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antenna jacking
Sunday, August 21 2005
I have most of the solar deck's decking boards in place, though none are screwed down because I continue to add angle braces to firm it up. Considering that, unlike the house's three other decks, this one has no firm horizontal support in any direction, it is remarkably stable.
After attaching posts for the deck's railing, I went with Gretchen and the dogs to the Secret Spot on the Esopus and met with our friends T & B, Buddhists from Rosendale. The water was much colder than it had been three weeks ago. Perhaps the recent string of cool nights were responsible. But since it's just outflow from the Ashokan Reservoir, it's possible that we just happened to be there during the discharge of a lower strata of reservoir water. I don't know if that's possible at the Ashokan dam, but it's just a hiphopthesis.
The dogs were more enthusiastic about swimming than ever before, with Sally swimming back to the southeast bank across deep water at least four times, usually having crossed to the northwest bank in the shallow rapids upstream.
Now that I had the northeast solar deck rail post in place, I could finally get around to raising up and attaching the antenna mast, which I've had standing in a temporary position for weeks. It had to be raised because otherwise the big VHF Yagi would be sweeping only four feet above the solar deck, a recipe for disaster. But getting it up into its new position required considerable upper body strength, especially since, like everything else deck-related, I did it all entirely by myself. To make things as easy as possible, I sank a thick half inch lag bolt nearly to its head at the bottom of the post against which the antenna mast would be mounted. The goal was to rest the base of the mast on this bolt if I could just lift it high enough.
The first lifting attempt was thwarted by the fact that I hadn't paid out enough slack wire for all the cables. Luckily, I'd made a few of the cables long enough that I didn't have to extend them. But I would still have to extend the 120 volt power, the USB, and the television cable.
The second lifting attempt was brutal and it kept feeling like it would fail. The cables would snag around the bottom of the mast and threaten to be in the way when I needed to set it down on that lag bolt - something that would happen with enough force to slice through anything in the way. When I finally got the mast on that bolt I could screw in the three pipe support brackets that would secure it in a vertical position.
Now that the antenna was eight feet higher than it had been, expected to have better television and WiFi reception, but I hadn't tested either functionality since the foliage came in the spring. If anything, reception today was inferior to what I'd had in February, particularly the WiFi.
We'd been starving after returning from the Secret Spot and had made a big pot of vegan chili. But then this evening, only a couple hours later, the Tillsons called asking did we want to go to the Pupuseria. Despite my lack of hunger, it just seemed like too good of an idea to turn down. Mr. Tillson brought photos of his upstairs "shithouse remodeling project," which is finally finished. The pictures were grainy, but it looked like he'd done a great job. At the end of the month he'll be leaving for Boston to begin his postgraduate education at Mass Art (my mother's alma mater, thus my alma grandmater). His poor wife will be something of an "education widow" during this time.
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