My best-laid plan for last night was to come home, have dinner, watch a
little TV, get to bed early, and then get up nice and refreshed for my
radio exam this morning.
The yesterday afternoon I got a call from my boss at the casino - the
Friday night engineer had been in an accident, and needed to go in and
cover. He would get me a room at the hotel. I didn't have my blacks (casino
sound guy uniform) or my sound-guy briefcase with me, so I had to get off
the train at 6:40, drive the 20 minutes back to my house, change clothes,
throw the shaving kit and a change of socks and undies into the backpack,
and drive to the casino to relieve my boss who got the first band started.
So, instead of sleeping I ended up mixing bands until 2:30AM, crawled to my
hotel room after being awake for 20-1/2 hours, fell asleep at 3.
Wake-up call at 0730 so I could shower, get dressed, and drive the 35
minutes back home to Valparaiso, swing through McFood for a McMuffin, and
get to the library by 9 for the exam session.
Now, you're thinking, "Why didn't you just wave off and take it next month?"
Hell, no. I've spent the past week cramming, taking practice test after
practice test. My brain is in that mode NOW, and I don't want to go
through yet another month.
I fill out the form, plunk down my $15, get my exam booklet and answer
sheet. 50 questions out of a total pool of 702. Need to get 37 of them
right to pass.
Ahhh. Only four featuring math and formulas. One of them I'm sure I know.
I finish, turn in my answer sheet and exam booklet, sit down and wait for
the three examiners to check my answers and verify that they all agree (FCC
rules for the volunteer examiner program).
Hard to read their faces. Plus, I'm going on 4 hours of sleep after being
awake for over 20.
I passed. He said it twice, just be sure I heard.
After 37 years of dreaming of this day, and a good 6 months of studying
advanced radio and electronics theory and hundreds of rules and regs, I
passed my Extra. (For those of you non-hams, or non-US hams, Extra is our
top class).
I went home, told Sheri, crawled into bed, got a 90-minute nap, and now I'm
working Rocks again until 10:30pm tonight....
--
Paul Braun WD9GCO
Certified Music Junkie
"Music washes from the soul the dust of everyday life." -- Berthold Auerbach
--
_________________________________________________________________
Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/
|