Cleaning the shack

Time has been flying by and I realized it had been about a month since I sent the materials into the Montserrat licensing authorities. I had hoped that I would have heard something back by now but perhaps I'm just being impatient. I had also sent a letter to the head of the Montserrat Amateur Radio Society (MARS) with a request that our DXpedition group be admitted as members of their society. Knowing that they are doing emergency communication on an island with an active volcano, I also included a bit of a donation in there for their club, too. They are brave souls! Since I have a contact within that group, I mailed the President of the MARS club today and asked if he had received our letter. I hope to hear back from him in the next couple of days.
We had done a great deal of remodeling around the condo this last year and stuff has been piling up. (Crunch time at work didn't help, either, as we were spending very little time at home.) Tonight I turned on the baseball game and started cleaning the room that serves as my shack. There were two reasons for starting in this room: I hope to be working the CQ WW SSB contest at the end of the month and I didn't want to spend most of that 48 hour contest sitting among junk, and, alas, most of the junk was actually mine, so I'm the only one that could clean it up anyway. Nobody to blame but myself!
To further add to my excuse list for my messy home, I had been spending lots of time doing volunteer work for some local clubs. I had done some artwork for the New England QRP club this summer and had designed a new logo for the PART club in Westford. That new logo was approved at the general meeting last night! We'll be rolling that out on the web site, badges, and other stuff later this year. I must say, though, it is good to have this behind me. It was amazing how time-consuming that stuff was!
I'm speaking at the Boston Amateur Radio Club (BARC) tomorrow night. I need to run all this garbage I've collected to the dumpster so I can fill my car with toys for show-and-tell tomorrow! If you are in the Boston area and haven't seen the show, I hope you'll drop by. Again, mention this blog and receive a big smile from the blogger. {grin}