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He was using a secondhand Coronado PST on the rear end to provide the H-alpha. He himself suggested the binoviewers for increased enjoyment. I had absolutely no idea I would be climbing the steep learning curve into H-alpha and binoviewer use before I was deeply involved. It has been a far more expensive exercise than I would normally have allowed myself initially.
Then I keep reading about "household names" dropping like flies as I pass the 70-year 'tipping point' of my own life. Their [comparatively] great wealth didn't seem to provide any protection against their chosen lifestyle. Why leave my unpaid pension to the taxman to spend on coal fired battleships? When I can spend it on another crazy, but creative project? One which keeps me fit, active and healthy enough to go on to build yet more things.
I must balance the expense of my hobbies against running a 20-year-old car and grocery shopping by bicycle, on a pension. Or rather a lightweight tricycle, in my case. For all its extra carrying capacity and grin-inducing instability on every single corner. So I stay fit and active on all fronts and constantly write it all down to "make it real." A sort of running autobiography for when I can no longer manage all the things I do now. Or to remind myself why I did it that way in the first place.
I don't smoke. Nor drink more than an occasional beer. Our housing costs are minimal as we reach the tail end of our mortgage. For what is basically a detached, rural hovel. I did a lot of work on it for the first few years but gradually lost interest from fighting endless Catch 22s on far too small a budget. The utter shame, at its dilapidated appearance, is an excellent excuse for never [ever] inviting anybody home.
The plan was always to move to somewhere much nicer and very much bigger and preferably sooner, rather than later. Somewhere like an old, dilapidated, ramshackle farmhouse, which nobody else wanted so it was cheap as chips. One without any near neighbours to constantly smoke us out. Nor to saw firewood 24 x 365 with screaming circular saws just outside our windows on a borrowed back garden.
Preferably somewhere with aircraft hanger sized barns. A place for all my lifetime collection of tools and junk to be visible and easily accessible. Instead of hidden in boxes stacked up high on shelves I can't reach, in a dark shed I had built myself. Limited, as it was then, by two large trees growing in exactly the wrong place to allow greater width so near the corner boundary where the ground fell way steeply.
I have always had an awful memory. Perhaps 'awfully selective' is a better term. So I needed to search my hoard constantly to remind myself where it was and what it was. Always as a valuable resource for building the next project. Then I could remember the original source and location of every little piece of dismantled machinery and all my other bits and pieces. I used to buy old tools and interesting "technical" junk from flea markets until we gave it up for lack of storage space or anywhere to display its attributes in a suitably good light.
In an ideal world there would be a Danish eBay to help to gradually reduce my hoard. But there isn't. Postal charges would exceed any gains from selling off my junk. Which would put off potential, international buyers of what is basically worthless in everyday "layman's" terms. My narrow interests inevitably result in narrow interest "stuff" to unload onto a largely uninterested world. Curiosities of a long forgotten industrial age need a large audience [like the US or UK] to make a worthwhile customer base.
Having literally hundreds of interests and hobbies, over a long lifetime, means that little was ever thrown away. I have been incredibly fortunate to have survived this long without losing the plot or foundering in boredom and depression. Not to mention avoiding serious injury or ill health.
I was told, in my youth, that such an eccentric and eclectic lifestyle, as mine, was only really available to the already wealthy. I proved them wrong by making everything that really interested me. Instead of simply going out and buying it. Or, perhaps, stealing it.
Mind you, they once described me as far too under-muscled for manual work when I was just ridiculously cycling fit for my youth. My fitness is still maintained by constant exercise of mind and body. My daily, morning walks in unspoilt countryside, are valuable for endless reasons. Equally as useful for recharging and remaining fit as was cycling, but to a lesser extent.
There is the lack of practical shopping built into this enjoyable pastime. Which must, as always, be further reinforced with parallel interests like bird watching, photography, landscape admiration and binocular practice. The combination of physical and mental exercise has always appealed. Plus, I get to talk about it, largely to myself, on my blogs.
I am a confirmed loner, apart from my long suffering wife, of 50 years of marriage. We have little need of others and balance each other's completely opposite traits to [almost] seamless perfection. I owe her my lack of narcissism. All thanks to her constant reminders of my abject failures. This is not remotely meant as a criticism but fulsome praise indeed!
The Internet gave me contact with other people, of similar interests, for the very first time. Others far more clever and experienced at some particular things. Though sometimes at the expense of exposure to idiots and trolls I would never, normally tolerate. The Internet was our anchor to reality while we were living in almost complete rural isolation in a foreign land with foreign TV. Our 'foreign' neighbours already detested all 'incomers.' That was long before mass immigration changed everything.
The Internet provided affordable, easily accessible storage of the illustrated record of my most recent or longest lasting pastimes and milestones. It allowed me to share my usually narrow interests, often for the first time. It provided a diary format, recording my partaking of the utterly pointless [to most other people] entirely for my own enjoyment. I detest most sports, with a vengeance, so am a pretty poor conversationalist. Yet I am foolishly competitive at those things which I can manage.
I hardly ever look at the thousands of books I once held so dear. They were my text books and references for some formulae, or fact, which I had forgotten for the 7th time this week. Or even just the 7th time today. Now I just Google it and sort the trash from the precious grains of gold buried under a vast mountain range of largely and utterly ephemeral, completely meaningless dross.
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