Don't Beware The Ides Of March

A flashback to April 2020. In just a couple weeks it will be a year that has passed since the Pandemic Lockdowns started here, yet right now the fear, and the panic, which gripped us so quickly at that time, now seems a world away. I know in many parts of the world right now there are still lockdowns, and worries about vaccines, but there is light at the end of the tunnel -- something that was a very rare commodity just a year ago.

The pic, taken April 8th, 2020, is of a sign that someone had put up across the highway from the entrance to an area neighborhood. 'Stay Home, Stay Safe' was the Washington governor's motto when he announced the first Corona Lockdown.

'THE IDES OF MARCH' -- WHATEVER AN 'IDE' IS

As I write this, it's the 16th of March -- the 'Ides of March', they call it. Now, I don't know what an "Ide" actually is, but it sounds ominous, although right now March isn't feeling as ominous as it did last year, when Corona was slamming us in the gut.

March 2021 is halfway done, April is a couple weeks away, and Spring here in the Seattle area has started to look like Spring actually should, although it's still cold at night -- the past three weeks nearly every night has been freezing (usually 28-34 degrees F, and -2 to +2 degrees C). Earlier today it was sunny out, and the temperature went up to around 5-6C (about 48-50F), and it felt like March should feel: sunny and positive.

In my state our governor has recently lifted some of the corona restrictions, and businesses are starting to open up, although everyone still wears masks and practices social distancing. The vaccines are being given to a lot of people but most people I know still haven't gotten the shot. I don't know when I will get mine. Hopefully before mid-Summer.

Being that I haven't been out during the day much with my camera, I will intersperse in this blog post several pictures I took last Spring, when, coincidentally, the Pandemic Lockdown started. The sun was shining, the trees weren't yet green (the past several years they have been late in leafing out -- usually it would be April 5th that they were all a bright shade of green, but the past couple years the trees have been two weeks late).

Another view of the 'Stay Home, Stay Safe' banners some people placed near the entrance to a nearby neighborhood. A second banner saying 'We Got This' can also be seen. At the time, I was doing something Illegal -- I was riding my bike on a closed section of Trail, and I was not an 'essential' person there. Being that this section of the Trail only sees a handful of bikers and joggers during any afternoon, I figured that particular law could be safely broken. 

A sign warning bikers, walkers, rollerbladers and joggers that the Cedar River Trail was closed to all but "essential" users, i.e. County personnel. I took this pic, and then as I rode my bicycle past the offending sign I gave it the finger and went on my merry way. Generally, the Trail is about as empty as seen in the pic. During summer you might see three or four people on this stretch of asphalt -- enough room for people to socially distance in normal times, much less during a pandemic. About two weeks later, the County thankfully removed the sign. Imagine that: trusting the public to engage in safety without the Government slamming the hammer down. 

In fairness to the County, during the start of the corona pandemic, there was a lot of fear all around, and their #1 job is public safety.

The Cedar River, April 8th, 2020.

SLIDE GUITAR -- THE JOURNEY CONTINUES

Work for me has picked up; fiction writing has been in the doldrums (I haven't felt inspired to write lately, and forcing myself to write just isn't working); I have been listening a lot to blues and blues-rock and learning guitar riffs from players like Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and Warren DeMartini and Mick Taylor and adapting them to slide guitar. I now have three guitars set up for slide -- four, if my Texarkana Black Beauty is included -- as I finally got my Ibby Gio set up to where the string tension is high enough for slide playing, but the intonation is good also.

My 2000 Ibby Gio GRX-40, now pretty much permanently set up for slide guitar in Open G, after a year in Drop C, and -- before that -- D Standard. It's taken a couple months to increment the adjustment of the bridge saddles and humbucker pickup to get the best balance of slide playability and sound. Now the humbucker sings out well with a slide -- fretting a chord is good, but fretting individual notes just sound a little 'flat', tone-wise, as they seem to on a Powersound unless you have a good dirt box, or you're playing cleanly through a chorus box, or an amp that sounds great clean. But just add a slide, and play, and the Powersound pickup really opens up.

Now it's just a matter of nailing down the slide guitar technique better. I've got it down well enough to play with other people, but not enough to where I'm truly satisfied with what I'm doing. But it will come in time.

In the non-music, non-work, non-Corona, and non-writing world, life is more or less normal. As someone who lives alone, the Corona shutdowns didn't really affect my life all that much. I never was a party animal, nor do I have a large family to deal with. It's just me and my mom, and my mom lives somewhere else right now, so it's just me and my cats.

I get my exercise with iron weights and bicycling, and most times I hit the local Trail at night when it's quiet and there's no one around. So, for me, life is sort of the way it always has been.

Seeing stores shut down, and some stores go under -- that has had an effect on me. As my recent article on the demise of Fry's Electronics shows, I really find it sad that brick and mortar retail is taking a big hit.

Some books and maps I purchased last year, before the Pandemic hit. The map of Germany was brand new, a purchase from the brick and mortar Barnes & Noble bookstore. The German dictionary was a find at nearby Half Price Books (also bought just before the shutdowns) and the tourist book of Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands was a Barnes & Noble purchase. Since then, I've learned a bit more about the Faroe Islands, an interesting country in the middle of the North Atlantic.
 

SEEKING THE FAROE ISLANDS -- A PARADISE IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC

Last week I stopped by two bookstores to see what they had on the Faroe Islands. Why the Faroe Islands? Because they're this interesting little country made up of a small chain of islands in the North Atlantic that have similar weather to Seattle, and less trees, and a culture that goes back to the Viking settlement in the 800s and 900s AD. And their language is really cool -- it's like halfway between Northern Norwegian (Nord Norsk, a dialect of Norwegian spoken in the far north, and the Lofoten Island chain) and Icelandic, and the people in the Faroes have managed to keep their unique language alive for over a thousand years. As I've always been a fan of languages (I have some reading capability of Norsk, Svenska, Dansk, Spanish, German, and a little bit of Afrikaans and Dutch), I found the Faroese words intriguing. 

From my research, it seems that the Faroese are an independent minded people, and seem to live a decent life -- being officially a part of Denmark, they share that country's standard of living. A lot of Faroese live in Denmark, although many of them go back to the Faroes after a while. 

Did I mention that Faroese women seem to be awesomely beautiful? OK -- I just did.

April 6th, 2020: a mostly empty highway during rush hour. The lack of traffic noise was in one way refreshing, but also a little scary, in the sense that life seemed to be like a bad disaster movie, playing out right before our eyes. The only cars on the road were people going to get groceries, or maybe gas, or some other necessities. That was it. On a normal afternoon, pre-Pandemic, both lanes of the highway in this picture would be full of cars.

A view of the Cedar River from the Cedar River Trail east of Renton, Washington, on April 8th, 2020. At the time I took this pic, I was Breaking The Law (cue in some Judas Priest music). As you can see, the trees were still bare of leaves -- they hadn't even budded. Most normal years, by April 5th, the trees are a bright green with fresh, new leaves. Not 2020 -- or most years since 2017, for that matter.

I always knew the Faroe Islands existed: I have always been interested in geography, and have a lot of maps and atlases in my bookcase, and I know where every country is on the map or globe. And after taking Norwegian in college I became aware of most of the Scandinavian countries and cultures. They didn't really teach much about the Faroese, though, so -- to me -- the Faroes were this semi-known place in the Atlantic until 2017.

It was in 2017 that I found a Faroese blog by accident. I think it was through the Google Plus thing, where you could find other people's blogs by just hitting an arrow or something like that -- I don't quite remember -- but you could scroll through the blogs, and I happened to land on this particular blog. And the blog had some pics of the Faroes' countryside which the blogger (a woman) had taken, where it looked windswept, spacious, and majestic. I was intrigued. Then I did a little research and found out they have a system of tunnels -- similar to Norway's -- that go under the fjords and connect most of the islands.

Anyway, I went into two bookstores south of Seattle last week to see if there were any books on the Faroes, or the Faroe language, and I found none. But I did find a New Testament in German (I read a little German), a book on Danish (it's similar to Norwegian), and a few other books at the used bookstore (Half Price Books), and I got a map of Austria at Barnes and Noble (I know someone who lives in Austria).

My purchases from two different bookstores: Half Price Books and Barnes & Noble, both in the Southcenter area of South King County, Washington (the region south of Seattle, where I live). A map of Vienna (I know someone who lives there), a small book on Norwegian customs (I know someone who lives there, also), a hardback book on the Danish language (I know Norwegian and some Swedish, so I'm learning some Danish to top it off), a map of Austria, another cool map of SW Iceland (good topography), and a German New Testament with Psalms (I know some German and am trying to learn more of the language. I've found that if you have a Bible, getting Bibles in other languages can help you learn them.).

I was doing my bit to keep brick and mortar retail alive -- and also needed to get into a store and pretend life everywhere is back to normal -- which it isn't yet, but it felt good to shop in a store where there were real people, and real clerks taking your real money, and walking out with purchases in real shopping bags.

So, although I didn't find what I was looking for, I did find a few books, and a map -- and it didn't really cost me much, and maybe it helped one of the clerks buy a latte or two. But when I drove home that night I felt much better than I did driving home from the closed Fry's store (which I featured in a blog post in February).

My Realistic DX-398, which I've been firing up (along with my Panasonic RF-B45) and doing some evening MW DXing many nights recently. 

...AND IN ALL THINGS RADIO: the hearing of LAS VEGAS, and NATIVE AMERICAN MUSIC on KTNN!

In the radio world, for most of this year I haven't been DXing the MW band much, and the last time I tuned through the Shortwave spectrum I heard maybe nine signals -- nothing new, but nine signals is better than the two signals and static which was all I heard the month before. However, the past week or two I've been switching on my DX-398 and RF-B45 and tuning around, hearing whatever's out there in Medium Wave Land. Both radios are excellent performers, where you don't need an external loop to hear what's out there, although a loop sometimes helps if a station is 'in the mud'.

I've been involved in the Facebook "I Love AM Radio" group, and there the conversation sometimes gets lively. A lot of the guys post their latest DX reports, and being that some of them are in DX-friendly territories (i.e., high elevation, decent ground conductivity, and no nearby mountain ranges to speak of), some of them are hearing some new stations. The best catch I've had lately is a station I've heard before, KTNN 660, a station out of Window Rock, Arizona that plays a lot of Native American music.

They usually only appear here on 660 during 'auroral' DX conditions, when the aurora borealis blocks out a large swath of the northern ionosphere and mostly southern US signals come in. Usually 660 here is dominated by CFFR Calgary, an all news station out of Alberta Canada. This night CFFR was MIA, and all I could hear was KTNN's Native American music, and a little bit from an Hispanic Christian music station out of Oregon on the same channel, KXOR, Junction City, Oregon.

It was cool to hear KTNN. The first time I heard them was in the 1990's, after I got my Superadio III. I didn't even know KTNN existed before then. Now they only appear four or five nights a year.

The same night I heard KTNN I also heard two stations out of Las Vegas: KXNT 840 and KMZQ 670. Both have news-talk formats. KXNT usually only comes in once or twice a week, as there are closer stations that dominate the channel at night. KMZQ is usually heard a little more often, underneath KBOI Boise Idaho, which most nights is local strength here in Seattle.

But if you 'null' out KBOI's signal (for the uninitiated, a 'null' is the weak spot you find in a MW station's signal when you rotate your radio, and sometimes nulls can be very tight, as KBOI's is in my location), you still hear KBOI, but KMZQ's programming can be heard. 

During Spring 2020 I took out my Sangean PR-D14 and had it playing on my front porch while I did some hedge-trimming in the driveway. Sadly enough, the PR-D14 turned out to be my last ever purchase from the now defunct Fry's Electronics store.

I always love to hear Las Vegas. I've never been there, but the sunshine and fun-time atmosphere of Southern Nevada sure is appealing when it's 40 degrees or colder out up here in Green Oblivion, and raining.

Well, I've said as much I can say in a blog post for right now. I have two new posts in the making -- one just needs pics, the other one needs another pic or two and a sound file.

I noticed that my blog has had a couple visits here from new countries -- Honduras (a first from there), Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and some visits from Hungary and even Norway (a rarity). It's always nice to see people from other parts of the world visiting the blog and reading about radios and guitars.

And to close this blog post, here is a positive picture -- a harbinger of Spring: the Redwing Blackbird. Redwing Blackbirds always appear in Spring, and their cheery "kong-ka-REEE" calls can be heard when the sun is getting warmer and the trees are starting to leaf. I took this pic last Spring, in April, when the Lockdowns were full bore. The sun was shining, but everywhere the atmosphere seemed to be a dull panic. Yet this Redwing Blackbird was singing his cheery song (you can see his beak is open in the pic -- I got lucky and snapped the photo when he was chirping) was oblivious to coronavirus, lockdowns, panic, empty shelves in stores, and all the other trappings of the Pandemic. Here's hoping this April is a cheerier one, overall, than April 2020 was.

I hope all of you remain well and safe. Vaccines are on the horizon for most of us (myself included). We can get this Pandemic behind us, and live life again. I am not the most happy-dappy guy in the world normally, but I can tell you this: there is always hope. Never give up hope.

Until next time, my friends, Hasta Luego, Auf Wiedersehen, Farvael, and Ha det.

C.C. March 16th and March 21st, 2021.