I want to apologize to all of my regular readers for the complete and utter lack of content here recently. I know that there aren’t a ton of you, but I do appreciate those who have gone through the trouble to subscribe to my blog.

If you have been paying attention to my Twitter stream, you may have noticed that I’ve been in a nasty funk regarding my interest in radio. I think it got started a few weeks ago with some online behavior between hams that I found extremely discouraging. I’m not going to name names, since I have no intention of trying to stir up hard feelings.

I’ve also noticed an uptick of condescending nastiness from hams online towards those who hold moral, religious, and political views similar to mine. I don’t mind small amounts of these types of discussion in my ham radio content (whether I agree with the view or not), but the level of vitriol has been really bothersome to me lately. Personally, I try to steer clear of mixing these topics with my ham radio stuff, although I have been occasionally guilty of letting a bit of it sneak through at times. In the past, I just ignored the stuff that I didn’t like. But considering the state of the world, right now I just want to get away from all of the negativity and back-biting when I read about radio. However, it seems like all I see lately is exactly this type of behavior. I just don’t have the stomach to deal with it at this point. I guess you could say that I have a thin skin at the moment.

Sitting down to operate or melt some solder didn’t seem to help either. Usually I can sit down with an idea or a circuit and have a lot of fun tacking the thing together and getting it to work. Now, I just don’t seem to have the attention span to get through even a simple build. Perhaps I’m coming down with a case of ADD, LOL!

Add in the stress of my greatly reduced paycheck, uncertainty about my employment stability, and planning and paying for a wedding, and you’ve got the recipe for a bombed out Jason.

I have been enjoying doing other things, such as fixing up our new home, working on putting in our new vegetable garden, baking bread, catching up on reading, and watching the Trail Blazers make their first run to the playoffs in many years.I am extremely grateful that I have other things that I still enjoy, which tells me that this probably isn’t some kind of depression.

I suspect that everyone who is into a passionate hobby or profession hits the wall like this after long enough. I just need to find the trick to recovering the passion. Maybe I need to completely unplug for awhile to give my psyche a rest.

I don’t intend to let this place blog fade. I still have a ton of neat ideas floating around in my head and in my notebook. But I also do not want to post a bunch of worthless crap here about my psychological state that you don’t care about while I try to get out of the funk. So I’ve been silent, hoping to regain that spark quickly. Since it still hasn’t come back, I wanted to at least let you know what’s going on so that you are aware that the blog will be back on track at some point. The question now is “when?”