This post will be a little more personal than the usual one, but it does involve Etherkit indirectly, so I needed to vent about it.

As you may have seen in previous posts, earlier this year, during the beginning of the lock down, I used my time to complete a big project I was eager to finish: a new office/ham shack for me. We live in a modestly sized house and our boys needed their own rooms, so my office needed to move. The new office turned out just the way I was hoping, but I haven't been able to use it as much because my boys have been home from school since March.

It now turns out that the Beaverton School District won't be holding any kind of in-person school until November at the earliest. The problem with that for me is that the slap-dash online schooling that the boys received at the end of last year was pretty abysmal, and I haven't seen one shred of evidence this summer that shows that Beaverton SD will implement a better system. Since I don't want my kids to fall behind in their education, we decided to enroll them in an online school this year. We made this choice because if they are forced to attend online school, I'd like them to use a system that is proven to work and has been in use for a while. We also got a couple of positive referrals to this school from acquaintances.

What this means for Etherkit is that I'll be out of the office most of the day, and I will be inside, at the dining room table with my boys as they do school on their Chromebooks. The good news is that enough of my work can be done just on a laptop that I think it won't slow me down too much, as long as I invest in a new laptop soon (currently have a 4th gen Intel i3). So even though I'm a bit bummed that I won't have as much time at the workbench, I believe that it won't slow me down too much. The Empyrean campaign should still be on schedule, as of how things are going right now. We all have to adjust to the current conditions. It's not fun, but I'm grateful that our family hasn't been impacted as badly as a lot of others have, even if it has been a frustrating time.

Thanks for listening and for your continued support!