Literally pounding some brass

Ham radio operators have a "contest" on new year's eve called Straight Key Night. The idea is to use archaic wireless equipment and communication methods to have a few nice long conversations, known as QSOs (amateur operators use a set of arbitrary 3-letter "Q signals" for abbreviations). If you don't have archaic radio equipment you at least must use a "straight" key (as opposed to an automatic key that makes sequential dots and dashes with a single movement of the key lever).
In addition, many contests consist of simply passing a few bits of information to prove you made a contact and move on to the next station as quickly possible but just the opposite is true of the SKN contest. The top prize for SKN is to get the most votes for "best fist" - best sounding Morse code produced by a straight key.
I haven't had the opportunity to partake of SKN for a few years but this year it was quite a pleasure. Conditions were fair on 80 meters (the 3.5 MHz shortwave band) and I managed to have 45 minute conversations with one station just a few miles away and another down in California.
The California operator was just one month younger than me and we were both licensed in 1963 - quite a coincidence! He was quite good with a straight key, if a little slow, but fortunately didn't mind me sending at 25 words per minute (quite a challenge to keep up for any length of time on a straight key). What was even better is our signals got quite strong as the 45 minute QSO progressed. It is always more fun when a signal is "pounding in" than when you have to "dig it out of the mud".
In the end my wrist got a bit sore, but it was well worth the pain. I'll have to do it again next year. Happy New Year!
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Felines appreciating Christmas time

House cats are a funny lot given all their personality quirks. However, as they get older they all seem to have one thing in common, desire to seek out warmth. Shortly after turning on the tree lights this morning we came across this scene of Sir, our 12 year old male:


Obtaining a photo of the other end posed a bit more of a challenge but the facial expression says it all:


We have had other cats exhibiting similar behavior over the years. I can't find the photo at the moment but one classic was a cat sitting on a bunched up string of lights being tested before outdoor installation.

Another interesting behavior of the cats is their fondness for the taste of tree-stand water. It makes it hard to tell how much water the tree is still taking when the cats are drinking an unknown quantity.

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Hungry birds posing for the camera

I've been inspired by my daughter to try my hand at blogging. This is going to cover random subjects despite the blog title. I have enjoyed playing around with digital cameras the last few years, mostly taking closeups of flowers and the like. I like to compose them to make useful wallpaper for our computers.

It has been raining a lot lately and when we got a sun break this afternoon (aka a sunny day in Seattle) the birds came to the feeders in droves. We had just replaced the platform feeder with a new plastic one (called a "dinner bell") in an attempt to foil the squirrels and I was watching the chickadees getting used to it. Hmmm... so many to chose from:


I grabbed my camera and tripod and cranked up the zoom and started snapping photos from the warmth of the kitchen. However, shooting through the double paned glass wasn't the best so I picked up and went outside for some shots of the other feeder. Of course that scared all the birds away for a while so I waited in the cold and eventually got a few decent poses from the finches.



These were taken while I was hiding low next to the patio table about 20 feet away with the camera cranked up to full 12x zoom.

.-.-. (AR in Morse which is shorthand for "end-of-message")