Category: Uncategorized

  • Winter is here

    Thanksgiving Day in the Driftless; overcast, breezy, 20s outside. Inside, a chicken roasting with kale and root vegetables. Huge salad, butternut squash, 2 kinds of soup; almost all local, some from our garden. Went to the spring earlier for fresh water, then hiked a mile or so on a county park trail just to enjoy…

  • Adding a solar data thing …

    … to see how it works. it’s a snippet of HTML: inside a “Custom HTML” block. The snippet above is in a “Code” block. I don’t have a sidebar to put it in, though; maybe stick it down on the bottom of the page ? hmm, okay; seems to work at the bottom in the…

  • Hamfest!

    It was quarter-to-one Sunday morning when I got up to go to the De Kalb Radio Club’s hamfest in Sandwich, Illinois. I barely had time to shave, dress, and make enough coffee to fill both a big reused Kwik-Trip cup and one of the larger vacuum bottles before it was time to toss my packs…

  • Well, here’s something new: a Wildcat Mountain trifecta

    I enjoy hiking in a lot of different ways; sometimes all-eyes-and-ears observing the sight and sounds of life all around; sometimes meditative and full of the spirit of shinrin-yoku; often a mixture of both; sometimes (not often) it’s just pushing along to get to the end of the trail. Today, I don’t know quite why,…

  • Mill Bluff Trifecta! and a few random notes

    Saturday morning I was up early and managed to get out for a hike before the sun was up; Mill Bluff State Park was my choice. I avoided the three deer crossing the highway and made it to the park just a bit after dawn. Since I had so much time I thought I would…

  • A post about many things

    re: Field Day 2023 The December issue of QST arrived a while ago and I invested maybe 15 minutes looking through the fine print for my score: 440 points. I think that my claimed bonus for Public Information Display was rejected; not unfairly mind you, it was a bit skimpy. Eh, surest way to fail…

  • An amusing juxtaposition

    seen on the kitchen table yesterday. Nothing, otherwise; certainly no radio; home DIY is absorbing a lot of time as a project draws to a close. Maybe next week, right? (rueful lol) Thanks for visiting! Please leave a comment if you get what I found amusing in that picture, or if you just have a…

  • happy anniversary, driftlessqrp!

    It’s been a year, today! Onward to many more years of hiking, and radio, and blogging here!

  • Touch paddle project, with updates

    October 24th: I want to start off with a word of praise for UPS; yesterday evening my package was in Louisville KY; this morning at 5:30 it was in Rockford IL; but I lacked faith, I didn’t believe it would get here today … and there it was on my doorstep at 3! Thanks, UPS!…

  • A non-QRP post

    DIY stuff around the house has been taking up a lot of my time these past few weeks, with a proportionate decrease in park activations! I keep on thinking about sort-of-related things that might make interesting posts though, so here are a few of them for your entertainment: circa 10/13/23: Interesting reading, and maybe a…

  • I made a knee board

    This is a great example of the kind of “just good enough to do the job” work that I do when I am in a big hurry; this whole thing took me one hour to make. First, how big to make it? A couple of minutes with a tape measure and (in this order) my…

  • Wildcat Mountain, K-1480, again

    On the roll from Monday’s more-than-successful semi-spontaneous activation at Dell Creek SWA, today I dropped in at Wildcat Mountain State Park while I was in the neighborhood. It was a beautifully springlike day here in the Driftless Area, or at least it evolved into one from the sorta-wintery overnight … I was actually in shirtsleeves…