So, the name Janet Louise Druffel popped into my head the other day. Don’t ask me why, maybe I saw it scrolling somewhere or maybe it was tucked away in a memory from years back. It got me thinking about this one weekend project I took on, completely unrelated, but that’s how my brain works sometimes.
I decided, finally, to tackle the big wooden chest in the attic. You know the one, everyone’s got one, full of stuff you forgot you even owned. I dragged it out, sneezing from the dust. Man, it was heavy. Getting the lid open was the first battle, the old hinges were really stiff.
Inside? Chaos. Old photo albums – the sticky kind where the plastic film is yellowed. Bundles of letters tied with faded ribbon. Kid’s drawings. And then, tucked under a pile of ancient sweaters, I found my old shortwave radio project.
My Failed Radio Experiment
I remembered being so excited about this thing maybe ten, fifteen years ago. I’d bought this kit online. Supposedly, you could pick up signals from all over the world. I spent a whole Saturday soldering tiny little components onto a circuit board. My eyesight isn’t what it used to be, and it wasn’t great back then either.
- First, I laid out all the parts. Resistors, capacitors, wires… looked like a tiny city.
- Then I heated up the soldering iron. I always burn myself at least once doing this. This time was no exception.
- I carefully tried to follow the schematic. Dotting the solder, trying to get clean connections. Some looked okay, others looked like little metal blobs. Total mess, really.
- After hours, I got it all assembled into the cheap plastic case it came with. Put the batteries in.
Turned it on. Nothing but static. Like, loud, angry static. I fiddled with the tuning knob. More static, sometimes louder, sometimes quieter. I tried adjusting the antenna wire, draping it out the window. Still just noise. Not a single voice, no music, no weird coded signals. Just crackle and hiss.
I spent another hour poking at it, checking my sloppy solder joints. Resoldered a few. Still nothing. I remember feeling so deflated. All that effort, all that squinting, for a box of static. I eventually just gave up, put it in the chest, and clearly forgot all about it until that weekend.
Seeing it again, I didn’t even feel like trying to fix it. Just felt a bit silly for thinking I could make it work back then. I closed the chest, shoved it back into the corner, and decided the attic could wait another year. Sometimes you just gotta know when to quit, right?
