2019 Update

My new CD, "Life's Good to Me," has now been available for one year! In addition, I released a new single in February named "Yard Art." Both are available on the Internet wherever good music is sold or streamed. I hope that you will check them out. All are original songs.

The album and single have been good to me - as of today, I am #1 locally and #30 regionally on the Reverbnation ranking. Listen to my music on Reverbnation and become a fan, and I hope to see my ranking climb even higher.

I have written several new songs this year, and hope to start on album #8 soon. I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, I have retired from teaching and am now doing music performing and recording full-time!

I retired on June 7, 2019 from my job as a college professor. I'm now working as a professional musician, which includes songwriting, arranging, recording, producing, distribution, promotion and consulting with other bands as well as singing and playing guitar and other instruments.

Please follow my career at http://facebook.com/tomsmerkmusic or check my web site at http://musician.tomsmerk.com.

Keep in touch! Email is tom@aa6ts.com.

I've been busy lately working on my new CD music album. As of September 2018, it is now available as a digital download at your favorite online music retailers including Amazon, CD-Baby, Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, iTunes, and Napster. If you don't like to shop online, you can order it from Barnes & Noble.

The CD is called "Life's Good to Me" and it consists of 13 original songs in a variety of styles including rock, blues, R&B, country, folk rock and surf instrumental.

I am still working hard on promoting the new album, so I will write more here once I get caught up. You can also follow me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/tsmerk and/or https://www.facebook.com/tomsmerkmusic.

Thanks for checking back!

2017 Update

Hi again! I'm still teaching full-time for the San Diego Community College District, going on 30 years now! I'm currently the Assistant Program Chair for Business Information Technology, and teach classes at the new Cesar Chavez Campus. I have also been writing for CQ Amateur Radio Magazine since January 2013 where I am the International Editor and write the monthly column "CQ World Wide." I am an Extra Class ham radio operator and my call sign is AA6TS. Learn more at htp://AA6TS.com.

I am still writing songs and rehearsing and performing with the "Grand River Band." I am also available to fill in with other bands as needed. See http://musician.tomsmerk.com for photos and to download free music.

I am working on five books. One is almost finished, and another two are over half complete. I'll tell you more later when I am close to publishing the books.

Take care, and God bless. May you and your family have a wonderful 2017.

Welcome to 2014 - A great year!

2014 has arrived, and I am optimistic that it will be a better year than 2013. Not that 2013 was such a bad year, it just wasn’t a great year! It was bad for a few of my friends who lost their job during 2013 and are still unemployed. I hope for their sake that 2014 is better.

The Holiday season came and went without much ado. I miss having the kids here for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Peg and I had a turkey dinner at The Golden Acorn Casino. I was good and didn’t overeat – we brought half of our meal home to enjoy on two more occasions! I’m getting to the point in life where I don’t like eating out. Everything is too salty and the portions are big enough for a growing boy. I don’t want to grow bigger – I want to grow smaller! Not to mention the fact that Peggy is a terrific cook!

No special meal for Christmas, but we included a glass of champagne. New Year’s Day brought my favorite traditional meal of pork, sauerkraut and kielbasa. I will never grow tired of that meal! In addition (but on a different day), Costco had a pierogi “road show” where we were able to buy a 3-pound bag of authentic Polish pierogies. It was a one-day-only event and we were there at the right time! Sure, you can get pierogies at the grocery store, but these taste like the ones I enjoyed growing up in Pennsylvania, where they were as common as a hamburger.

Over the 2½ week Christmas vacation from work, I not only enjoyed some extra sleep and relaxation, but I actually got quite a few things done around the ranch for a change. But there will always be things to do.

No New Year’s Eve gig with the band this year. My days as an entertainer are behind me now. But I am always available to help other entertainers and groups perfect their show and their arrangements. Unfortunately, not too many performers want to pay for this service. And then they wonder why nobody hires them back! A few dollars invested in my stage image development services would be a good investment for most of the bands I’ve seen. I haven’t seen that many good bands lately. Maybe they’re out there, and I’m just not getting around enough.

I just finished my 12^th column for CQ Amateur Radio Magazine – one year as a contributing editor! I always wanted to write professionally. I always thought I would have some books published, but this monthly magazine column is OK for now. Once I get better known in the field of ham radio, I’ll try publishing a book or two. I’m also working on a book tentatively titled “Guide for Weekend Teachers” which will hopefully turn out to be a great book for all teachers, not just the weekend warriors!

I’m always anxious to hear from any or all of you, so please feel welcome to share your thoughts. Best wishes for 2014!

I must try harder to make my blog more interesting. I have a vacation next week and this will give me time to think about it. What prompted this is that I realized that all of the replies to my blog posts were ads for viagra and similar messages! What a stupid waste of a good concept! I realize that this is all automated, but still, I wish I could just reach out and say "all you spammers - atay away from here!"

Honk if you agree!

Money can't buy happiness

I was talking on the ham radio this morning to an old timer who grew up in Chicago. He was telling me how his father worked as a furniture buyer for a chain of large department stores and then became a stockbroker when he lost his job during the depression. It made me think about my own childhood.
 

My father worked as a car painter for a Chevrolet-Buick dealership. He probably didn’t make as much money as a furniture buyer or a stockbroker, but as a child growing up, I never had to do without anything important. I had my baseball bat and glove and my little red wagon. One of my uncles gave me a bicycle. We weren’t “dirt poor,” but I’m not sure if we qualified for “middle class.”

 
I married a woman that was also raised without a lot of available money. As we raised a family, we set out to try to provide for our children, but with four children, it was very tough. I guess I might have discovered why I was an only child! To this day, I have always felt bad that we were unable to give our children a car for high school graduation, nor could we provide them with a college education. Thinking back, I sincerely hope that they had everything important, as I did, but I’m not sure that I did as good a job as my own dad when it comes to this.
 

Thinking back on my childhood, I realize now that my experience was a lesson that money can’t buy. Without knowing, I learned many good things, such as “money isn’t everything,” and “the best things in life are free” and all of those other sayings that people without money toss around. All my life, I have wanted “things” and I felt bad when I could not have them. I really did OK and had everything I need, but I didn’t realize that I was greedy and materialistic. Once I realized this, I was able to change my ways. Today I realize that there are not many things in life that I really need, and if I am ever able to get something nice that I have been longing for, the feeling of accomplishment and reward is much greater than ever before.

 

As silly as it might sound, I am now glad that I was not spoiled and pampered as a child because it taught me many lessons. It just took me a lifetime to realize what these lessons were, and now that I finally do understand, I am thankful. Now there is but one thing I wish, and that is to hear that my children were lucky enough to also be instilled with this wisdom. Every generation always hopes to provide for their own children better than they themselves were brought up, but I’m not aware that this happens in many cases, so perhaps we are going about this the wrong way. Perhaps we should have been saying “I hope to raise my children the way that I was raised – to realize that there is more to live than material possessions, and that our efforts should be not to acquire wealth, but to acquire wisdom, humility and a caring disposition toward mankind.