"Hey, BlastFromThePast, Where 'ya Been??

 Very good question indeed....

I've sadly suspended rocket building (and flying) activities over the past two months to make time for other activities:

First and foremost is a project that was begun about eight years ago and has languished until now:

Framing and finishing the basement. 

The donning of the tool belt and firing up of the chop-saw has been inspired by the presence of the parts and pieces of a full-sized pool table that hasn't seen any action since the missus and I moved to Castle Rock, Colorado in 2006. All of the components are scattered and stored all around the basement space.

It's high time to finish up a portion of this basement space and call in the pool table setup pros to get this thing back in action.

I've got lots of trick shots I want to master....

Also vying for my time is the annual frenzy of getting my indoor and outdoor Christmas light displays in ship-shape operating condition and installed.

I'm not exactly in the same league as the Griswalds, and certainly don't do it up like those folks you see on the 'extreme lighting' shows, but I do manage to put up a substantial amount of lights.  

I estimate somewhere in the ballpark of 12,000 to 15,000 individual mini-lites.

At one point in November, the entire basement space was covered with light strings and lighted features, in various stages of functionality and repair.

Even though I am slowly, year-by-year, converting everything over to LED, I still use tons of incandescent mini-light strings, many of which date back to the mid 1980s !!

These strings, as you might expect, are extremely fiddly to keep in operation.  I happen to have vast amounts of replacement bulbs, so I spend a lot of time troubleshooting and repairing inoperable sections of these strings, as well as fashioning my own custom strings.

That nifty little Lightkeeper-Pro tool definitely gets well used this time of year.  A great investment for us Christmas lighting nerds!

Anyway, it won't be long until I get back full swing into rocket building.

Stay tuned to the blog, I may yet sneak in another rocket-related post or two by year's end.

Cheers!