Scattered Thoughts . . .

I don't know what it is about the State of Liberty... I've always been bothered by this French gift of art. Don't get me wrong, I love French art and architecture but the Statue of Liberty bothers me deeply for some reason... it creates conflict within me when it really should create welcoming warmth...  Perhaps it is the horrendously ugly and overbearing cyan color... perhaps what bothers me is the prison-like facilities on this tiny island and its sister island, Ellis Island, used to process our poor immigrants... perhaps it is a cluttered, poorly arranged harbor that has bothered me... perhaps the vision of a monstrous, overbearing "Lady Liberty" to greet our east coast immigrants bothered me... perhaps I agree with some movie-makers and think this piece of art is more aptly suited to be featured in movies like Planet of the Apes ... perhaps I just find this monstrous piece of "art" a bit unappealing or even hideous (of course, my own personal opini

So, since I am sitting around waiting for my spinal inflammation to subside, I thought I would sit here on my pillows and work on some old photos while sipping on some coffee.  I'm still sorting through the folder that holds photos from our 2013 trip to Manhattan. I was using an old, crappy Olympus camera back then so I often left whole folders of images left untouched because I was so frustrated by the images. This was one of those folders. After my experiences with two Olympus cameras, I don't ever want to use another Olympus camera for the rest of my life... the colors absolutely suck, white balance is always a problem, the noise is horrendous, the files are very shallow causing the image files to fall apart very quickly in post-processing... I just hate working with these files. I've found, however, that I can get some decent black and white images out of the files when color is my main problem as is the case with this particular folder of images. The Empire Sta

My health is on a roll again... absolutely miserable, poor, lousy, and exceptionally painful health which has been far too consistent lately. I couldn't sleep again last night... I have a million things I must get done and I can't do any of them right now.  Funny...  I had thought I was already in a lousy mood yesterday... compared to my mood today, my mood yesterday was quite pleasant.  It will be another long, brutal day today.  Maybe I'll look for some other photos from that 2013 trip to Manhattan...

I slept away much of the day since I didn't sleep at all last night. Fortunately, my spinal pain has subsided a bit... down into the 4-5 range, at rest.  I'm about to head to bed but wanted to post a photo here first. I worked on processing this image this evening... selective dodging and burning... luminosity masking... selective sharpening... etc.  I shot this photo during a trip to New York City in 2013. The RAW image remained on one of my hard drives untouched. I hadn't even sorted it into one of my "best" folders as I do with the best images in most of my daily folders! When I was searching through the folder looking to pull out this image this evening, I saw a few others which might make some decent photos as well. For now, however, it will be only this one image to add to my collection of finished photographs. I love the contrast of this image... the sun rays... the clouds... the sun reflecting off the buildings in the center of the frame... and I esp

What a crappy, lousy, miserable day due to intense spinal pain, inflammation, bone pain and some resulting Systemic Mastocytosis issues... that is about all I can say.

Although the weather is beautiful today for working outdoors, I am in 'recovery mode'. My spinal pain, at rest, is in the 7-8 range on the 10 point pain scale.  Yesterday, I dug and installed footings for the roof covering our grill/outdoor kitchen area. Then, I jacked up the adjoining playhouse to raise it four inches to match the roofline I need for this new roof over the grill/outdoor kitchen area. This work proved to be far too much for my spinal injuries.  Anything I do adds inflammation to my spinal injuries but I've been doing a lot of things lately which require a lot of bending over and that is never good for my spine. I don't think I slept more than a total of one hour last night! My spine was so inflamed that it was excruciating just lying in bed. I spent the night very carefully and very slowly tossing and turning trying to get comfortable enough to sleep. It didn't work. I simply could not sleep. So, today is a down day for my health.  As I s

I had a fairly good day yesterday... my health was relatively stable... I did some annual staining around the outside of the house... I assembled a hand pump station and stained it... I assembled the galvanized plumbing fittings... it was a productive day! This doesn't mean I didn't have moments of borderline lousy health yesterday... I did. A few times during the day, I needed to cool down... cold showers... cold water over my head until I cooled down... cold water on the insides of my wrists to cool down my blood... It was around 90 degrees all day so I had to work hard at keeping my body cool so my health would not fail. Around lunchtime yesterday, I wheeled our air conditioner to a window... set up the vent in the window... plugged it in... and we had air conditioning in our living room, kitchen and bedroom. I might need to resort to turning on the air conditioning today just to cut the edge on the humidity which is causing serious breathing issues for me today. Today