A Brief Interlude

Life Can Be Crazy

I really don’t want to make a habit of posting meta-content on this Stack, but I feel that an exception needs to be made in this case. It has been quite a while since my last post here, and nobody wants to hear excuses, but I do feel like an explanation is owed to my subscribers. So, please forgive me a brief message about why the content has been delayed and when you’ll be seeing more of it.

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

I could probably write at least 10,000 words on the story of my move from Beaverton to our new rural property, and all of the obstacles we’ve had to overcome to get here. If you are really interested, there’s more on my blog. To cut to the heart of the matter: we’ve been waiting a very long time to arrange the difficult delivery of our modular home to our property; first just finding a transporter that could do the job, then in having the requisite stretch of dry weather¹. By the time that our house was finally delivered, the amount of time left on our construction loan was very short, and there were things that I had to do in order to get final approval from both county inspections and the bank. Those things included framing a stem wall and installing skirting, and building steps and landings for both entrances that were up to code. I got a bit of help from my dad and my wife, but most of the work fell onto me, and I had a hard deadline. So for about three weeks, when I wasn’t taking care of my normal parental and household duties or working my part-time job, I was doing the aforementioned construction work. Which meant pretty much from 6 AM until close to sundown I was working. I didn’t even touch my laptop for a couple of weeks out of that stretch of time. As is typical of these things, the whole process was a lot of waiting while nothing happens, and then running around with our hair on fire for the last little bit.

The good news is that I just barely beat the deadline, and we got final approval from the county planning department and the construction loan was able to be successfully completed. But it took pretty much everything I had, which meant zero time for Project Yamhill. Over the last week, I’ve still been pretty busy, as we moved our belongings into our new house (emptying out our storage unit in the process) and have been setting up our new home. We’re just now over the worst part of that, where at least we can live a normal life again, other than having a handful of boxes that we still have to unpack and deal with.

When I last left off on Project Yamhill, I had almost completed the first pass of the schematic capture of the front panel PCB. Which means that next up will be the PCB layout. After that, I’m going to lay out a prototyping PCB block module, and then send off for PCB manufacturing for the first tranche of boards. Thank you for hanging in there during my down time. I’m definitely not stalling out, I merely had no choice but to put all of my attention into the house situation for about four weeks. Also, this Stack has passed well over 100 subscribers right now, which is amazing! Thanks for following along, and stay tuned as I get back into the flow of things. I can’t wait to delve into radio experimentation again!

1. Here at our QTH, we went straight from a long winter into summer. There was no intermediate season this year. And summer didn’t arrive until May.