Our Ham Radio club had a POTA event at Catalina State Park. That’s a Parks On The Air party. The idea is to set up some portable radio equipment out in the wild, like in a state park, and see how many contacts you can get. The rig I got to spend a little time on made almost 70 contacts, from a couple dozen states and one contact in the Azores! (That’s halfway across the Pacific Ocean towards Europe!) This was my first time at a POTA event, and it was both fascinating and intimidating… Some of these hams are very fast and it’s hard to follow all the chatter. But pretty cool!

So you are probably wondering what this beautiful ’34 Ford has to do with Ham Radio. Nothing. We just saw it at a stop on our way to the POTA and I had to chat with the owner for a minute. A beautiful specimen! (And I hope I remember correctly that it was a ’34… I wasn’t around when it was born, and so I don’t know those models too well.)

Ok, So we made it to Catalina State Park… quite different from the Catalina Island off Southern California where we grew up!

…Where we set up a couple of radios, rigged up antennas and had fun.

After a while, radio traffic died down, we ate lunches, and packed everything up. Cherryl and I decided to go for a short hike and look for birds. (We still haven’t gotten to see a Cactus Wren! I’d thought that would be our first day in Arizona!)

A lot of the dried grass looked like silky blonde hair.

We saw lots of cactus, but very few birds! Early afternoon is not a good birding time in the desert!

Catalina has its own type of beauty… It’s good if you can appreciate dry, brittle, harsh almost dead looking things…

Grandma Hits 90!

Cherryl’s mother, Joanne, celebrated her 90th birthday on Friday. We kept her busy with errands, games with kids and grandkids, etc. to keep her out of her house while we hung a wonderful set of pictures of all her family.

Jeanne and Steve did a fabulous job of getting family pictures rounded up and mounted. On the big day, while Joanne was out of her home, we hung the pictures in her living room. Cherryl and her family on the left, Jeanne and her family on the right. The oldest granddaughters’ families are on the top, the youngest below. It turned out really well!

Becky used her usual awesome cake-making skills; this time a Blueberry-Lemon cake with a few whole blueberries on top. Scrumdiddlyumptious!

So here’s the whole crew… except Karen and her family. Covid was beating up their family so we had to soldier on without them. 🙁

And it seems it’s almost required these days to have a crazy portrait, so this is our entry in the funny farm pictures.