We’ve had a fairly quiet week here at Skagit Valley RV Park. The park is full and it seems like there are a number of long-term residents of the place. I’m curious about the fifth-wheel trailer next to our site. I haven’t seen anyone there and the trailer is covered with cob webs. There’s a Dodge Ram pickup truck parked in the site, but I haven’t seen it move. There are current Washington license plates on the rigs but the lack of activity seems strange.

We got together with my oldest daughter, Alana and her husband, Kevin at Farmstrong Brewing on Wednesday and our granddaughter Lainey joined us. The brewery is only a quarter of the mile from the RV park, so Donna and I walked there.

On Thursday, we met them at the Skagit Golf and Country Club where they’re members. Alana texted us and advised when she thought they would be coming off the 18th hole. We arrived a little after 3pm and saw them on the 18th green. We watched them putt, then went to the clubhouse for a drink and early dinner. Kevin’s son Nick was also there. I don’t know why I didn’t take any photos!

It’s always nice to get together with my daughters and we’ll get to see Alana’s family again tomorrow for Sunday dinner. Other than that, it’s been mostly our usual activities. Donna went out for a couple of bike rides and she practices clarinet every other day or so. I do the same with my guitar.

Speaking of the guitar, I use pedals to alter the sound of my electric guitar. I especially need them with the small practice amp to get an over-driven tube sound and I almost always run some reverb and delay. For the past ten years or so, I’ve used an Hermida Audio reverb pedal which is pretty subtle. It adds a little ambience, like your amp is set up in an empty room with wood floors. I thought I might like something that had a little more flair than that.

I did some research and thought the Omni pedal designed by Robert Keeley would be the one. I found a good deal on one with free shipping and bought it. It’s smaller than the Hermida Audio pedal and fits nicely on my board, but it packs a lot more sound than the Hermida! It has three base settings – room – spring – plate. Each one of these settings can be adjusted for the intensity of the effect. In the room setting, it can be subtle. The spring setting gives a little more oomph for the surf guitar sound and the plate setting can get really wild. I’m liking this pedal.

I have my pedal board set up with the guitar plugged into a TC Electronic tuner on the right. This pedal will cut the signal from the guitar and display the note being played and whether it’s flat or sharp, allowing me to quickly tune the guitar without any sound coming from the amp. Next in line is a MXR Modified OverDrive pedal. This boosts the guitar signal and can drive the amp into distortion – great for rock songs. The next pedal is the Keeley Omni reverb unit and last is a MXR Carbon Copy delay. I use a very conservative setting on the delay as it can easily get out of control and oscillate. Set carefully, it can create sounds like U2’s guitarist, the Edge. That’s my simple pedal board set-up.

I also have my Buddipole Versatee vertical high frequency ham radio antenna set up. I had a hard time getting it to tune – the closest I could come to resonance was a standing wave ratio (SWR) of about 1.5:1. A lot of guys would be happy with that, but I’m used to this antenna tuning to a SWR of 1.1:1 or less. The higher the SWR, the more loss of signal going out. Higher SWR can also force the output stage to reduce power to prevent damage. It’s a vicious cycle. To compound the issue, the 20-meter HF band conditions have been poor. Yesterday I futzed around with the antenna again, resetting the coil and counterpoise and got the SWR below 1.25:1. Better, but not perfect.

It rained off and on overnight and we had a couple of showers this morning. We didn’t let that stop us from going to the farmers’ market at the Skagit River Walk park. I told Donna if you stayed inside every time it rained in western Washington, you wouldn’t be out much! Of course, July and August are typically the driest months of the year, but they still average 1.2 and 1.3 inches of rain respectively. At least we don’t have any smoke now.

We’ll probably have a few more showers through tomorrow morning. Today’s high is only 68 degrees. Tomorrow should be a little warmer and dry by late morning – early afternoon. As I mentioned, we plan to go to Kevin and Alana’s for a cookout.

The forecast for the week ahead has the warmer weather returning with temperatures in the 80s and maybe even 90 degrees by the end of the week. We’ll be here until the 16th and we don’t have a clue where we’re heading next. We’ll have to look at weather, fire and road condition reports and decide in about a week.

By the way, after her walk today, Donna stopped in the RV park office to find out if we should be worried about our neighbor. Apparently, he doesn’t get around too well and that’s why we haven’t seen him. But the gal in the office appreciated our concern.

*Just so you know, if you use this link to shop on Amazon and decide to purchase anything, you pay the same price as usual and I’ll earn a few pennies for the referral. It’ll go into the beer fund. Thanks!