Field Day 2026, or 'Why Was Red Awake after 3:30 AM?'

As I mentioned the other day, I participated in ARRL Field Day 2026.

This is the official logo. You can find it on all
sorts of merch in Ham Radio circles. From the ARRL.

As seen in the official name, Field Day is put on by the ARRL, the largest ham radio organization in the US.* The basic idea is to get hams out and away from their local shacks and out into a park or some other place, set up shop, and make contacts. A side effect of this activity is that hams can promote amateur radio by being available to the public during these times** and allow the public to see amateur radio in action.

To answer one of the most basic questions about Field Day, yes, it's a contest. And yes, some people take this more seriously than others. Think of it as how different people participate in raiding in MMOs: some people are very casual about it, some are a bit more serious, and some are really hardcore. 

I didn't realize just how hardcore people could be about Field Day until I attended a forum at the Dayton Hamvention about Running a First Class Field Day Operation. Our club president and I were really interested in what the presentation focused on, and boy were we surprised. We kind of expected the presentation to cover a wide range of Field Day approaches, but the presenter went with what he knew, and it was a truly hardcore operation that consistently places well in the rankings. 

Needless to say, my club's Field Day participation is a lot more casual than that. (Thank goodness.)

We had a sign-up sheet that was passed around on the club's email, and given that Field Day landed the same day that both Free RPG Day and Cincinnati's Pride Parade were held --and that our youngest was coming up from Louisville for dinner-- I chose part of the late shift: 8 PM to 2 AM.

Well, things changed, because of course they did. My youngest wasn't able to make it up, so I had more free time than I expected in the late afternoon and early evening. Still, I rolled into the Red Cross building around 7:30 or so to eat some of the food that people had brought.*** To forestall your next question about why the Red Cross building if we're supposed to be doing "Field Day", the Red Cross building counts as a remote location for Field Day purposes. It does have its advantages, given that we weren't sweating out in the heat and humidity like some of the other Field Day participants, but there are times when it feels like we're violating the spirit of Field Day.

I ate, chatted with some of the club members, and we groused about the weather. There were a few counties in Kentucky that got hit really hard by storms, and a few counties were declared disaster areas. There was also talk about one of the dams south of Louisville being in danger of failure, but thankfully that didn't come to pass. The ARRL had put out a bulletin that one of the frequencies in the 40 Meter band was off limits due to it being in use for earthquake rescue communications in Venezuela, which also had a sobering effect on us. 

While I was supposed to go on at 8 PM, the radio I was supposed to use was in use by another club member, and I was fine with waiting until they were done for the day. So it was close to 9 PM when I got started, and we waited for a digital bulletin to be transmitted by the ARRL over the three different amateur radio digital modes. 

Here's what the transmission looked like
on PSK31 mode.

I was planning on using the digital mode called FT8 to participate in field day, because I still am reluctant to talk on voice. Sure, I participate in our club's weekly net, but those are people I know so I'm comfortable with talking there.**** Besides, FT8 is a mode that is quite similar to the chat communications I've had for work (Microsoft Teams, IBM's Sametime, etc.) so there's that added comfort factor.

Anyway, I got to work, attempting to make contacts over then next several hours. 

This was my station in the radio room. The radio
is an Icom IC-7300 Mk1 (there's a Mk2 out now)
which is fed into a PC with dual screens.

The bottom portion of the left monitor shows the band activity for digital modes, and as you can tell the bands were busy as hell. Normally at that time of night the bands would be mostly empty (a sea of blue), but everybody and their grandmother was working the bands for Field Day. 

I spent a lot of the evening chasing contacts, and constantly moving my send frequency around into clear areas to avoid the crowds. I was quite aware that night time isn't the best time for operating on the 20 Meter band, but I was determined to make as many contacts as I could without interfering with my late night companion, a club member who was operating voice on 80 and 40 Meters. 

My fellow club member working the bands was scheduled to work the entire night and leave sometime around 8 or 9 AM, so until the club president came in around 5 AM there was a stretch of 3 hours where he'd be the only person in the radio room attempting to make contacts. He kind of preferred it that way, because he had a schtick where he would create what's known as a pile-up attempting to make contact with him during the overnight hours, and he relished the attention. During breaks, he regaled me with stories about Field Day and other assorted things that would pop into his head, so I think he was happy to have someone else there to share in the zaniness of Field Day.

Over those hours I spent there, I became familiar with the come-and-go nature of FT8 on a busy night. I also learned one truism about amateur radio: just because you can hear them doesn't mean they can hear you. There were plenty of stations out on the West Coast I attempted to make contact with, but I was simply not being heard by them. I got lucky with a few, making a contact in Western Washington state and one of the central locations in California, but a lot of my other attempts out west went nowhere. My greatest success came from stations closer to me, such as Illinois, West Virginia, Michigan, and other states.

However, there was one experience that I was really excited about. About 11:30 PM or so, in the middle of a bunch of European stations starting to come online I received a station from the Cook Islands. The signal was really poor and down in the weeds, but I mentioned it to my companion. 

A light turned on in his eyes, and he said "Do you know where that is?"

Being familiar with the history of exploration, I said, "I sure do; it's way out in the Pacific."

"Go for it!"

"Yeah, but it's not part of Field Day."

"Doesn't matter. GO FOR IT!"

I shrugged and gave it the ol' college try and sent out a reply.

About 3 minutes later when I was talking to my companion all of a sudden a response popped up on my screen. 

"HOLY SHIT! HE GOT IT!" I'm pretty sure I raised my voice a few octaves.

My companion gave me a huge thumbs up as he was working a contact at the time, and he was grinning from ear to ear.

Here's where the Cook Islands are versus
where I was located at. And I ought to remind
you that 20 Meters wasn't really doing so well
for me at that time of night for contacts in California,
Oregon, and Washington. Propagation can be weird at times.

Around 1:30 AM or so I heard a door open way down the hall.

"Hey," I asked my companion, "does security walk the floor at night?"

He took off his headset and I repeated the question. "No, why do you ask?" he replied.

"I just heard a door open."

"Well, let's find out." He got up and began heading down the hall.

Right about then I got a brief case of the heebie-jeebies. 

"Hello?" he called out. "Anybody there?"

"Hey!" came a response.

"Oh," my companion said as he returned to the radio room. "It's just [another club member]."

Our newcomer had apparently been making a circuit of all the local clubs today after having helped set up our club's operation, and he was dropping by before heading to bed. We had a brief chat, although my companion kept dragging it out to the point where I butted in and said "Let the man go to bed!"

Our fellow club member yawned and laughed and hit the road for home.

I looked up and it was around 2 AM. "Damn," I said. "Just one more contact."

That "one more contact" took about 20 minutes, but I finally got it done and then headed home myself, pulling into the driveway around 3 AM.  Because I'm me and I can be a bit idiosyncratic, it took me about 1/2 hour to get ready for bed and then I lay down, only to find myself wide awake until finally konking out sometime close to 4 AM. 

A long night for certain, but it was also a fun one.

***

So... What did I learn?

That there's always something new to learn, which is kind of the point of amateur radio.

That a lot of fun can be had if you step outside your comfort zone. Which is why I was doing this in the first place.

That a fellow club member makes really damn good desserts. (I was surprised my blood sugar didn't go through the roof.)

That another club member makes really good Skyline Chili Dip.

That a blind club member who operated on CW (Morse Code) was an absolute monster on the bands, getting the second highest number of contacts.

That there were kids operating on Field Day. My companion spoke with a few of them while he was operating on the 80 Meter band, it was great to see some youngsters 9 and 10 years old participating in the hobby.

Yeah, I had fun. But boy was I happy to get to sleep, and even a day later on Monday I needed some strong coffee to wake myself up.

Using this mug, of course...

As you can see, it's sitting behind me right now.

*For reference, and it was news to me during the weekend, Winter Field Day is not put on by the ARRL but a different organization entirely, the Winter Field Day Association (WFDA). That explains why some digital modes are allowed in ARRL Field Day but not on Winter Field Day. 

**Yes, a non-ham can operate an amateur radio station under the supervision of a licensed amateur operator. The ham, known as the "control operator", is ultimately responsible for the non-ham's activity. Over the winter there was a Boy Scout Amateur Radio event at one of the local meet-ups on the east side of town, and the scouts lined up to talk to hams on a couple of different frequencies (including our club's 2 meter repeater frequency). 

***I'd brought gluten-free cookies. The brand of dough is Sweet Loren's, and while the "gluten free" moniker does nothing for me as Type 2 diabetes doesn't care about gluten, only about carbs, holy crap are they good. I usually get the dough on sale, because it is a bit pricey, but if you can find them at your local grocery store, GET THEM.

****I should write a post about so-called "mic shyness" as well as other quirks about the amateur radio hobby sometime.

State of The Redbeard, Summer Edition 2026

I spent this weekend at ARRL Field Day 2026, which is put on by the American Radio Relay League, the largest Amateur Radio organization in the US. I'll post more about it later this week, but the TL;DR is that it's a contest/activity that's intended to get hams and clubs out into the field and away from their home locations to try to make as many contacts as they can. Just like guilds in MMOs, some clubs are far more hardcore about this than others, but I'm grateful my club is NOT one of those.

Anyway, I wasn't playing MMOs much this weekend --only a couple of hours playing WoW this afternoon-- so I got the opportunity to take a step back and consider what I want to do with my MMO playing.

Well, the first thing I did was to admit that I haven't really been playing LOTRO much at all since the great 64-bit server migration. My oldest, who also had been playing LOTRO far more than me, hadn't been playing much either. We haven't set up a new Kinship house --and in my case I haven't even bothered with setting up a new personal house-- and all I've done the past few months was to login and wander around Bree for a few minutes at a time. 

This theme also follows what I've been doing in ESO, where I'm so out of practice that when I do go out and about and fight any sort of enemy I almost end up dying. That's kind of embarrassing, given that I really used to love ESO's and GW2's limited ability bars, but that's the reality of me not effectively playing either game over the past 6+ years. 

I'm the plain looking Dunmer to the side.
All sorts hang out around a bank vault, I guess.

That leads me to SWTOR, where I bowed to reality here and decided to cancel my in-game subscription. I've gone from logging in once a week and doing stuff in the Vanilla SWTOR zones to logging in more like once a quarter. I can trace my decline in interest with SWTOR directly to the change that impacted companions' pathing, but I also think that the success of Classic WoW lead to the realization I liked the pre-expansion Vanilla version of SWTOR more than its current iteration. If the dev team were to come out with a "SWTOR Classic" with a pre-Rise of the Hutt Cartel version of the game available to play, I'd be all for it. I still love the Vanilla storylines, and I'll miss them a lot,* but paying a subscription to a game I'm not playing is pretty silly.

Some of the other games I've played in the past, such as Neverwinter and Age of Conan, I've uninstalled from my PC. I'd login, look at my toon for a moment, and just logout. The former I couldn't get into after a certain level (I think it was mid-20s) and the latter is still a buggy mess that requires grouping up to finish the main storyline, and I honestly don't know anybody who plays it anymore. That the talent tree for AoC is so obnoxiously huge --it makes Rift's talent tree look really basic by comparison-- I have absolutely no idea what my options really are. If you've ever heard about analysis paralysis, I met that head-on in AoC.

Speaking of Rift, there's so few players --especially in the low level zones-- that you really can't do much. You can quest in a zone to an extent, but the grouping that is expected to happen in fighting Rifts or whatnot in the open world simply doesn't happen. You need a critical mass of players to do that, and that's just not happening anymore. I haven't tried their automated LFD tool, but given my experiences with automated tools in other MMOs I'm very reluctant to try it and group up for their equivalent of a dungeon.

Like most days when I poke my nose in Rift,
nary a person in sight.

I do login to Star Trek Online a bit, but like LOTRO, I just wander around and maybe take a trip from Earth to Vulcan. If I were subscribing to STO, it would have also been on the block for unsubscribing.

And now let's circle back to the elephant in the room, the various forms of WoW.

At this point in time, WoW is the only MMO I'm actively subscribed to. Well, kind of: I buy 60 days' worth of WoW at a time, which forces me to review whether I'm enjoying myself every couple of months. And so far, that has been the case.

Among the versions of WoW I've played, the Classic Anniversary servers are what I've played the most. I still poke my nose into the Retail and Era servers, but I've not touched the 2019 WoW Classic progression servers since 2023 or so. About the only thing I did do there was to occasionally login so I knew what my toons originally looked like when I recreated them on the Anniversary servers. 

***

So, that begs the question: what have I been doing?

The most obvious answer is that I've been doing non-gamer things: amateur radio, gardening, repairs around the house and cars. And eventually I'll get back to making more outdoor furniture since the weather has finally heated up.

But what about gamer stuff?

Oh, single player games: Civ IV, Stardew Valley, Stellaris, Age of Empires.

There's a few other games scattered in there, but I've stayed away from long games that require a lot of attention, such as any of the isometric RPGs (Baldur's Gate 1/2/3, Icewind Dale, Divinity Original Sin 1/2, Disco Elysium, etc.). I simply don't have the time to devote to those games, and I realized that when I came to the conclusion that my BG3 playthrough was long enough in the past that I can't even remember what I was trying to do at the time. Maybe I'll get a chance to play these longer form games another time --I'm looking at you, Planescape: Torment-- but that's not about to happen right now.

Yeah, buddy. I'm done with trying to figure it
out, so you'll just have to wait and I'll recreate you later.

That's the biggest drawback to video games made over the past 10-15 years or so: the hours to completion has become so large that you'd have to devote a significant amount of your free time to playing them, and that in the end works against my enjoyment of the game. While I no longer have kids around the house, that doesn't mean I'm swimming in spare time. And these 100+ hour video games demand enough of your spare time that it becomes increasingly difficult to justify devoting that much time to a single endeavor. If I read a book about an hour a night, for books not named Don Quixote** that'd take me about 40-50 hours to complete. So, somewhere between 1-2 months. But a game such as BG3 or The Witcher 3, with their playtimes of well over 100 hours each***, can take me a lot longer than that. I think that when I played the original Baldur's Gate back in 1999 it took me somewhere around 4 months, and that didn't include the expansion.**** 

There are other games I do want to play, such as Dispatch and Stray Gods, but I suspect that I'll get so invested in the story that when difficult choices come along (and from what I understand, you're given a very short period of time to make a choice in these Telltale-type games) I'll likely freeze and simply stop playing. The old line from the Rush song Freewill "If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice" looms large over me whenever I play one of these games. Maybe its my acknowledgement that there are no objectively good or bad solution in these games that causes me to freeze like that, but I do feel bad for all participants in a video game when push comes to shove and I have to let someone down.

I believe this is one of the "easier" choices
in Dispatch. I mean, you could be a selfish jerk
with the left option or have an overinflated ego
in the mid, or just propel the story forward on the right.
Screencap from Dispatch.

***

Does that mean my MMO playing days are winding down?

Not really. Just like everything else, it evolves around here. I expect that as Fall heads toward Winter my MMO playing will go up a bit as I'll be doing less and less outside. Still, you never quite know around here. Who knows what Microsoft might be up to this Fall? More cost cutting? Same thing goes for all of the other game companies, as the "good times" in the post-pandemic world come to an end.

I guess we'll see.

*You know, I still never finished the Agent's storyline. I got mid-way through Chapter 2 and... Just stopped. That's when the pathing issues kicked in, and I couldn't stand it.

**Unabridged version. The abridged version is significantly shorter.

***And I'm here to tell you I do NOT operate at the same speed as the "average" player; I spend way too much time enjoying everything and contemplating my choices before I move forward. What, you thought that I only did that in MMOs? 

****I was loaned the copy of BG1 that I played, so I returned it when I was finished. The guy who loaned it to me kept pestering me to finish it, but I was like "Dude, I have a newborn at home, I'm working 50 hours a week, and I'm wiped. I'm moving as fast as I can."

This'll Be Your Big Chance To Get Away From It All

Outside of checking out a few cities in Retail (as seen in the previous post), I took the past several days off from playing WoW.

I'd like to say that I had projects that had priority over any video game playing, but that wasn't the case. I simply didn't feel like logging in and playing on my Alliance toons. I did check the bank alts a couple of times to make sure I wasn't losing anything via in-game mail*, but beyond that, I didn't do much.

This is but one page of my "junk" mail.

This sort of break is a necessary part of any endeavor, and because I have no external pressure to complete anything in-game** I can take as many breaks as I need. This was something I sorely missed in 2021, and I fully intend to take advantage of my lack of commitment right now.

So. 

What have I been doing?

Thinking about this...

No, this is not my house. From a
reviewer at The Home Depot's website.

Yes, it's creeping toward gardening season, and I've already obtained some seeds for this year. And this year, I'm actually going to put in a couple of raised beds in the backyard so I can plant a vegetable garden in the yard, the first one since the mini-Reds were little. (Here's to hoping the deer won't be that hungry...)

Outside of that, I've just been taking a mental break. Goofing around, doing this and that, and catching up on some of my writing.

By the time this posts I might be back into WoW, but whether or not isn't that great of a concern. What's important is that I enjoy what I'm doing.

*If you're like me and have far too much accumulated junk for a bank alt or two, you just move stuff around via in-game mail. In WoW at least, you have 30 days before the mail (and attachments) returns to the sender, and then 30 days it can sit in the sender's inbox before it's automatically removed. So, if you keep up with juggling in-game mail, you can move a ton of stuff around.

**Relatively speaking, of course. My friends group would want me to get to Outland and level faster --it's not quite so overt right now but it's one of those generally understood things-- but I'm being my contrarian self right now and am actively resisting that.

At The End of Everything be Sure to Buy the Merch

There was something that was supposed to happen yesterday, but I can't remember what it was...

Hmm.... Not exactly.

No, that's not it. Something else...

Kind of funny how this is likely going to upstage

that other announcement yesterday. Then again, Microsoft
owns them both, so I guess it doesn't matter to them.

Maybe? It is video game related...

I don't know about that. Midnight in Goldshire
is a wee bit different than Midnight in other places.

Oh yeah, that was it: something was supposed to happen at Midnight.

Or something like that.

Under the headlines of "I'm not sure they know their audience," This appeared in the WoW Classic tab this evening:

Mists Classic, 20th Anniversary Servers, Retail Midnight. Same difference, I guess.

But what got me was that email I got this afternoon, even before the "Adventure is Calling You Home" email:

I guess Blizzard knows their audience, but... Meh. The universe is ending; buy the merch! And buy the top end package for the housing exclusives and Early Access!

Unfortunately for me, I apparently never bothered to post about Retail's impending player housing --because I checked under "Retail" and couldn't find it-- but if I had I'd have said something along the lines of Blizzard making some aspects of housing dependent upon the Cash Shop. Well, the Expansion Price Tiers isn't the Cash Shop, but it's close enough for me. 

To be honest, I'm surprised that Blizzard isn't abandoning the lower price tiers entirely and just having everybody pay $100 or more for the expac. After all, look at what Nintendo is doing for the prices of their new games on the Switch 2, and WoW is deliberately orienting the contents of the various packages that if you want to be "serious" about raiding or collecting, you'd better shell out for the top end price.

I don't really have a leg to stand on here, it's just that what I spend money on is different than what others in MMO spaces do. Like on raw materials to make another one of these:

No appendages were lost in the construction
of that end table.

#Blaugust2025

Red vs. Birds, Part Whatever

I'm only being semi-facetious with that title, because I've had quite a Spring dealing with birds. 

My involvement with birds is mostly two things: don't let them get into the house, and set out seeds for them in the birdfeeder. They don't bother me, and I don't bother them. However, each Spring there is an ongoing battle to keep the birds from building a nest in the porch.

It's the robins that are doing that. Always the robins. 

One year, the robins made a nest in the bush right next to where our cars are parked, and one of them would sit on the side mirror of one of the cars all day long, making noises at it's reflection, and crapping all over said side mirror. I had to hose off that side mirror every couple of days until the baby birds in the nest grew up and flew away. 

However, for the past several years, the robins have been trying to build a nest in our porch, which would prevent us from actually using said porch until they left. (They have a habit of dive bombing us if we come close to where their nest is.) To prevent this, I've turned on the overhead fan on the porch for several days to keep the birds from landing on the fan and trying to build a nest there. This also keeps the robins from building a test on the rafters next to the fan by blowing away the twigs and whatnot.*

This year the robins were unusually persistent, but they eventually failed to build a nest and moved on. I thought that my work was done and I could turn my attention to staining the deck boards I put down last year. The rain had been unusually persistent this Spring, so for much of the past Spring the weather had either been too wet or too cold to allow me to go out and stain the deck boards. Finally, however, the weather turned and I got four days of clear weather for the deck to dry out and I could make a go of staining it.

Then the robins decided to take their revenge by finding a nice perch on the deck and start crapping all over it. 

I was planning on using a deck cleaner/prep solution on the boards anyway, but the appearance of bird poop all over the deck was quite unwelcome. I spent the better part of a day scrubbing the thing down, clearing it out, and then the next day there was more poop to clean off.

After two days of this, I finally said "Fuck it," and decided to stain the deck after work.

Partway through the staining, I finally remembered
to take a photo.

Using a paint pad as opposed to a roller made for a lot less splatter and made the process go more quickly than it had in the past.

The view from the porch after it was completed.
Yes, the screen is ripped, but that's an artifact
of the original screen that enclosed the porch. That's
a story that I'll have to discuss in another post.

I know it's not perfect; I can see the overlapping coats of stain in plenty of spots, but the entire point of this was to protect the wood, not look perfect. I can go put another coat of stain on later, but the current problem is fixed.

Now, I have to work on the stairs, then address the railings. My budget might not permit either to be complete this year, because I had surprise car bills this Spring. I also decided to pass on finishing up my amateur radio license this year because buying ham radio equipment was out of the question too. Oh well, one thing at a time.

*It's not as if the robins don't have trees and bushes to build nests in nearby; there's a bunch of them around.

Being Present in the Moment

One of the things I've had to adjust over these past several months is to embrace the slow and steady pace of things. Not in World of Warcraft, per se, but in life as well.

For a guy who has been tinkering around with electronics since the late 80s*, I've had a reckoning while studying for my Technician's license. While I realize that for some people memorizing the questions in the potential question pool for the test is the way to go, that's not me. I prefer to learn how to do something so I can then figure it out every time. Sure, it'll slow me down on my test completion, but it's not like this is a timed test in the same vein as the SAT or GRE. 

But still... Holy crap have I forgotten a ton of stuff over the years.

Yeah, that. Wait, what was I talking about?
from Cheezburger.

This has been an exercise in humiliation. I can't tell you the number of times when a concept was presented in the study guide and my initial reaction was "Oh yeah, I remember this! It's... uh... It's..."

What's sad is that I've built a power supply and
antenna tuner before, so you'd think I'd remember this.
From The ARRL Ham Radio License
Manual (5th Edition), page 3-16.

I then have two directions I could take: tell myself that I know this and I'll be fine on the test, or admit that I don't really know it and that I have to study and review and practice more. 

While I really really want to take the former route -my ego wants me to go that way too- I've been forced into the realization that the latter is the better choice in the long run. Yeah, my ego drives me just like it drives everybody else, but even more than my ego is my fear of looking like an idiot in front of everybody else.**

Speaking of idiots, having this photo of Richard Garriott in the
book did not age well. And no, I'm not putting this here to try
to get a response from Wilhelm Arcturus, either. From
The ARRL Ham Radio License Manual (5th Edition), Page 1-7.

So I've been proceeding a lot slower than I hoped. 

***

If you play video games or are a fan of logic puzzles, you know that typically the best solution is to perform actions in a specific order. This kind of goes without saying for anything in life, from putting together IKEA furniture to cleaning out the garage to engaging in relationships.***

This includes figuring out my outside projects for this coming year.

The most critical part, replace the deck boards, was completed last year. Now I have to stain the deck once the overnight temperatures reach over 50 F (10 C) as according to the stain instructions. There's also the consideration that if I'm not careful, the stain will have a ton of pollen embedded in it as well. 

But there's the next phases to consider, and they involve replacing the stairs and the railings. And the skirting around the deck.

That's just the deck. I also want to paint the exterior of the porch, which involves me getting up on a ladder to paint the top portions of the porch. And that involves me clearing out enough of the garage so I can get to the ladder...

You get the idea. 

I have to figure out the order to attack all of these projects in the same way my Questing Buddy attacks her goals in WoW Classic, but I have to temper this with the knowledge that I don't have all the time in the world to do this, either. Some of these will get bumped to next year (or the year after), and I have to be willing to accept that.

(Yeah, right.)

***

Speaking of next year...

I reviewed the vacation days I've taken for this year so far, and all but two of them involved doctor's visits. And those two vacation days involved my travel for work, so they technically don't count.****

Admittedly, 3 of those doctors' visits involved me getting vaccines, so they're a once every several years event, but even then I'm starting to feel a bit run down by the constant drip of doctor visits, along with the knowledge that this is going to be my life going forward. 

All of these visits are starting to impact other things as well. For example, I'd like to take some time off to just rest and recharge, but the more time I take off for a doctor's visit means there's less time for other things. (See my projects above.)

The irony that I kind of need some time off to recharge but that my time off is already being taken up by health issues hasn't been lost on me. I've also had a nagging concern that the longer my life has gone on I've lost the ability to relax. Consider it an unfortunate byproduct of being on-call 24x7 for close to 30 years, but even when I have a couple of days off it takes an effort to not check work email. Or join a daily review session. Or... Well, you get the idea. 

I began to realize I might have a problem with relaxing when I sat down in a chair on the newly replaced deck surface and no more than five minutes later I got the urge to go work on another project.

This is not good, I thought, and got up and went back inside after trying to push those feelings away.

So yeah, I need to relearn how to relax. Be present in the moment. Maybe that's why I've been enjoying fishing this much lately.

Good luck with that one.
From Tumblr and Star Wars.

*Not to mention my bachelor's degree.

**I'm not talking about 'an idiot versus a know-it-all', but 'an idiot versus being actually competent'. If there's one thing I have learned over the years, being a know-it-all serves as a lightning rod for everybody who hates/bullies smart people, so blending into the background by not being a know-it-all is typically the smarter move.

***Figuring out what that order is in a relationship frequently is the hard part. Everybody is different and responds to things differently, although some general concepts are pretty universal. Otherwise, Psychology would be a crap shoot.

****And I ended up working while traveling anyway, because of course that's what happened.

Time to Rest the 'Ol Back for the Winter

It is finally done.

I finished replacing the deck boards. That includes the last board behind all the plants and the "mini" boards at the corners.

I highlighted what I meant by mini-boards
in red circles. They're very small compared
to the rest of the planks.

But all's not completely finished, because I'll be spending up through mid-winter putting the rotting boards and the leftovers in the trash.

I'd imagine that my allergies will improve once
all of those boards finally are out of here.

However, I don't need to do anything else about the deck until Spring, when I'll be looking at revving up for replacing the stairs and railings. (And the skirting. Can't forget the skirting.)

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around
it being warm enough here in November to go barefoot.

Some People go on Vacation to Rest...

...but I end up working on projects instead.

I'm not exactly sure why I derive such enjoyment from working on a project, but I do. Maybe it's that my job is a case study in never seeing anything truly finished*, or maybe that I'm naturally biased toward working on things with my hands, but when a job finishes up there's a wave of satisfaction that washes over me, if only for a little while.

Of course, things are never that easy. About halfway through a project I get an itch to start another one, and that presents a problem. Sure, the new shiny idea does capture my attention when I'm in the middle of something else, but it also means that I've forgotten why I was excited about the original project in the first place. If I can get through these urges, I can see a project through to completion.

As far as the deck goes, yes, I have felt those urges already.

Still, I've been pushing onward.

My workstation on the porch. I thought the
deck was completely attached to the porch,
but having seen the framing underneath, they
are actually separate. Go figure.

Thankfully I bought the miter saw quickstand, because I wouldn't be able to finish this deck project otherwise. The reviews talked about how light the Ryobi miter saw is, and if that's light I'd hate to lift the "normal" weighted saws.

I finished the last of this current batch of wood, but this also involved doing some other work on the deck.

See where that exit to the north is? That's one of the two locations where I'm going to replace the stairs. As you can tell, there's only one post there to attach a stair railing. Since you need two stair rails, that meant either I was going to put in a post now or wait and do it next year when I actually work on the stairs.

I chose the former. Do it now while the area under the deck is exposed so I don't have to take out boards later. 

Painter's tape is a wonderful invention.

I used painter's tape to attach a level, so I could work it without needing an extra pair of hands.

What's hidden by the support board are extra screws attaching
the post to the ledger board.

No, your eyes do not deceive you, that post is taller than
it's compatriot on the left side. I decided it was smarter to
install a longer post and then cut it down rather than
risk installing a post that was too short.

So now, with 2/3 of the rows replaced, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I have 3-4 leftover 16' deck boards that I'll use when the last batch of wood arrives, and once those are all installed I'll be done for the year. I think I'll use this Winter to let my back rest.

*If you work in IT, you know what I'm talking about. Sure, there are "projects" that end up being "completed", but I'd say only 1 out of 10 projects I've worked on ever crossed the finish line to my satisfaction. There's far too much horse trading going on trying to keep the bugs and disruption to a minimum versus finishing within a (so-called) reasonable time frame.

Red Needs Water Badly

On September 4th we received our next batch of wood for the deck.

The guy delivering the wood warned me about
some of the pieces. He didn't pull them, but if
he had he'd have gotten me better boards, as he
builds decks as a side job on the weekends.

That meant I worked on the deck this weekend.

I have 42 rows to replace, so I bought enough wood for 21 rows plus a bit extra to compensate for any bad boards.

So today, I put down nine rows.

One more row here will barely fit within the
length of a 16 foot board, and then I'll have to use
combinations of 8 foot and 12 foot boards.

It was also quite the adventure, given that I dropped a couple of things that fell down under the deck, so I had to crawl under it to get to the drill bit and screws. I was sure not going to go on another trip to the hardware store for another countersink bit.

The hardest part of the deck work has been ripping out the old boards:

The damage.

I'm going to have to break those down and safely remove/bend the nails before I can get too much farther along. These 4 inch-wide boards may look pretty, but there's a lot more of them than there would have been if the previous homeowner had used the more commonly used 6 inch wide boards. Sure, I could have replaced the 4 inch boards with 6 inch, but that would have required me ripping out all of the boards so I could properly do it. And I really wasn't going to do that and leave the deck in an incomplete state for a couple of months.

The weather today was fantastic. Almost too much so, because in my focus on my work I neglected to hydrate and even eat some lunch. (I did have a handful of nuts, so I wasn't completely crazy.) Right now, I'm paying the price by nursing a headache while I drink water. 

EtA: It's countersink, not counterstrike. /sigh

What To Do on a Saturday

Yesterday was a beautiful, sunny day. Not humid at all, and a pleasant breeze coming from the northwest.

A good day to finish off this batch of wood for the deck:

10 year old grill not included.

I flipped over and began working on the side of the deck closest to the porch, so I could exploit the wood I had left. I could cut out the bad sections of the replacement decking and still have enough left to replace these small pieces. That photo is kind of deceptive, however, as the board lengths rapidly grew to requiring 12 foot boards.

I have now exhausted that first batch of wood and have about 60% of the deck rows left to replace. The length of the rows isn't nearly as important as the number of rows, because the number of cuts on the saw will be the same for most of what's remaining. I'm thinking of getting one batch of wood in September and then another in October, and that ought to finish up the decking. All I'd have to do then is wait until Spring or early Summer to paint the deck. 

Oh yeah, and begin Phase 2 of the rehab: the railings and stairs.

#Blaugust2024

What I Do When I'm Not Gaming

I suppose I ought to provide an update to my deck adventure, if for no other reason than as proof that I didn't abandon it again like so many other years.

Last year, car repairs ate up all available money, and the year before I was still in recovery from my little hospital adventure. And the year before that, 2021... Well, I'd rather not talk about that summer again.

But yes, I have been working on the deck this year, and I do have a long term plan of action.

The first stage was to determine if the top of the beams and joists were good enough to use as-is. If they weren't, then I'd likely have to replace the entire deck and... with costs for a new deck running $12,000 to $20,000 for a direct replacement, we don't have the money for that right now.

So I bought a couple 8 foot replacement deck boards and pried the old ones out on the far end with the intent of determining if the so-called bones of the deck were worth saving. 

Luckily, they were, so I replaced them and put in an order for decking that would cover somewhere between 35-40% of the deck. I give it a range because you always over-order on wood being delivered to your house because you have to assume that some of the wood is going to be unusable. 

Looks can be deceiving.

From this side, the wood looked pretty good. However, when I began flipping the boards over, I discovered that was not the case.

There's a reason why I put some boards up
high like this. This flaw just had to be in
the middle, because if it were on the end
I could have found a place for it and cut off
the bad section.

Some boards, however, could be made usable by merely flipping them over so the flaw wasn't showing.

Such as this one. I do sometimes wonder how
people at the mill where this is cut convince
themselves that wood such as this is perfectly
fine to sell at the same price as other, good boards.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been pulling out a row of decking and replacing it with a new one. Although I've been out there early in the morning from time to time, typically as stress relief from work, for the most part I've begun my work after 3:30 PM. That's when the deck is covered in shade from a nearby chokecherry tree.

If you notice that the last board on the end is an old board, that was done on purpose. I'm using that board to be able to snap a line once I'm finished and trim all of the excess off in one cut. That does mean that there are boards that extend pretty far out from the edge of the deck, and I've nearly thwacked myself a few times by forgetting that fact. When I cut the grass last Sunday, I forgot about the 16 foot deck board I set on the top of the rail and nearly smacked into it with my temple. 

Still, the project is continuing, and I'm about 30 - 33% finished:

That has left a lot of old deck boards to get rid of.

That pile is after I broke down a bunch of boards, took care of the nails sticking out, and set them out for trash removal. I sure hope that the trash people aren't gonna complain about the steady stream of old decking they're gonna see.

***

The plan going forward is to finish using these deck boards, then in September I'll get another round of wood, and go until that round is finished. If I need a third bunch in October, that's fine; October is usually our driest month of the year. 

Why spread it out? Well, the short answer is money. I can afford a bit at a time, rather than pay for it all at once. Since the cost pushed me into using pressure treated wood instead of composite*, cost is also determining just how much of the deck I can complete at one time. I'm a one man operation, so I don't want to have all of the wood delivered just to have it sit out, unused, for months.

Once the deck boards are replaced, then I have the Winter to plan out how I want to attack the next phase, which is either the railing or the steps. I'm thinking it's going to be the railing, but I could change my mind and do the steps instead. The last stage of the deck repair will be replacing the skirting and putting in some gravel and whatnot around the edge of the deck to keep the weeds away.

So yeah, multi-year project. One step at a time, however. One step at a time.

*At one point composite decking cost as low as twice that of pressure treated wood, but the price of wood has gone down recently. Still, I'd likely have to rework the deck by adding joists if I wanted to use composite deck boards, because composite isn't as strong as regular wood. Yes, I'd have to paint the deck more regularly than if I used a composite material --and paint is not cheap-- but having to resubmit the deck for review by the county inspectors isn't worth the extra up front cost.

Me and My Big Mouth

After that post on my upcoming deck project, I've been reading up on the building code for said deck. 

And I've found a few problems.

You know how I mentioned that I had no idea how the deck passed inspection because of the slope of the stairs? Yeah, I found that if there's three or more steps in place then a rail has to be there. That 3 steps is kind of critical, because the north steps have only one step, and a very steep one at that, so I guessed right and that they avoided needing stair rails there because of the lack of steps and barely making the minimum slope for the steps. Still, it's not optimal.

However, I did find out that the gap in the balusters around the deck was required so that a 4 inch sphere could not pass through the gap. Not because they don't want a ball falling off of the deck, but a toddler being able to stick their head through the gap.

And the gap in our balusters is 5 inches. 

/sigh

While I was measuring, I also found out that our railings were 35 inches high, while the code minimum for the railings is... 36 inches. That may sound bad, but I can actually make 36 inches by changing a few things on the rails. I was going to rebuild them anyway, but it is annoying.

I mean, really? REALLY? How close
can you get and still mess this up?
But yeah, putting a 2x4 or 2x6 on top
will push me over 36 inches.

For a few anxious moments I thought the length of the deck railing wasn't up to code either, as the "how to" deck books I was reading mentioned a 6 foot maximum length between railing posts, and ours were a maximum of 6.5 feet. It turns out that the building code for the county states a maximum length of 8 feet, so I don't have to do major surgery on said deck. 

And at least the spacing on joists is 14 inches, not wider than the absolute minimum of 16 inches.

Rebuilding the rails isn't that big of a deal, and I'd been considering it anyway as the railings had been out there, exposed to the elements, for 35 years. However, if I'd have needed an extra 5 or so rail posts, that might have been enough to require a rebuild.

And a reinspection.

/ugh

What I've decided to do is do what I can right now that is most important, and that is to redo the deck boards themselves. After that, if I've the time and money, I'll fix the north steps, the skirting, and the west steps in that order. Last on the list will be the deck railing, because a) it's been like that for years so an extra year won't hurt, and b) I don't have little kids who could stick their head through the railing. (Any more, anyway.)