Sunday, May 17, 2015 — I’ve been making some headway in my quest to return to becoming more radioactive, a quest which really starts in my home office / shack.
My shack is in a 20 x 15 room in our 100-year-old farm house. It is a room that’s kind of an enigma …. we’ve never really been sure if it was originally a dining room or a bedroom. It is located off the hallway just outside the kitchen. The kitchen is big enough for a large table that can feed 8 people (we have an antique table with leaves that expands that much), so is there a need for a formal dining room?
That’s one of the things you just don’t know about an old home unless some family members survive, I guess. The home has three bedrooms upstairs, and my office could be a fourth. The home has two identical rooms in the front on each side of the main entry door; one of them we use as our formal living room, the other is our kids videogame room. My wife and I plan on turning the videogame room into our master bedroom in the next few years.
Its a big old house, and you could bunk a large family here if necessary. Two could use my office as a bedroom comfortably. I use about 1/3 of it for my office, and the rest as ham shack — and its that two-thirds part that I’ve been working to unclutter.
Well, “unclutter” makes it sound like my doyleys are out of kilter or something rather minor. Perhaps “bulldoze” would be a more accurate term. I would post a photo or two but it would be embarrassing even for a slob like me (and that’s going some!).
DUMPING GROUND. For years, when my wife or the kids clean up, anything they don’t recognize or own gets dumped in my shack. And for the last couple of years, as I’ve become less active on the air, the “stuff” has piled up on the shack side.
I made quite a dent yesterday simply but cutting up the shipping boxes that had accumulated …. the latest being a new-to-me Dell XPS 8100 whizbang-faster-than-hell PC to replace my very long-in-tooth Dell Dimension E521 that I’m using now.
I also need to deal with the results of my latest hobby — my growing collection of guitars. In recent months, I’ve gone from a single Fender Gemini III acoustic and a Peavey Raptor EXP start electric and added a Fender Squire strat, an Ibanez Gio, a Spectrum strat copy, an Oscar Schmidt OE-3o semi-hollow body and a Davison Les Paul clone. And that doesn’t county the Fender Jazzmaster my wife gave me new for Christmas or the used cherry red OE-30 I won on eBay and expect to arrive this week.
I’m going to need to invest in some cases — or gig bags at least — to protect these things. The Spectrum came in a nice hard case; I bought a hard case on eBay worth the money, so my Squier strat or Peavey can go in that case. The Jazzmaster has a hard case too. The OE-30 I own now (a tobacco sunburts model) came with a soft case (aka “gig bag”). They aren’t much protection against crushing blows, but protect the finish from banging-around type of scratches and damage.
GOOD NEWS! The good news is that I can see the floor in a path from the door to the shack side of the room — and that’s progress, friends!
In my professional work, this past year or so I’ve had to develop a YouTube channel for content created by my organization. It’s been a learning experience that’s also had me thinking about doing some Morse key-related videos …. how about a review of some of my favorite keys? A closer look at them rather than just still images? The downside of course is pretty simple: A). I have to clean the shack up enough to be presentable by video, and B). I have to be able to handle a bug at a reasonable speed again. The first one is easy to accomplish, the second, not so much.
Another downside is that it’s going to take time to do it, and I’m not sure I can sell my wife on the idea that I need time in the shack to create a video about my Morse keys. Well, one can only smile and ask, right??
Enough for this trip, hopefully I’ll have more good news to post soon, and maybe some HF QSOs to report.
73 es CUL DE KY4Z SK … dit dit …