On Sunday while I was at the
KARSFEST hamfest in Peotone, Illinois, my ticket number got called for a door prize!

I ended up winning a $50 gift certificate for the
American Radio Relay League (ARRL) online store! I have been going to hamfests (a convention and flea market for amateur radio operators) for 17-years now, and I think that this is the first time that I have ever actually won a raffle door prize at one! And I already spent my gift certificate too-- I bought three books with it, including:
Ah! Books on programming microcontrollers, building low-frequency transceivers, and listening to the natural radio signals produced by the Earth itself! What could be better reading than that!?
Unfortunately, many of the books offered by the ARRL are quite pricey, so $50 doesn't really go that far at their store as a result. My gift certificate ended up only covering the cost one of the books plus a little bit of the cost of a second one, so I ended up paying for the other half of my order out-of-pocket. But isn't that always the way when you get a gift certificate? They never seem to ever quite entirely cover the cost of what you want to get, so it always seems like you have to pay
something. I swear, it's like there is some kind of a gift certificate conspiracy! In any case a $50 discount is a $50 discount, so if I was ever going to get what I really wanted the time was now!
Oh, and if that didn't make my Sunday awesome enough, I also got to talk with Shim's dad for over a half-an-hour while I was there! He goes to hamfests too as one of the vendors, and this is now the second hamfest in a month that I have had the pleasure of running into him!

Now I just have to hope that I didn't accidentally say anything to Shim's dad that will ultimately end up embarrassing Shim! There is only so long that a mad scientist like myself can act well,
not mad in front of normal everyday non-mad people, and it is only a matter of time before I start ranting about my diabolical schemes! But then again, some of my more crazy projects such as planning to build a meteor-tracking RADAR station in my parents' backyard would actually seem quite normal (or maybe even humdrum) to other amateur radio operators, so it is really hard for me to go wrong at a place like a hamfest!
