April Showers, and a Few Flowers -- But Two Weeks Late!

Trees are finally greening out here, 2 weeks late.

As I write this, I have my window open. It is almost 8 p.m., and the sky is still light out. The past four to five days we've finally seen some Spring weather here in the Seattle area -- temperatures reaching 60 degrees F (around 12C), and the nights haven't been freezing for the past five nights in a row, which seems miraculous, in that just over a week and a half ago it just hit freezing (32F / 0C).

The hills around my little corner of Washington have just begun to turn a light green, and after what seems to be interminable cold, it's finally feeling like Spring.

A look down the highway, the light green of fresh leaves, and 15C / 60 degree temperatures feeling like Spring finally.\

While I was out on my bicycle and taking a few pics with the Nikon L32, a helicopter flew over a nearby hill. The electronic telephoto enhancement on the Nikon sometimes works really well for shots like this.

I have yet to get my corona shot, that is something I hope to do in a couple weeks. Things are opening up in my state a little -- which means the traffic on the roads is back. There still aren't many jet airliners in the sky, though, so at night it's a lot quieter at times than it was pre-pandemic.

Work has continued, fiction writing has halted, and I've been wrestling with two of my electric guitars, trying to make them better for slide playing -- which means you're jacking up the string tension, but not to the point where strings are popping. I increment up the bridge saddles, a thousandth of an inch at a time, play a little, let the guitar sit, try it again.... Closer and closer to 'perfect'.

A 110 year-old Trestle and green trees.

One of my guitars, my Ibanez Gio GRX40, is really good on slide. Being a longer scale length, the distances between the notes is greater, so you have less chance of overshooting a note with the slide. The Powersound humbucker also sounds very good with slide, much better than it does if you fret single notes.

And the saddles on the bridge go up, up, up -- by the thousandths of an inch.

Three Tremolo springs (instead of five, which is probably preferable) -- not exactly ideal for maximum tuning stability, but it's the way the guitar was delivered from the factory, and I don't feel like messing with it now. 

The tuners on my Ibby, however, need to be replaced -- mainly the top two. They work, but they do not have a positive feel, and when you're playing in Open G and trying to get the chords to sound totally balanced, you need more 'feel' from the tuners than I've been getting. So it's time to get out the tiny drill and the wood putty (to fill the previous tuners' holes in the headstock).

I've changed out tuners three times previous (once on my Daimaru Jaguar copy, and twice on my Lotus L520 Les Paul copy), so it's not something I haven't done before, but drilling into one of my guitars isn't something I really look forwards to.

The Cedar River at dusk. The river is low for this time of year, when it is usually two to three feet higher and really flowing fast.

All that said, I'm still working on a radio article (on the Grundig G2, a lesser known Grundig that came out in the 2010's and didn't sell well), an article on Shortwave radio, and a third article which is devoted to slide guitar.

Until then, I hope these photos will suffice.

Peace out to all of my readers, here in the U.S. and all over the world.

C.C., 4-22-2021

JOYO BRITISH SOUND -- A Great Guitar Pedal, And A Cure For Some Excess Hiss

My typical "pedal board" these days. Guitar into Boss DD-3, into the Joyo British Sound dirt box (dead center in the pic), into the Boss Super Overdrive SD-1, into the clean (or dirty) channel of my Fender solid state Tweed Bronco (a 20W amp with TL072s and several series of clipping diodes in it). The LED on the JOYO, you'll notice, is fairly bright. When the battery gets too week to operate the pedal 100%, the LED doesn't dim as much as LEDs do on other pedals. Where I have the controls set on the Joyo, in this picture, is where I usually have them -- although I often crank the bottom left control higher, and the bottom right control lower, depending on the guitar I use, and color of Marshall-like tone I want.

As many of my readers already know, I not only have a radio hobby, but I also am a musician. I am mainly a rhythm and slide guitarist, but I also sing, play bass guitar, some keyboards, bagpipes, and in the past I played a set of drums on my demo recordings. On top of that I have dabbled in blues harmonica, and also have played some mountain and Celtic tunes on fiddle and banjo from time to time.

But guitar is my main instrument of choice. It just feels natural in my hand, to make music with one. Consequently, like most guitarists, I have my share of 'stomp boxes' -- distortion units, choruses, phasers, flangers, echoes and delays (analog and digital), noise suppressors (sometimes needed in recording), compressors, etc.

My Bagpipes, a set of 1981 Lawries with 1982 Hardie chanter. I used to play them in a band, but after my dad passed, it wasn't fun anymore, and I now play at home -- not as often as I should.

Stomp boxes can add atmosphere to your guitar's sound (chorus, phase, echo), or extra expression (wah-wah -- something I used to use in the 1980's but grew tired of). They can also color your guitar's sound overall (EQ, Fuzz, Overdrive, Distortion, etc.).

This is similar to my average philosophy on pedals and 'guitar rigs': One guitar, three pedals, and a decent amplifier... It doesn't even have to be an expensive amp. There are some good sounding ones out there at affordable prices. The guitar is an old Ibby which I got at a thrift store -- I had to gut it because the original switches were unfixable and the pickups fell apart when I took the covers off to get more volume. A local music store had Japanese Strat-copy pickguards with pickups, probably Matao brand. Controls and switches came from Radio Shack, which no longer exists; and a grey piece of plastic -- to mount the jack -- came from a hobby shop that also no longer exists.

PEDALS = GOOD; OR PEDALS = OVERKILL

A lot of guitarists have massive pedal boards full of all sorts of unnecessary stuff. They even have pride in their pedal boards. There are YouTube videos where guys show off all their expensive boutique pedals and gizmos, with several pedals in a row that all do the same thing (only differently!); furthermore, they've got racks full of crap to process the signal; you will then sometimes see them with ten or twelve stacks of amplifiers lining the wall behind them, when you really only need one amp and maybe a backup.

Then you'll see some big name guitar player being interviewed about their rig, and it's all boutique stuff -- in other words, forget trying to sound like them, because they're playing a custom $5000 guitar plugged into a custom $5000 amplifier through $500 pedals and processors, none of which Average Joe or Jane Guitar Player can afford.

Jimi Hendrix played stock Strats into stock Marshalls. He had a wah-wah and a fuzz box. Sometimes he used other stomp boxes, too, but in this video (Stockholm, 1969) he's using two -- count 'em, two -- pedals.:

The Jimi Hendrix Experience Live in Sweden 1969 - YouTube

Jimi wouldn't fit in today, I guess. No boutique pedals that one can't buy off the shelf. No signature or pre-aged, custom $5000 guitar.

And don't get me started on extensive guitar collections, where a guy is standing in front of a room full of guitars. You know what? You only need one or two (maybe a humbucker guitar and a single coil one) and a backup or two if you're thinking about playing in public, plus maybe an acoustic. Not fifty of them. 

But I digress...

It often becomes overkill, because face it: to make good music, you don't need that much! Eric Clapton changed rock and blues guitar music by just plugging one guitar (a 1960 Gibson Les Paul) into one amp (a Marshall Bluesbreaker combo), and when he went on to form Cream he only went up to a bigger Marshall amplifier because he was suddenly playing to bigger audiences and PA systems weren't all that loud back then. 

I've seen those popular "rigs of the stars" vids where these guys have six or seven guitars, banks of amps, all this processing crap -- all doted on by techs -- and meanwhile, Eric Clapton played entire tours using just one guitar (his 'Fool', painted Gibson SG). 

In 1967 he added a wah-wah pedal, which he used on two songs only (Tales of Brave Ulysses and White Room). In 1968 he added a second guitar as a backup.

That was it.

You don't need a boatload of pedals (and other equipment) to make decent music.

I only use three or four pedals max: a Delay, a Distortion, and an Overdrive (which replaces the gain channel of whatever amp I'm running my guitar into). Sometimes I put a chorus (Boss CE-5 or Ibanez CS-505) in front of the delay. Lately, I haven't -- so I have been just using three pedals, to save on batteries. The Boss DD-3 Delay gives the guitar enough 'atmosphere' that chorus really isn't needed.

I have a Boss TU-2 tuner handy in case I need to touch up the tuning -- my guitars rarely, if ever, go out of tune. But over a week they'll fall an eighth of a tone or so. When the strings start to feel a little mushy I'll plug the guitar into the tuner and tune the strings back up to pitch. So that makes four or five pedals, max, that I actually have plugged in between guitar and amp. And I get by O.K.

DIRT BOX MANIA

All that said, after playing with some people in December 2019 and having had the experience of a) not being able to hear myself because b) I was using a strange amplifier, and c) I wasn't satisfied with my sound (which I couldn't hear anyway), I decided to re-vamp my signal chain to make it more uniform sounding -- no matter what amp I was using.

So I added to my collection of distortion units -- or "dirt boxes" as we guitarists like to call them. I've had an old MXR Distortion Plus that I used on my CD demos long ago. I used to run a wah-wah, flat out, into the MXR, and with the small practice amp I was using at the time it gave me a very easy to record, slightly Marshally sound. Many of these recordings can be heard here.:

ChrisCampbellRock | Chris Campbell Rock | Free Listening on SoundCloud 

I got a Boss DS-1 in the mid 1990s and although I haven't used it on any recordings, I practice with it from time to time. I've found it has a really good slide guitar tone, and also works well to get Pearl Jam and Nirvana-like grunge guitar tones.

In 2000 or 2001 I got a Marshall Guv'nor Plus -- a terrific, dark sounding and Marshall-like pedal that sounds like a cranked, 1980's era Marshall (think JCM800 or 900). Built like a tank, it has served me well over the years. Unfortunately they no longer make them, and if you see one for sale online they go for as much as $400.

Last Spring, after I decided to update my guitar's signal chain, I purchased a Boss Super Overdrive SD-1, which I found very useful as a dirt box for slide and rhythm. The SD-1 has been around in various forms since the late 1970's, when Boss first introduced it. It was designed to imitate a tube gain section in a tube amplifier. The SD-1 gives my guitars a nice snarl, making them sound a lot like the tone Mick Ronson got on the early David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust era records.

I then got a Boss BD-2 Blues Driver, which I found works awesomely when placed in front of the SD-1. I get a British amp tone with that combination, and combining the two I don't really need an amp with a gain channel -- any clean channel seems to do.

ENTER THE JOYO BRITISH SOUND

My most recent purchase was a JOYO BRITISH SOUND pedal, which is a knock-off (apparently) of a Tech21 British Character pedal -- an analog amplifier simulator that is supposed to sound like a Marshall Bluesbreaker amp (JTM45), or a JCM100 / Plexi Super Lead amp. From what I've seen on YouTube, the JOYO is close to the Tech21 in sound.

I was looking for a backup or replacement for my Guv'nor, as I plan to find a band to play in, and don't want to take a pedal around with me that is now valued at $400 just because it's no longer made. I saw the Joyo advertised online, and -- after checking out some YouTube reviews -- decided to buy one. The price was reasonable -- around $35-$40 US.

I was pleasantly surprised. The JOYO British Sound pedal is very good at reproducing the Marshall-like tones it is supposed to produce. I can get a Malcolm Young tone, and if I turn up a couple of controls, I can get my guitar to sound more like Angus, or Eric Clapton when he was in Cream.

IT'S ALL IN THE CONTROLS

The JOYO British Sound pedal has six controls: Bass, Midrange and Treble on the top side, and Drive, Voice and Gain on the bottom.

They all seem to interact with each other a little bit; with the bottom row of controls definitely interacting with each other.

The JOYO's top controls (the tone controls) basically act like they do on your average guitar amp. I have the tone controls on my Joyo set low because #1, I don't like screaming midrange (Slash's tone is not for me), #2, my main amp is bassy enough as is, and #3 I don't like tons of treble in my guitar tone, and my guitars already have treble to burn.

So I have the tone controls set low -- ironically, close to where Angus Young has his tone controls set on his main amp.

Two dirt boxes designed to make your amp sound like a Marshall (or other, similar sounding British amplifier) -- the JOYO British Sound on the left, and the 2001 Marshall Guv'nor Plus on the right. To simplify the differences: the JOYO gets you closer to Paul Kossoff, Eric Clapton, or Angus and Malcolm Young on their first Australian albums, and the Guv'nor makes you sound more like Angus now. Oh, yeah: you can get a JOYO online, new, at a decent price. You can only get a Guv'nor online used, at $200 or more.

Now we get to the bottom row of the JOYO's controls, the row of controls that really make this box sound like a Marshall. The bottom controls are "Level", "Voice", and "Drive".:

The Level knob (the JOYO's overall 'volume' control) I usually have set high, so it will max the volume coming out of the amp, without making the guitar sound muddy or squishy.

This leaves the last two controls -- Voice and Drive -- which determine the 'color' of your overall sound. The Voice control, in the middle, determines how the pedal reacts to distortion and midrange. When you turn it to the left, it's more scooped, and the pedal will distort a bit less -- think Bluesbreaker amp (Clapton when he was with John Mayall) or Malcolm Young. Turn the Voice pedal past noon and you're entering into Marshall Super Lead / Super Bass and Plexi territory (Paul Kossoff, Angus Young, Eric Clapton in Cream). The "Drive" control is a gain control that determines your overall distortion level -- however, it interacts with the Voice control, so they both work off of each other.

I usually have my Voice control between 10 o'clock ad 2 o'clock, depending on the type of crunch I want to hear. I have my "Drive" control between 9 o'clock (for Malcolm Young like sounds with my humbucker guitars) and one o'clock (for my Daimaru Fender Jag knock-off, which has low output single coils), for more sizzle and crunch.

The only negative in the JOYO pedal that I experience is there is a ton of treble to spare. I have my JOYO's treble control cranked to zero, and even though the SD-1 cuts down some treble, I still have the treble reduced at the amplifier. It's not really a problem with the JOYO box, because no one on the internet complains about it -- but I just don't like really bright guitar sounds, so it's my own preference. I prefer a darker tone, and my ceramic-magnet pickup equipped guitars are bright enough to provide more than enough treble than I need.

A pic of the JOYO British Sound box with the battery so weak that the box is hissing very loudly. As you can see, the LED is still fairly bright -- even though my camera probably makes it a little bit brighter than it was to the human eye, it still is brighter than your typical Boss or Ibanez stomp box LED when the battery is next to dead.

Here is a pic of the JOYO British Sound pedal with a fresh battery. Same camera, same general lighting. The difference between the brightness of the LEDs in the pics is fairly apparent. The level of hiss in the JOYO with a fresh, or good battery isn't enough to bother me. It's more of a background hiss, that instantly gets covered by the guitar.

HISSSSSSSSSSSSSS

I have found that battery life with the JOYO is really good. The first battery lasted me about five or six months. The LED has remained bright the entire time, and I noticed no weakening of signal from the box, either. Amazing.

However, a couple nights ago, things took a sudden turn for the worse.

Now, most dirt boxes put out a little hiss -- depending on the box, of course. Even some amps put out some hiss. I've heard Van Halen concerts on YouTube, where Eddie Van Halen's amps were hissing a little in between songs.

With a new battery, there was a little hiss with the JOYO, but not enough to worry about.

Two nights ago, suddenly I was hearing tons of hiss. If you've ever heard a steam train, or a pressure cooker releasing its steam -- it was almost to that level.

I also noticed that I also had to crank the gain higher than usual to get distortion. The clarity was still there, though. The pedal didn't sound muddy like other gain pedals do when the battery weakens. It just didn't distort as easily.

So I had a pedal that had lower distortion, still had clarity, but a lot of HISS.... and the LED was still bright. I was puzzled.

I did an online search. Some guy had once bought two JOYO pedals and they both had hiss. No one on that forum could give him any decent answers. Then I thought about the battery. What if the battery actually was LOW, even though the LED was still bright?

I took the back of the battery compartment and replaced the battery on the JOYO.

I plugged the JOYO back into my guitar signal chain (guitar > JOYO > Boss SD-1 > Fender Tweed Bronco clean channel).

Instantly, the excess hiss was GONE! More signal. More crunch and distortion! Normal operation!

The LED on the JOYO pedal was brighter with the new battery, but the difference wasn't as great as you have on other brands of guitar pedals. The LED on the JOYO British Sound darkens slightly as the battery weakens, but not like other brands of pedals. You will know you need a new battery when you hear a LOT of hiss.

So if you have a JOYO pedal, and you're experiencing excess hiss: CHANGE THE BATTERY!!!

My Hawthorn tree is just starting to bud. Usually by April 5th, the trees have already put out their new leaves, making the hillsides of the valley a bright shade of cheery green. Not this year. The past three years have seen the leaving of the trees occurring a week or so late, even with mild Winters. This year it looks like the trees may be two to three weeks late.

IN OTHER, NON-MUSICAL THINGS

Aside from the recent encounter with hiss on my Joyo pedal, nothing really is going on. 

Work is still happening, and our state is slowly opening up, but it's a slow process. I still haven't gotten a corona shot and still don't know when I will be able to. As my foreign readers are probably aware, we here in the U.S. have a mish-mash, hodgepodge, throw-together health care system that the government regulates, but doesn't run, so things like vaccination programs are left to the states, counties, and local health districts. It's times like these that the proponents of nationalized health care definitely have a point.

I know it's worse for some people in other areas of the world, where there are issues even getting vaccine to their country. I really feel for them, because right now I understand at least a little bit of what they face.

Near the end of the first week of April -- April 6th, in fact -- and the temperature at 6 in the morning is just below freezing: 29 degrees F / -1C. There was a light dusting of frost on my car as well. Horrible Spring weather. I took this photo about an hour or so before finally posting this article. The article describes cold temperatures, but not 29 degrees!

As for the season normally called Spring, it still sometimes feels like Winter. The weather here basically sucks. The rain has stopped, but it's COLD.

Last night it was a few degrees about freezing (37F, which is around 3 degrees C). Two nights before that it was 0 degrees C (32F -- FREEZING). And this is the last few days before April. In a normal March, the nights will be around 45F or so (7-8C?) and around 55-60F during the day (12-14C?).

The trees are still bare. You can't see any leaf buds. In normal years the trees are bright green by April 5th -- which means their leaves are out, but still just barely.

Not this year, probably, if our present weather is any indication.

A hillside which appears in one or two other photos I've placed in blog posts over the past few years (the August, 2017 Solar Eclipse article being one of them). The tall, conical shaped green trees on the hill are Douglas Firs and Spruces. The brown? That's bare tree branches of Cottonwoods and Oregon Big Leaf Maples. On normal years, those trees are always a light green by April 5th. It's been that way as long as I can remember. Back in 2003 and 2004 I started marking it down on the calendar, and April 5th was always the day the trees were leaved and green. Not this year -- and 2018, 2019, and 2020 weren't any better.

My radio hobby is about the same as last time. I tune around the MW/AM band about once an evening, generally hearing the same 300 or so stations. Some nights and mornings are more blah, DX-wise, than others. A few early mornings 1600 AM will be cluttered with stations, but nothing will stick out (I listen to KVRI 1600 a lot because of the Sikh and Punjabi music they play). I heard a heterodyne on 1590 the other morning (possibly the 1593 khz station in China that is 400 KW?) but there was no audio.

In the location where I live, surrounded by hills, heterodynes (signals from across the Pacific) rarely turn into audio. The last time I heard a heterodyne turn into audio was three or four years ago, when the powerhouse station in Korea on 1566 Khz was just audible, in the Korean language. That was pretty cool to hear on my Sangean PR-D5!

TO THOSE OF YOU OVERSEAS

I have been reading about the situation in Europe, and really feel for the people over there. I've mentioned before, I have a few online friends in Germany, Austria and Norway, and although they're doing O.K. personally, they're stressed out because of the vaccine situation and the lockdowns.

My prayers go out to all of you overseas.

I hope to post a new radio-hobby article before mid-April. It just needs some good photos.

Until then,

Stay safe, everyone, and thank you for reading my blog. I check my stats periodically, and almost half of my readers are from outside the United States. I appreciate each and every one of you.

C.C. March 31st, 2021, with photos added on April 6th.

Don't Beware The Ides Of March

A flashback to April 2020. In just a couple weeks it will be a year that has passed since the Pandemic Lockdowns started here, yet right now the fear, and the panic, which gripped us so quickly at that time, now seems a world away. I know in many parts of the world right now there are still lockdowns, and worries about vaccines, but there is light at the end of the tunnel -- something that was a very rare commodity just a year ago.

The pic, taken April 8th, 2020, is of a sign that someone had put up across the highway from the entrance to an area neighborhood. 'Stay Home, Stay Safe' was the Washington governor's motto when he announced the first Corona Lockdown.

'THE IDES OF MARCH' -- WHATEVER AN 'IDE' IS

As I write this, it's the 16th of March -- the 'Ides of March', they call it. Now, I don't know what an "Ide" actually is, but it sounds ominous, although right now March isn't feeling as ominous as it did last year, when Corona was slamming us in the gut.

March 2021 is halfway done, April is a couple weeks away, and Spring here in the Seattle area has started to look like Spring actually should, although it's still cold at night -- the past three weeks nearly every night has been freezing (usually 28-34 degrees F, and -2 to +2 degrees C). Earlier today it was sunny out, and the temperature went up to around 5-6C (about 48-50F), and it felt like March should feel: sunny and positive.

In my state our governor has recently lifted some of the corona restrictions, and businesses are starting to open up, although everyone still wears masks and practices social distancing. The vaccines are being given to a lot of people but most people I know still haven't gotten the shot. I don't know when I will get mine. Hopefully before mid-Summer.

Being that I haven't been out during the day much with my camera, I will intersperse in this blog post several pictures I took last Spring, when, coincidentally, the Pandemic Lockdown started. The sun was shining, the trees weren't yet green (the past several years they have been late in leafing out -- usually it would be April 5th that they were all a bright shade of green, but the past couple years the trees have been two weeks late).

Another view of the 'Stay Home, Stay Safe' banners some people placed near the entrance to a nearby neighborhood. A second banner saying 'We Got This' can also be seen. At the time, I was doing something Illegal -- I was riding my bike on a closed section of Trail, and I was not an 'essential' person there. Being that this section of the Trail only sees a handful of bikers and joggers during any afternoon, I figured that particular law could be safely broken. 

A sign warning bikers, walkers, rollerbladers and joggers that the Cedar River Trail was closed to all but "essential" users, i.e. County personnel. I took this pic, and then as I rode my bicycle past the offending sign I gave it the finger and went on my merry way. Generally, the Trail is about as empty as seen in the pic. During summer you might see three or four people on this stretch of asphalt -- enough room for people to socially distance in normal times, much less during a pandemic. About two weeks later, the County thankfully removed the sign. Imagine that: trusting the public to engage in safety without the Government slamming the hammer down. 

In fairness to the County, during the start of the corona pandemic, there was a lot of fear all around, and their #1 job is public safety.

The Cedar River, April 8th, 2020.

SLIDE GUITAR -- THE JOURNEY CONTINUES

Work for me has picked up; fiction writing has been in the doldrums (I haven't felt inspired to write lately, and forcing myself to write just isn't working); I have been listening a lot to blues and blues-rock and learning guitar riffs from players like Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and Warren DeMartini and Mick Taylor and adapting them to slide guitar. I now have three guitars set up for slide -- four, if my Texarkana Black Beauty is included -- as I finally got my Ibby Gio set up to where the string tension is high enough for slide playing, but the intonation is good also.

My 2000 Ibby Gio GRX-40, now pretty much permanently set up for slide guitar in Open G, after a year in Drop C, and -- before that -- D Standard. It's taken a couple months to increment the adjustment of the bridge saddles and humbucker pickup to get the best balance of slide playability and sound. Now the humbucker sings out well with a slide -- fretting a chord is good, but fretting individual notes just sound a little 'flat', tone-wise, as they seem to on a Powersound unless you have a good dirt box, or you're playing cleanly through a chorus box, or an amp that sounds great clean. But just add a slide, and play, and the Powersound pickup really opens up.

Now it's just a matter of nailing down the slide guitar technique better. I've got it down well enough to play with other people, but not enough to where I'm truly satisfied with what I'm doing. But it will come in time.

In the non-music, non-work, non-Corona, and non-writing world, life is more or less normal. As someone who lives alone, the Corona shutdowns didn't really affect my life all that much. I never was a party animal, nor do I have a large family to deal with. It's just me and my mom, and my mom lives somewhere else right now, so it's just me and my cats.

I get my exercise with iron weights and bicycling, and most times I hit the local Trail at night when it's quiet and there's no one around. So, for me, life is sort of the way it always has been.

Seeing stores shut down, and some stores go under -- that has had an effect on me. As my recent article on the demise of Fry's Electronics shows, I really find it sad that brick and mortar retail is taking a big hit.

Some books and maps I purchased last year, before the Pandemic hit. The map of Germany was brand new, a purchase from the brick and mortar Barnes & Noble bookstore. The German dictionary was a find at nearby Half Price Books (also bought just before the shutdowns) and the tourist book of Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands was a Barnes & Noble purchase. Since then, I've learned a bit more about the Faroe Islands, an interesting country in the middle of the North Atlantic.
 

SEEKING THE FAROE ISLANDS -- A PARADISE IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC

Last week I stopped by two bookstores to see what they had on the Faroe Islands. Why the Faroe Islands? Because they're this interesting little country made up of a small chain of islands in the North Atlantic that have similar weather to Seattle, and less trees, and a culture that goes back to the Viking settlement in the 800s and 900s AD. And their language is really cool -- it's like halfway between Northern Norwegian (Nord Norsk, a dialect of Norwegian spoken in the far north, and the Lofoten Island chain) and Icelandic, and the people in the Faroes have managed to keep their unique language alive for over a thousand years. As I've always been a fan of languages (I have some reading capability of Norsk, Svenska, Dansk, Spanish, German, and a little bit of Afrikaans and Dutch), I found the Faroese words intriguing. 

From my research, it seems that the Faroese are an independent minded people, and seem to live a decent life -- being officially a part of Denmark, they share that country's standard of living. A lot of Faroese live in Denmark, although many of them go back to the Faroes after a while. 

Did I mention that Faroese women seem to be awesomely beautiful? OK -- I just did.

April 6th, 2020: a mostly empty highway during rush hour. The lack of traffic noise was in one way refreshing, but also a little scary, in the sense that life seemed to be like a bad disaster movie, playing out right before our eyes. The only cars on the road were people going to get groceries, or maybe gas, or some other necessities. That was it. On a normal afternoon, pre-Pandemic, both lanes of the highway in this picture would be full of cars.

A view of the Cedar River from the Cedar River Trail east of Renton, Washington, on April 8th, 2020. At the time I took this pic, I was Breaking The Law (cue in some Judas Priest music). As you can see, the trees were still bare of leaves -- they hadn't even budded. Most normal years, by April 5th, the trees are a bright green with fresh, new leaves. Not 2020 -- or most years since 2017, for that matter.

I always knew the Faroe Islands existed: I have always been interested in geography, and have a lot of maps and atlases in my bookcase, and I know where every country is on the map or globe. And after taking Norwegian in college I became aware of most of the Scandinavian countries and cultures. They didn't really teach much about the Faroese, though, so -- to me -- the Faroes were this semi-known place in the Atlantic until 2017.

It was in 2017 that I found a Faroese blog by accident. I think it was through the Google Plus thing, where you could find other people's blogs by just hitting an arrow or something like that -- I don't quite remember -- but you could scroll through the blogs, and I happened to land on this particular blog. And the blog had some pics of the Faroes' countryside which the blogger (a woman) had taken, where it looked windswept, spacious, and majestic. I was intrigued. Then I did a little research and found out they have a system of tunnels -- similar to Norway's -- that go under the fjords and connect most of the islands.

Anyway, I went into two bookstores south of Seattle last week to see if there were any books on the Faroes, or the Faroe language, and I found none. But I did find a New Testament in German (I read a little German), a book on Danish (it's similar to Norwegian), and a few other books at the used bookstore (Half Price Books), and I got a map of Austria at Barnes and Noble (I know someone who lives in Austria).

My purchases from two different bookstores: Half Price Books and Barnes & Noble, both in the Southcenter area of South King County, Washington (the region south of Seattle, where I live). A map of Vienna (I know someone who lives there), a small book on Norwegian customs (I know someone who lives there, also), a hardback book on the Danish language (I know Norwegian and some Swedish, so I'm learning some Danish to top it off), a map of Austria, another cool map of SW Iceland (good topography), and a German New Testament with Psalms (I know some German and am trying to learn more of the language. I've found that if you have a Bible, getting Bibles in other languages can help you learn them.).

I was doing my bit to keep brick and mortar retail alive -- and also needed to get into a store and pretend life everywhere is back to normal -- which it isn't yet, but it felt good to shop in a store where there were real people, and real clerks taking your real money, and walking out with purchases in real shopping bags.

So, although I didn't find what I was looking for, I did find a few books, and a map -- and it didn't really cost me much, and maybe it helped one of the clerks buy a latte or two. But when I drove home that night I felt much better than I did driving home from the closed Fry's store (which I featured in a blog post in February).

My Realistic DX-398, which I've been firing up (along with my Panasonic RF-B45) and doing some evening MW DXing many nights recently. 

...AND IN ALL THINGS RADIO: the hearing of LAS VEGAS, and NATIVE AMERICAN MUSIC on KTNN!

In the radio world, for most of this year I haven't been DXing the MW band much, and the last time I tuned through the Shortwave spectrum I heard maybe nine signals -- nothing new, but nine signals is better than the two signals and static which was all I heard the month before. However, the past week or two I've been switching on my DX-398 and RF-B45 and tuning around, hearing whatever's out there in Medium Wave Land. Both radios are excellent performers, where you don't need an external loop to hear what's out there, although a loop sometimes helps if a station is 'in the mud'.

I've been involved in the Facebook "I Love AM Radio" group, and there the conversation sometimes gets lively. A lot of the guys post their latest DX reports, and being that some of them are in DX-friendly territories (i.e., high elevation, decent ground conductivity, and no nearby mountain ranges to speak of), some of them are hearing some new stations. The best catch I've had lately is a station I've heard before, KTNN 660, a station out of Window Rock, Arizona that plays a lot of Native American music.

They usually only appear here on 660 during 'auroral' DX conditions, when the aurora borealis blocks out a large swath of the northern ionosphere and mostly southern US signals come in. Usually 660 here is dominated by CFFR Calgary, an all news station out of Alberta Canada. This night CFFR was MIA, and all I could hear was KTNN's Native American music, and a little bit from an Hispanic Christian music station out of Oregon on the same channel, KXOR, Junction City, Oregon.

It was cool to hear KTNN. The first time I heard them was in the 1990's, after I got my Superadio III. I didn't even know KTNN existed before then. Now they only appear four or five nights a year.

The same night I heard KTNN I also heard two stations out of Las Vegas: KXNT 840 and KMZQ 670. Both have news-talk formats. KXNT usually only comes in once or twice a week, as there are closer stations that dominate the channel at night. KMZQ is usually heard a little more often, underneath KBOI Boise Idaho, which most nights is local strength here in Seattle.

But if you 'null' out KBOI's signal (for the uninitiated, a 'null' is the weak spot you find in a MW station's signal when you rotate your radio, and sometimes nulls can be very tight, as KBOI's is in my location), you still hear KBOI, but KMZQ's programming can be heard. 

During Spring 2020 I took out my Sangean PR-D14 and had it playing on my front porch while I did some hedge-trimming in the driveway. Sadly enough, the PR-D14 turned out to be my last ever purchase from the now defunct Fry's Electronics store.

I always love to hear Las Vegas. I've never been there, but the sunshine and fun-time atmosphere of Southern Nevada sure is appealing when it's 40 degrees or colder out up here in Green Oblivion, and raining.

Well, I've said as much I can say in a blog post for right now. I have two new posts in the making -- one just needs pics, the other one needs another pic or two and a sound file.

I noticed that my blog has had a couple visits here from new countries -- Honduras (a first from there), Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and some visits from Hungary and even Norway (a rarity). It's always nice to see people from other parts of the world visiting the blog and reading about radios and guitars.

And to close this blog post, here is a positive picture -- a harbinger of Spring: the Redwing Blackbird. Redwing Blackbirds always appear in Spring, and their cheery "kong-ka-REEE" calls can be heard when the sun is getting warmer and the trees are starting to leaf. I took this pic last Spring, in April, when the Lockdowns were full bore. The sun was shining, but everywhere the atmosphere seemed to be a dull panic. Yet this Redwing Blackbird was singing his cheery song (you can see his beak is open in the pic -- I got lucky and snapped the photo when he was chirping) was oblivious to coronavirus, lockdowns, panic, empty shelves in stores, and all the other trappings of the Pandemic. Here's hoping this April is a cheerier one, overall, than April 2020 was.

I hope all of you remain well and safe. Vaccines are on the horizon for most of us (myself included). We can get this Pandemic behind us, and live life again. I am not the most happy-dappy guy in the world normally, but I can tell you this: there is always hope. Never give up hope.

Until next time, my friends, Hasta Luego, Auf Wiedersehen, Farvael, and Ha det.

C.C. March 16th and March 21st, 2021.

February Snow, and the Return of Socks the Cat!

Socks the Cat, looking a little bigger than he did last Summer.

The weather here lately has been the standard 40F/4C and clouds / rain. "Forty degrees and rain" -- our usual Seattle winter weather. It's dull weather, and the combination of rain and cold is the thing I hate the most about weather here.

A couple weeks ago, however, we got a surprise -- two days of SNOW!

My back yard turned into a Winter wonderland.

Looking down a side street -- elsewhere in my blog, I have sunrise pictures taken from this angle. This time, it was snow. Winter had finally arrived. Then, two days later -- it was gone.

This past winter hasn't been all that much like a winter -- I could almost count the number of frozen mornings using the fingers on both of my hands. When I was young, frozen mud puddles and frosty mornings were more common. This winter we've had maybe 15 of them -- if that. Night time temperatures have been cold, though -- most nights being as cold as 32-35 degrees F (0-3C). A couple nights were in the 20's. But most nights since late January it's been 40 degrees and rain.

The snow was unusual, and it also was refreshing. It was a light snow, and we got maybe 3-4 inches of it in places (it was thicker in the wind-blown drifts). It lasted two days before the rains returned and the snow all melted.

I took a few photos of it with both of my cameras (my Fuji AX655 and my Nikon L32).

A bigger pic of Sock the Cat, by my hedge. I talked to him, and he just looked at me.

After I called out to Socks, and shook a bowl full of cat food to attract his attention, he walked off on his way.

I also took a photo of Socks the Cat! Socks the Cat is a neighborhood cat who wanders all over the neighborhood. I don't know what his real name is, but I call him Socks, because he's a black cat with white chest, and white paws that look like white socks.

Last Summer I saw him on my front porch, and I've also seen him two blocks away in both directions. I have no idea who owns him. I saw him last summer a couple times, including once when he was eating my cat's food on my front porch. 

Then I didn't see him for a few months. I was worried about him -- we do have coyotes in the area, and sometimes they raid our neighborhood and kill cats.

Socks right before he left my porch. Cat food just wasn't enough to get him to come closer.

The morning of the snow a week and a half ago, I was sleeping in. I awoke to the sound of a cat crying out front, and it didn't sound like any of my own cats. In fact, I thought I heard a cat crying right outside my front door. I looked out my bedroom window, and there he was: Socks the Cat, wanting to come in!

I grabbed my camera and went down to my front door and opened it, and Socks ran off to the hedge that borders my driveway. He stopped, and looked at me. I called out to him, and still -- he just looked at me.

I got a couple photos of him, and put some fresh cat food out for him -- shaking the dish to get his attention -- but he never came up to eat any of it. Then he left.

I have no idea where he went. He probably went home -- wherever that is.

Socks the Cat this past Summer, July 2020. As you can see, he was a bit smaller. I think he was a grown kitten or young adult cat in this pic. When I talk to him, he looks at me, but then takes off. He's a very independent-minded cat.

The snow was a welcome change here from the usual grey skies, 40F temperatures, and rain. I didn't ride my bike out in the snow as I have done in past snowstorms, as I didn't feel like getting cold and wet. Last time I rode my bike in the snow, a couple years ago, my bike's wheels became solid with snow, and it took a while to clear it all off. I went for a walk, though, and took a few pictures, some of which I am posting here.

My outdoor Christmas ornaments, which I still have yet to take down and pack away.

The two to three inches of snow on the bushes and trees made the world a wonderful looking place.

It was 25-26 degrees F (minus 5C) the day of the snow. But because it wasn't raining, it didn't feel all that cold.

The Cedar River with snow -- a pleasant Winterscape.

The bulkhead of the old Highway Bridge, built in 1950 and now used for the local Trail.

A few other people were out on the Trail, enjoying the snow day off work.

As I write this, my Sangean PR-D5 radio is playing WBAP, Fort Worth, Texas -- a well known 50KW station on 820 khz, which is usually blocked by a local station on the same frequency (KGNW, a religious station), which is off the air for maintenance tonight. It's interesting to hear a station from Texas, something that's not exactly common here in the Seattle area. MW DX otherwise has been mediocre here at this location, with nothing spectacular even when I use a loop antenna as a booster for any of my radios.

Here's hoping that all of my readers, both here in the US and other places, are safe and healthy. About one third of my readers are from other parts of the world -- recent check-ins are people from Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Finland, Slovakia, Austria, Czech Republic, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Portugal, Spain, Egypt, the Emirates, and Bangladesh. I have some readers from Germany, Canada, the UK, Russia, France, Turkey, Indonesia, and Australia as well. It's always great to have readers overseas.

Peace to all,

C.C. 2-28-2021

RIP Fry's Electronics -- The Sad Demise of an Electronics & Radio Retailer

Numerous times in my blog posts I've talked about Fry's Electronics -- after all, several of the radios I write about here in my blog were purchased at Fry's. 

I bought my Sangean PR-D5 there in 2014 -- and I've written maybe three blog posts about that radio alone. I bought my Sony ICF-38 there (featured in maybe three or four blog posts), and I bought my Grundig G2 there (I'm still working on a blog post about that radio).

The few cars that pulled into the Fry's lot earlier tonight were people who weren't aware that the store had already been shuttered permanently.

I also bought my Sangean PR-D18 and PR-D14 there. I got my Eton AN200 loop there when my Radio Shack AM loop went south on me in early 2020. I bought my Sangean HDR-16 AM-FM-HD radio there in March of 2020. I bought music CD's and some movie DVD's there; I bought blank CDRs, printer ink-jet cartridges; a printer and scanner for my old computer; USB memory sticks; cell phone chargers, and numerous other electronic devices and accessories there over the years, including various radio parts.

Going to Fry's was always an adventure of sorts -- there were always plenty of shoppers there, and it was a lively place.

But as of yesterday, Fry's Electronics is no more. The chain is shutting up shop. All remaining stores are closed permanently.

It's a sad day for the radio hobby, and it's a sad day for people who enjoyed shopping there. And, not the least -- it is a sad day for those who worked at Fry's.

Fry's had its only store in Washington state located in the city where I live. I think it opened up in 2001 or 2002. Previously, the property had been a vacant parking lot for Boeing workers, and when Boeing tore down half of their factory buildings in North Renton in the 1990's, the lot was empty -- only used once a summer for the traveling Cirque Du Soleil. Then, after 2001 or so, Fry's arrived.

I was working at a radio broadcast service company at the time, and in the afternoon the computer guys always were looking over the Fry's full-color flyers that came with every Friday newspaper. 

Fry's always had bargains every week, as they not only were a high-volume retailer, they were very competitive. The computer and IT guys always were talking about the great prices that Fry's had -- and if you were into computers and other electronics, Fry's had everything.

The tech guys would point at the latest hard drive or video camera, or marvel at the price of the latest desktop computer in the flyer. "Wow, look at that!" was something I heard more than once.

In 2005 or 2011, this parking lot would have been packed with cars. Earlier tonight, there was nothing but emptiness. I took this pic with my once frozen but now revived Fuji AX655 snapshot camera.

Fry's had motherboards, hard drives, laptop and tablet computers, peripherals and cables, TV's and TV accessories, video games, all sorts of cameras, CB's, stereo and audio equipment, and even washers and dryers. 

When you walked inside Fry's back in 2005 or 2012 there would be tons of shoppers. The parking lot was usually filled with cars. The store had a checkout counter that seemed to be a mile long, manned by 10-15 people. You had to wait in line for the next checkout stand to open. A light over a checkout stand would flash, and the guy or girl who tended the checkout line would point you to the next open cashier.

Fry's employed a lot of people. My rough guess is the Fry's in Renton probably employed a couple hundred at least.

The first night after Fry's closing: there wasn't even anyone at the store to pick up the morning newspaper.

I used to go to Fry's a lot. Like I mentioned earlier, I bought a few radios there, and when I got into the radio repair hobby in 2011 and 2012, I bought a lot of resistors, capacitors, and similar parts at Fry's.

The Great Recession seemed to have little effect on Fry's, as their prices were so good. And they had the bulk merchandise to back up those low prices -- they apparently had deals with Chinese manufacturers and the major electronics firms based in China, Taiwan, and similar Asian places. In one article I read about the store, they had their own dedicated containers shipped over from Asia.

You'd walk into the store and there would be bins chock full of small items like battery packs, USB drives and phone chargers, at dirt cheap prices -- it was a way to get you into the store, purchasing things.

The internet, along with the corona pandemic, brought another large retailer down.

For a few years -- from about 2015-2019, I hadn't gone into Fry's. I wasn't buying any more radios, and I had stopped trying to fix old radios, being that I hadn't had much luck fixing them, so I lost interest in that hobby. I also didn't have a lot of money to spend on electronics during those years.

When I finally re-discovered Fry's in July of 2019, and went inside the store, I was in for a bit of a shock. The store wasn't so bustling. There were less shoppers, and less people working there. Some of the shelves were a bit spare of product. I bought a radio -- my Sangean PR-D18, a handy little digital AM-FM I use in my car. 

Then I didn't return until March 2020. By then, Fry's looked like a ghost town. The radio shelves were spare, with just a few models available. The parts racks still had plenty of parts, but there were some areas of the parts department that weren't well stocked. The TV and video corner of the store -- instead of having lots of movies playing, and audio booming from the audio room, and lots of customers looking over the merchandise -- was amazingly silent, with a dearth of high-caliber video and audio equipment for sale. 

Fry's during better times -- July 2019. I took this pic and the next few pics with my cell phone camera.

In July 2019, the Shortwave radio section still had some product. I bought the AN200 loop antenna seen in the upper center of the picture.

The Sangean radio section still had a lot of product in July 2019, too.

There were only a few Sangeans remaining at Fry's in March 2020, when I bought my last radio there.

In March 2020 were also many bare shelves at Fry's. Very sad.

March 2020: a once bustling computer section, now mostly spare of product.

This time, in March 2020, computer corner of the store was almost devoid of laptops, tablets, and desktops. The computer parts desk wasn't busy as it used to be earlier in the decade.

And there weren't many people working at the store, either. Instead of 10-15 checkout people, there were only one or two. The rest of the checkout stands looked like they hadn't been manned in weeks. The floor help at the store were hard to find, because there weren't many people manning the floor. The espresso bar -- located in the middle of the store -- was closed.

The trade war with China, combined with the growth in online retail, had both taken their toll on Fry's. Now, with the corona shutdowns looming, it didn't look bright.

It was then that I purchased a couple radios (my HDR-16 and PR-D14) because the prices were good, and -- well -- just because. I had a feeling the store might not last through the corona pandemic. I wanted to buy my last radios there, and hope for the best for the store, being that it was a big radio retailer with people still working there, and it was a convenient place to get electronics. The last radio I got there was my PR-D14 (which I wrote about a couple months ago in this blog), which I bought a day or two before the corona shutdowns.

THE END COMES FOR A ONCE BURGEONING RETAILER

I read earlier today that Fry's were closing, and drove down to see if the store was still open. I arrived to an empty lot -- the only cars were the few would-be customers that drove up not knowing that the store had already been shuttered for good. There was a small sign posted on each door notifying people that the store was permanently closed, thanking them for their business over the past 36 years (Fry's opened up in California in 1984).

The local news says the building will be torn down and the lot will be filled with a few blocks of  apartments.

Is this a picture of the future of brick and mortar retail -- permanently shuttered doors and empty parking lots? Hopefully not.

As I drove away earlier tonight from Fry's, after taking a few photos of the shuttered building and the empty lot, I felt a severe twinge of depression. There is something wrong with a world where all shopping is done online, and there aren't any retail stores manned with people and stocked with goods for customers to buy. 

It's not just the corona pandemic that has done this to us: it's the trend for everything to be purchased via phone or computer screen, and it makes the entire experience -- although convenient -- very impersonal.

And then you have the lost jobs. It used to be a pleasant experience to interact with the checkout people at Fry's while buying the latest electronic gizmo, CD, or even a few packs of batteries. Being able to engage in some light conversation while buying stuff adds something to everyday life. It makes us more human. Now our lives are more and more impersonal. It's no wonder that increasing numbers of people don't know how to engage with each other on a civil basis anymore. 

Shopping used to be a pastime. When I was a kid, we'd sometimes go to the nearest mall, to shop for things, or just people watch. It was a social activity, and it was a good time. Most men don't love shopping, it's true. But there is something to be said for the social interaction one gets going into an actual store and talking to a real person -- like a clerk -- with your purchase in your hands when you buy it. Those days are leaving us.

Of course, none of this is going to change. More and more stores like Fry's will probably be shuttered due to the pandemic, and even afterwards. I think we're in for a few rough economic years ahead, and brick-and-mortar may suffer for it. But that's all for another blog post, perhaps.

To any of you who may have worked at a Fry's, I hope for the best for you all. I've been unemployed before. It's not fun, nor is it easy. God speed to you.

I took this pic of my last purchases at Fry's, my PR-D14 radio and some USB drives. It was March 25th, 2020, right before the corona shutdowns started.

For right now, I'm going to switch on my PR-D5 radio I bought at Fry's in 2014, DXed with, listened to every night while fiction writing, almost wrecked and then fixed, wrote a few blog posts about, and had fun listening to during the 2017 Solar Eclipse.

I got it at Fry's, and even though Fry's is no more, a little bit of the store is still in my life.

Hope this article finds all my readers safe and healthy, especially in this pandemic.

Peace.

C.C. February 25th, 2021.