General! - and Mr. Yagi

I think I told y'all some of the story of how, early on in my takeover of the route in 2007, I cooked up a set of homemade maps of the route.

It's been a long time since I looked at them myself more than once or twice per street, because I got so familiar with the streets after about the first year. But, it'll keep on being relevent for making it easy for my substitute (whom it looks like I'll be finally getting around to using one Sunday later in the spring), to maintain, on the maps, a detail or two about a house or two on each street (thereby making the rest of the houses on that street easy to locate also). And now I have one more detail to scribble in:

One of the customers has a ham radio antenna that, in late 2007, I happened to read in the Times-Tribune about a controversy about. As _my_ part in the controversy, for a while after reading about that, I went a few feet out of my way to give him his paper extra early, various times when it happened to be handy to do so - despite my own ham status being, as I confessed to y'all in "What I'll be doing when the TV goes dark", a lazily-just-renewing-since-the-1970s Novice.

Well, in an update of "What I'll be doing when the TV goes dark", I'm happy to report that last Wednesday, I went to Scranton (proudly still overdue for the same haircut that I'd been overdue for when I'd passed the arguably-a-_downgrade_-from-Novice, "Technician" on March 11) and passed the second of the three tests that I'd boasted that I was going to work on, and thereby upgraded to General. (I must give credit to www.aa9pw.com for the practice tests there, of which I've now begun working on the Extra.)

And one of the things that I've learned, is that the kind of antenna that that ham on the route has is a Yagi. So, I'll be writing "Yagi antenna" on the map.

My elmer boasts that he met the inventer of it, Mr. Yagi himself, at the end of WWII.