Scattered Thoughts . . .

In a previous blog post, I briefly mentioned "The Spoon Theory" which accurately, and yet in an almost heartbreaking manner, describes how I must manage my energy each moment of every day. This spoon theory was written by Christine Miserandino who struggles with Lupus.  In this case, the illness is irrelevant. What is relevant is the fact that most chronic illnesses sap all of our energy and we must figure out the best way to manage and minimize this problem in order to "live", not just "survive".  Although I have always struggled in finding the best way to describe this ongoing problem to family and friends so they can accurately understand my now often flaky behavior, Christine has concisely and eloquently found the words to graphically describe this struggle in energy management in her "Spoon Theory".   Before you continue with what I have written here, I urge you to read Christine's "Spoon Theory" so you will understand

I have been very fortunate this Christmas season!  We have had an exceptionally busy, hectic and exhausting December and, for the most part, my health held up surprisingly well. Now, however, we are a few days past Christmas and my health has crashed... and it has crashed spectacularly. I had a few bouts with anaphylaxis causing dizziness, palpitations, tachycardia, and breathing difficulties which all leads to exhaustion.  Whenever my heart responds to anaphylaxis, my heart-rate jumps to the 120-180 beats per minute range and it can stay there for an hour or two. Having your heart-rate at this chest pounding level is similar to running for a couple of hours... or playing a basketball game for a couple of hours... or any other strenuous activity for hours.  I am left feeling exhausted and my entire body aches for days. The degranulation of mast cells which caused this anaphylaxia also causes nerve irritation and inflammation.  Needless to say, in addition to the overwhelming fatigu

As some of you have already seen in my Facebook posts, I managed to get the fireplace project finished just in time for Christmas.  Actually, I don't think it was finished until 4:30pm on Christmas Eve!  Then, after cleaning the house of all the construction debris and sawdust, we carefully carried an ice-covered Christmas tree into the house and decorated it.  Between wrapping presents, putting together toys for the grandchildren and decorating, I don't think we made it to bed until 1:30am on Christmas morning.   Since we started renovating the house about five years ago, we have seen various parts of the house in multiple stages of construction.  So the purpose of this post is to show some photos of the progression of the living room project over the course of a few years.  There is no doubt that the living room is a much more comfortable and 'warmer' room today than ever before. Of course we still have a lot to do... ceilings, floors, another wall which is shared

The last real progress made on the fireplace... concrete backer-board for the tile... Well, just about everything is on hold now.  My health has hit its limit with this living room/fireplace project and Christmas preparations. Compounding my problems is the fact that we are expected to have icy road conditions for the next few days which means there is little chance I will get up to Williston and South Burlington for more building supplies, presents, etc.  Of course, if I lack the energy for this it doesn't matter much. My health has crashed quickly this time.  I managed to have a fairly productive morning but then I seemed to hit a wall.  I didn't even have the energy to clean up anything at all.  I just laid down for a few hours and then figured I needed to jump back into working on cutting tile for the fireplace...  no luck. I couldn't even think straight. I needed to measure things multiple times... over and over again... I couldn't draw a straight line no

Taking shape... notice the new custom paneling in the background where this fireplace will reside... (don't mind the dirty floors... I have really been beating on them this week!) I had an exceptionally productive day yesterday as you can see from these photos.  Not only is the maple and aspen paneling stained and finished looking warm, inviting and beautiful, but I have a good chunk of the fireplace and shelving unit cut and assembled. The mantle will also be aspen to match the walls.  The plywood sides of the fireplace and shelving unit is cut from birch. Much of the rest of the fireplace will be douglas fir and pine. I hand selected all the wood but did have to make some substitutions from my original plans because I could not find what I desired. The finished product should still look beautiful albeit a bit more expensive. Between the price of my substitutions and the time wasted trying to find what I needed, collecting materials was a long, tedious and frustrating proces

Today was a relatively productive day for a nice change!  I'm a little more optimistic that I can finish this fireplace project before the end of the weekend.  That will leave us a day or two to decorate for Christmas and wrap presents...  hmmm...  presents...  I might need to buy some of those soon... The new aspen and maple paneling in the living room is now stained and I have applied three coats of a satin polyurethane.  Ideally, it could really use another two or three coats of poly but the wood grain is filled in enough and sealed enough to make it through the next month or so. Besides, I just might add a coat or two while I am applying poly to the fireplace and shelving unit. That would finish the walls completely. In the meantime, it is looking great tonight! The house is a mess with construction materials all over the place but those new walls look nice! Tomorrow I plan to start cutting the latest batch of finish lumber for the fireplace, mantle and shelving unit.  In b

The official start of our Christmas season commenced last weekend with an afternoon and evening spent with friends. It has unofficially become an annual Christmas tradition to meet for dinner in Stowe every year. As always, we had a really great time... dinner was great... the drinks were great... the atmosphere was great... and the company was second to none!   Here are a few photos... Our 'frog bread'...  nothing like a loaf of bread that looks like a frog when you've been drinking all afternoon!

Just like many others across the midwest and the east coast, we got a bit of snow this weekend.  We had originally planned to cut a Christmas tree today but we canceled our plans so we could stay off the roads. The single digit temperatures also factored into our decision to cancel our trek to a tree farm to cut a Christmas tree today. Staying home for the day allowed me to get some more work done on our fireplace project.  I spent some time staining our new maple and aspen paneling on the wall behind the fireplace. Then I managed to rip a bunch of 2x4's that I had sitting around from a previous renovation. I ripped the 2x4's down into 1.5"x1.5" which I intend to use for framing the fireplace structure.   After all that ripping, I cut out a test architectural brace for the fireplace. This original design had a compound curve in it that is difficult to cut at the thickness of this test piece. Turns out I didn't like this design. I decided on a simpler design

Laying out the tile and some dimensional lumber for the fireplace... A week or two ago I wrote about a new home renovation project... designing, building and installing a little fireplace. This fireplace will be a relatively simple gel-fuel fireplace which does not require any flue whatsoever. This project entails upgrading an entire wall of our living room so, as usual, this project is a bit more than my health would like to tackle... but I'm hoping to be successful with this project which entails getting it finished before Christmas. First, I started working on our primed steel front entry door.  It is a 15-lite door so calling it a 'steel' door can be misleading.  It is a nice door but isn't so nice looking with its factory gray primer.  I've been saying for a few years since I installed this door that I would like to finish it to appear as though it is stained wood.  Since this front entry door is part of this wall sharing the fireplace, I decided to tac

Although about six months have passed, I am going to go ahead and share a couple of photos from our garden this year.  Of course, our garden is now buried in snow but, for a few short months every summer, our stone paths are lined with very photogenic wildflower gardens. The variety of flowers we typically grow each summer is pretty colorful, lush and amazing.  Of course, these wildflowers attract all sorts of birds, grasshoppers, crickets and bees. If I am having a quiet, but slow morning, I tend to grab my camera and head to the gardens to find things to photograph.  Every now and then I get lucky and find a few flowers which aren't blowing in the wind or a cooperative insect or bird. Here are two photos I just recently found sitting in a folder on my computer which I thought would be nice to share...   Hope you enjoy!

Shot through our laundry room window... and through some frost on the window! Well, Christmas is upon us but we are so far behind in everything that I highly doubt the Christmas Spirit will catch up with us until sometime in January or February.   We did manage to get some Christmas lights strung up outside.  We don't have as many as anticipated, but we have enough.  Actually, very few of our neighbors have any Christmas lights this year... our street is unusually dark. Very strange... perhaps we are all in the same boat this year... Stringing up Christmas lights outdoors was a bit frustrating this year. First off, the weather was frigid. That always makes for a frustrating time. Next, approximately 1/2 of our Christmas lights went into the garbage this year because they were no longer lighting up. Frustrating, huh? We ended up using all of our indoor light sets just to fill some of the emptiness outside. So, now we need to get out to buy some Christmas lights for indo

Once again, I was up later than I should have been last night scrolling through one of my external hard drives full of photos. I think I stumbled across a few complete sets of photos of the babies that I never posted nor even processed for printing nor viewing!  In another set of photos from this past April, I found a funny photo of Mackenzie.   If I remember correctly, I was having a hard time getting her to smile so I stuck my tongue out at her...  trying to get a laugh or at least a little snicker...  she mimicked me rather than producing a smile... I also realized that I have hundreds of photos of our trips to Lake Groton over the past few years that are still just sitting in folders on these external drives.  I'll have to get to those photos one of these days too!  More importantly, I really need to send a large batch of my photos to one of my professional printing labs to have some beautiful prints made...  My to-do list is entirely too long and I have far too little

Sometimes...  hmmm...  actually, quite often...  I forget about some photos I shot and they get lost on one of my many hard drives full of photos.  Then, on nights like tonight when I find myself scrolling through photos on my drives, I come across a really nice photo. Tonight I came across this photo, above, which I shot during the summer of 2012.  I shot this photo through our open kitchen window.  Our neighbors have a few bird feeders in their yard so we usually have birds feeding outside our windows facing our neighbor's home.  The problem is opening the window slowly enough and quietly enough so that I don't scare away the birds. Capturing good photographs of birds is tough.  It is especially tough with smaller birds like this one.  Even larger birds such as swans, geese and ducks can be difficult to capture.  Smaller birds can be extremely difficult. Getting close to these birds is almost impossible so that means you must arm yourself with a big, long lens.

Although the wall is difficult to see behind all these Christmas presents, we are building a gel-fuel fireplace for this wall between the door and the window.  We will be covering this entire wall in library paneling matching the interior door at left. Today I started working on our newest home improvement project... Building a gel-fuel fireplace with an attached shelving unit for our entertainment components. This project also involves upgrading the entire wall with custom library-type paneling to match the fireplace. Today I started the project by clearing off the entire wall.  I also cleaned and primed the new front entry door.  This door is a steel, 15 lite door currently adorned (sarcasm) in its factory primer coat. Today's priming job is simply an undercoating for a grain-like appearance which will show through a brushed-on wood stain topcoat. In the end, this door should look like a beautiful wood door. I've used this same technique on a few other doors in the past