Scattered Thoughts . . .

This past week has been an unbearable week of inflammation and debilitating pain. Needless to say, getting anything accomplished this week was virtually impossible.   Standing hurt, sitting hurt, laying hurt and sleeping long enough to keep my health stable was very difficult because the pain kept me awake. Understandably, my mood was negatively impacted. My ability to stay focused on anything for longer than a few short minutes was impossible. What an absolutely frustrating and excruciatingly painful week.  My entire spine was so inflamed it seemed like it was swollen and on fire... constantly... steadily... it burned consistently like the sun.  Each of the areas of my spine that have been injured during my career hurt so badly that it felt as though I had a large swollen red bump the size of a handball at each point of injury.  For those who aren't aware, after two line-of-duty spinal injuries I am left with two herniated disks, four bulging disks, six compressed disks, two a

Overall, my health has been quite miserable and very unstable for the past few months.  What really pushed my health into this bad spell was the fireplace project during the few weeks in December. I was in a rush to get the fireplace to an operating condition before Christmas arrived. Systemic Mastocytosis causes extreme, overwhelming fatigue and this is especially so whenever I over do it and use more energy than my health allows. I'm still trying to recover from pushing myself to finish that project in time for Christmas...  but, the fireplace really is nice. Unfortunately, although "really nice", that fireplace is still not completely finished.  I managed to work on this project about an hour each day this past week.  It still wore me out each day... imagine just a quick hour of light, easy work requiring bedtime immediately... Despite the need for sleep everyday, over the course of the week I managed to fill some open edges, sand, fill some more, sand even more

Disney videos on Grammy's Kindle Fire I went back and looked in the folder of photos from dinner with the grandchildren the other night and I found a couple of decent photos which have Mackenzie in them.  In one of the photos, Grammy is watching short Disney videos with the kids on her Kindle Fire. That kept the three of them busy for fifteen or twenty minutes but it is easy to see that Kenzie's interests are headed in a different direction than Lukey's interests.  Should be fun times ahead! I included another photo of Lukas here even though I shared one of him in a previous post already.  I included it because I thought it was interesting... it is a bit blurry, but a nice photo nevertheless. I was holding my camera in my right hand and the teddy bear (featured in my previous blog post) in my left hand.  If I hold the teddy bear just right, I can also bob his head and move one of his arms with my piano-playing fingers. So, while trying to get a photo of Lukey la

This past Sunday, the grandchildren were here to join us for dinner. I made some cheese ravioli, meatballs and tomato sauce for dinner.  I rarely make ravioli but it was pretty good... well, it was a nice change anyway. Lukas was fairly easy to capture in photos that afternoon but Kenzie was a bit difficult this time around. Either she kept her back to me whenever I was holding my camera or she was busy doing something elsewhere. She did, however, want to view the photos on the back of the camera so she kept squeezing between me and my camera to push buttons and swipe the screen. I showed the kids the video I put together from a visit a couple of weeks ago... that captivated them and they get very animated seeing themselves and family members on our television. The funny thing is that every time they saw themselves playing with their Thomas the Train train set, they would jump up and run over to the trains to play again. Their attention was constantly being diverted back and fort