Scattered Thoughts . . .

Since the weather has not been all that conducive to working outdoors this morning (we actually got some snow in the mountains... yes, it is June and we got some snow!) , I decided to stay indoors and do some food prep for our next few weeks.   Homemade Italian salad dressing. Over the years, I've been adapting my own recipe for Italian salad dressing. This was first up this morning after a quick trip to our local grossly overpriced supermarket. I threw all the ingredients together... tasted it... added a little of this and a little more of that... tasted it again... now that is done for the next few weeks.  In the past, I always made my salsa in a big batch and put it in a big bowl. That is okay for parties when everyone is gathered around one big table but the big bowl doesn't work too well for smaller groups. We've found that in one single big bowl, the salsa gets "old" far too quickly. This time, we decided to give canning jars a whirl in an attempt to

Over the weekend, Sheila and I tackled getting the boats ready for our very short summer season. I ran into some issues with the sailboat... I left the sailboat sitting upright on a homemade dolly with the mast in place. The sleeve for the mast filled with water while the mast sat in this wet sleeve...  probably froze, thawed, froze, thawed, etc, over and over through the winter... and when I lifted out the mast the other day, it fell apart. I won't make that mistake again. The sailboat will be disassembled and put away for winter this year! I managed to make do with spare parts I have on hand but the mast will need to be replaced eventually. It should be okay for this season though. Everything else looked pretty good and functional. That being said, I still would not be surprised if I find a new problem when we put the boat in the water at the lake house. While I fixed, cleaned, waxed and re-rigged the sailboat (replaced some old, worn rope), Sheila cleaned up and waxed the

The grandchildren were with us again on Sunday. It was a rainy and rather uneventful day but, as always, it was very nice.  I gave Lukey a haircut... some playing with dolls, dollhouses, trains, airplanes... some baked ziti for dinner, hot Italian sausage on the side, and some bread... and ice cream for dessert.  The fairly typical shot of Lukey and some of his trains... EDIT:  The photo of Lukey playing with his trains (above) was the first photo I shot this day. I quickly realized it was far too dark in the house on this dark, rainy day. My auto exposure chose a very high ISO of 12,800. Typically, anything beyond 1600 is avoided by photographers because things tend to get noisy, grainy and ugly beyond 1600. This shot above had doubled that limit three times and the photo still looks pretty good! Once I realized the house was this dark, I grabbed my little Nissin i40 hotshoe flash and mounted it on my camera... set it to TTL and a negative 1.5 exposure (so I only added a smal