Well, after a frantic and exhausting weekend, we’re finally moved in to the new QTH. I’m happy to report that the actual moving part of the move went almost exactly as planned. But (as usual) I underestimated the time it would take to clean the old place. We still managed to get all of our stuff moved to the new house and get the old townhome completely cleaned up before our deadline of Monday, 29 September. The lady from the property management company seemed pretty pleased about the condition that we left the townhome in, so it looks like we’ll be getting a big chunk of the deposit back (whoo hoo!).

Now comes the fun of sorting through the remaining boxes that are stacked up in the garage and placing the contents in the appropriate places. We’ve got all of the necessities unpacked and put into place, but there’s still a lot of assorted junk to go through (and I thought that we did a pretty good job of weeding out the unnecessary crap before the move). The shack is about 2/3 of the way to a condition where I can use it, so that’s another bit of good news. Some tragic news is the huge freakin’ blister that I now have on the side of my thumb as a result of driving a 8-foot ground rod with a 3 lb sledge. The first four feet were no problem, but the last four sucked mightily. At least my thumb can rest well knowing that it was sacrificed for a worthy cause: to help craft a new skywire.

I can tell that I’m getting very tired by my flowery prose, so it’s probably time to wrap it up for this update. I’ll post a bit more about my antenna choice in the next update, so stay tuned for that. Once I’m QRV, I think I’m going to focus on operating for the next few weeks just to savor what I’ve been missing for a long while. After I get that out of my system, it will be back to the homebrewing!