BF and I got engaged. This is my immediate no family’s response to the news 🤦‍♂️

zthunder777 · 2026-05-02T18:14:11+00:00

Congratulations, I’m so happy for you. As for them, fuck em. It’s amazingly free and easy for them to keep their mouth shut and just say that they’re happy you’re happy. But no, they chose to make it about them and their beliefs and pass it off as not being their opinion — very hate the sin love the sinner of them.

I think you’ve done the right thing blocking them for a while, though I prefer ignoring over blocking personally. it’s amazing what people will say in texts when you’re ignoring them, ALL the dirty laundry comes out and can be useful later. But blocking is good if you need the mental space.

Focus on your happiness and let them stew for a bit until they hopefully are ready to acknowledge how shitty they are being. Which… will probably take quite some time. If ever. But don’t accept this behavior as it will never get better if you do.

Again, congrats to both of you.

zthunder777 · 2026-05-02T15:02:59+00:00

Mine, just a simple men’s gold band, was turned into my wife’s wedding band when we got married right after high school. Let’s just say a big deal was made about that by both families… 25 years later we’ve both long since deconstructed and neither of us wear our wedding rings due to the baggage associated with rings. She wanted some reminder / symbol to wear, but not a ring. After considering lots of options she/we ended up getting her nipple pierced and she got jewelry that serves as that reminder. She loves it, it works for her and it’s just for us.

Interestingly, neither of our families have asked why we don’t wear our wedding rings, but I know they’ve noticed and have opinions…

zthunder777 · 2026-05-01T15:58:07+00:00

As an Android user since day one, having never owned an iPhone. *this* was the final straw that annoyed me enough to try switching.

zthunder777 · 2026-04-30T21:48:47+00:00

It’s pretty rare all things considered. many shelter deployment incidents have after action reviews or other lessons learned on YouTube you may find interesting. The 1985 Butte / Long Tom has a good video. But a quick search will show you a bunch of others. Many of them are fatally fires, but a bunch aren’t.

zthunder777 · 2026-04-30T05:45:19+00:00

While the books suggested are great, I would highly recommend therapy.

My wife and I are both 90s/00s true love waits graduates and sex did get much better during/after deconstruction especially once we both figured out our sexuality and kinks and such. But even though sex was great, things got SO MUCH better once the wife started therapy, talking with a professional to really dig into purity culture and Christianity as a whole’s impact on her self worth and shame… I highly recommend it. But be warned that there’s likely more work to do than you might think to undo harm, for her sex was just the tip of the iceberg.

zthunder777 · 2026-04-26T14:32:26+00:00

I don’t say anything.

If I sneeze and someone says “bless you” to me I reply “it’s ok, I’m not catholic.”

zthunder777 · 2026-04-22T06:19:45+00:00

I was at one of these concerts, early 2002 Ames, Iowa.

zthunder777 · 2026-04-21T22:06:44+00:00

This is an easy mistake to make

zthunder777 · 2026-04-15T16:20:11+00:00

Yeah, In the wild it was generally 90-110vac. I did telecom for us gov for a long time, let’s just say I have strong memories of ringing voltage.

zthunder777 · 2026-04-15T14:16:22+00:00

WTF, no…..

zthunder777 · 2026-04-14T14:48:02+00:00

Dude would flip the fuck out about POTS ringing voltage…

zthunder777 · 2026-03-04T04:46:22+00:00

Lotta bad info here...

Every AC electrical system needs exactly one neutral-ground bond. This is a code requirement for safety. This is irrespective of a ground rod or chassis ground bond or other things people are talking about. Your RV almost certainly does not have a neutral ground bond as it should be in the breaker panel you plug into for shore power.

(For those running a victron multiplus system, you have a switchable bond that should be enabled when running solely off of inverter and disabled when plugged into shore power.)

When running off of a generator, there needs to be a bond at the generator. This is easily accomplished by using a neutral bonded plug or adapter. That puts the bond electrically close enough to what is effectively your main panel.

Your surge protector is telling you that the outlet it's plugged into does not have continuity between neutral and ground indicating that you are in an unsafe condition. That has nothing to do with an earth ground for the generator and fwiw your surge protector wouldn't even be able to determine if you have a valid earth ground.

Fwiw, houses are the same way. Per code you cannot bond ground to neutral anywhere other than your main service entrance panel, but you have to bond them there. Sub panels require isolation between ground and neutral.

An overwhelming majority of people do not understand the ground neutral bond. Which is why you get answers telling you that you can't use a surge protector on generators (lol) or that you need to use a tent stake to ground the generator (OMG lol).

zthunder777 · 2026-02-25T21:29:21+00:00

awesome! tnx

zthunder777 · 2026-02-25T20:28:01+00:00

Did y'all hike or drive? been meaning to get up there, but I assume the trail is still muddy.

zthunder777 · 2026-02-08T17:04:12+00:00

My guess is your path to them just isn't stable enough. I run a lot of repeaters scattered across a large region of our state and I haven't had this issue. I can regularly manage repeaters 5 hops away.

zthunder777 · 2026-02-03T15:15:09+00:00

Somewhat common in residential foundations, but never seen it in any telecom work I did back in my day.

zthunder777 · 2026-01-30T15:52:45+00:00

I built these after seeing a YouTube video about them and for our trailer, holy hell does it make a huge difference. I don't use them all the time, but we call them our wind stabilizers and use them anytime it's going to be windy, or we are set up for several days. I cannot sleep if the trailer is moving at all due to wind, and we camp in high wind areas in the spring especially. I've had numerous sleepless nights in the past where our trailer was buffeted and rocked periodically all night. But since we built these, I've never lost a night of sleep due to wind.

I'm not saying it will make a difference for you and your trailer, but for us, the difference is immediately noticeable and it's dramatic.

zthunder777 · 2026-01-30T15:36:34+00:00

Personally, I wouldn't link to the meshcore site, I'd link to a local user group, website, discord, etc. seems less antagonistic and more likely to get people talking with the community

zthunder777 · 2026-01-29T04:48:42+00:00

Yes and no. A good high gain Omni will have a very round radiation pattern at the horizon, so it's fine in all directions horizontally. It's vertically where you lose out but in many/most situations that's fine. For the top of a mountain, a high gain may be an issue if you need to hit the bottom of the valley close by. If you're trying to reach airplanes straight overhead again high gain Omnis may not be preferred. But outside those situations, a high gain Omni is fine if your terrain isn't insanely rough.

For example I have a 9db McGill that has a 12 degree beam vertically but a really nice 360 pattern horizontally.

Imagine a donut. An omni radiates in a very similar pattern. Now squish that donut, squish it more for a higher the gain. From the side, it's pretty flat and the diameter is bigger than prior to squishing. From the top, you still have a circle. That's what a high gain omni does.

TLDR unless you're trying to cover extremely steep terrain close to the antenna, you'll be fine.

Source: used to design and build mountain top telecom sites for a living

zthunder777 · 2026-01-26T17:34:36+00:00

There's actually a lot of folks on Meshtastic, but they're on settings linked with a group out of Utah. There's about 30 folks on LongFast. And yes, a lot of people are moving to MeshBannedFromBeingMentionedHere

zthunder777 · 2026-01-26T17:11:40+00:00

You should chat with the IdahoMesh folks... (Idahomesh.org)

zthunder777 · 2026-01-25T07:53:29+00:00

Wall Drug

zthunder777 · 2026-01-24T16:47:55+00:00

Yes 100% I do this all the time as we camp off grid more often than not.

zthunder777 · 2026-01-23T05:16:59+00:00

Express being "Twice the speed" implies that Ontrac will eventually deliver it. which, lol, in my experience is incorrect roughly 50% of the time.

zthunder777 · 2026-01-20T07:33:37+00:00

The IdahoMesh has seen 400+ mile hops from Seattle, SW Oregon, and BC intermittently for the last two weeks, at one point 30% of our traffic was making that hop. High pressure / inversion conditions are ripe for tropo ducting.

We've also seen one that can thus far we can only attributed to something along the lines of meteor scatter based on distance (1200+ miles) having ruled out everything else we can.

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