Valentine

Love is a battlefield
Love hurts
Love me tender
What is love?

I'll tell you what love is.
Love is nothing to take lightly. I don't know how I feel about having a day devoted to "love" and having the primary color for the day be my least favorite (red).
That's right, I don't like Valentine's day because red is my least favorite color.
And it's a made up holiday designed to sell candy and cards.
No card can express how I feel about my wife.
How could it?

it was literal love at first sight. I knew when I saw her that I could marry her and be happy for the rest of my life, or learn to be content as a single man knowing I'd met the one, and said no. It's a strange thing to relate to you.
A better color for today is green,  because green represents growing, and I want to grow.
I don't want to be content with who I am. I'm not worth my wife's affection, she makes me grow. That's what love is.
Growth.
Love always will be. According to the movie "Interstellar" gravity and love are transcendent to this plane of existence. I don't know about gravity, but I do know that love certainly is. It's the one thing God said we will have when we die:

1Co 13:1-13  If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  (2)  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  (3)  If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.  (4)  Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant  (5)  or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;  (6)  it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.  (7)  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  (8)  Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.  (9)  For we know in part and we prophesy in part,  (10)  but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.  (11)  When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.  (12)  For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.  (13)  So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Love never ends.
One day we'll be faithless (for we shall see), hopeless (because we'll have won our rest), but we'll never be loveless.

You can't be loveless if you're going to be with The Father.

To Do Lists and Task Priorities

Things for me to do:

1. Update everyone on what's going on in my life, I'm busy
2. Finish out the Two articles I have written about antennas
3. Update LOTW to include my final entries from last year, and the QSOs I've had so far this year.
4. Clean out the Ham Shack, and demo it
5. Update my BASIC blog with a few Communion meditations

Update on What's Going On!

Short story: I've been working and going to college full time. Slightly longer story: I've been at Publix now 10 years. Last year I interviewed twice for jobs related to programming. Both were entry level jobs, and I was turned down for both. I believe that my lack of Computer Science degree was the main culprit for why I didn't get the jobs. To help alleviate that, I enrolled in and started taking classes at Florida Polytechnic University. Shortly after my classes began, I was given another interview, this time on my team. I landed the job! They are letting me start the job after the semester ends at the end of April. This has been a long time coming. I'll be a support programmer. I'll be on call, get woken up at Oh Dark:30, but mostly I'll be on dayshift, and I'll have weekends off. It should be great! I also get a raise.
Being back in school has been good for me so far. I'm learning a lot, calculus is fun again, I get to use a bunch of neat stuff, and I've even been given MS Office! Only bad part is that I'm always busy with school work. No real time to do radio, get outside, learn the programming languages I want to learn, etc. I'm busy. Very busy. I often wonder if I'm too busy. So far the answer is "not yet", and that's good. Somethings about being so busy have been a bonus. For instance: My oldest daughter is learning HTML because I have to learn it, and I showed her how it makes web pages work. She's getting a kick out of it. It's nice to discover that we could have this thing in common.
I'll say more soon, namely in my next blog about antennas. All this hard math I'm taking in school should be somewhat useful for building antennas, or at least that's my hope.