Electronics hobby – the wonder of it all

I started down this path a very long time ago and on the way – 

• Watching lights blink and buzzers buzz with a battery and a couple of wires was endlessly fascinating ...
  
• The wonder of the first crystal radio.
• The new Popular Electronics showing up each month ...
• Off to college studying for an EE

• Building a square root generator with discreet components (transistors for the uninitiated) 
• Learning how to properly bias a pentode, 
• Never having to study much for the first 3 quarters – most of it (except the math) I had sitting in a junk box at home – well that isn't exactly true – I didn't have any 100 horsepower motors in the basement...
• A newly minted engineer– differential and integral calculus – transient waveform analysis dancing in my head. The telephone company bringing me down to earth rather rudely – just miles and miles of wire strung on poles. With the odd repeater or load box .... terminally boring.
• Photography At home – building a home densitometer - trying to keep logarithmic circuits stable and calibrated in a cold and damp basement – the fun was endless..
• The first DIY digital clock
• Making the densitometer digital....
• The smell of exploding 150,000mfd capacitors, hot acid, overheated insulation, ozone from 150,000 30,000 volts...
• Headaches from watching the strobe light too much...
• Numbers from the past .159 ,12BA6, 2n3055, 741, 723, 555 (now there was a part)...
• Marriage/children keeping me upstairs too much – the solder oxidizing and the iron rusting over time, that is until they personal computer was published as a kit. building two and a half of them – ahhhhh 8k of memory and toggle switches on a front panel... 
• Mourning the passing of Southwest Technical Products...
• The Radio Shack Model 1 and the Apple 2e – Opening the box full of Model 1... 
• Lots of pixels bouncing around on the screen and endless hours with the adventure series (on tape mind you)...
• Modems and Running a BBS - 
  

Fast forward to recent times...

Owning 7 or 8 functional computers – and scads of whale bones... Multiple monitors and flat screens, A home network that fills a full Visio page. All the software known to mankind loaded on terabytes of storage... Coding and Solving immense enterprise software issues daily...

What am I doing for wonder? I'm down  in the basement – melting solder, playing with 'Duinos, making LEDs blink and motors whir, and having the time of my life...