Scattered Thoughts . . .

I wrote previously about this past week being pretty lousy and brutal. Then, I added a quick update earlier this afternoon (maybe only an hour ago) claiming my health had improved slightly into the "mediocre" category. Suddenly, and unfortunately, things are pretty damn brutal again. I was moving something far too heavy (sarcasm...  it was really a small package of toilet paper) to under the bathroom vanity and was suddenly slammed with intense spinal pain that instantly put me on the floor of the bathroom. I was just a heap of tangled, inflamed nerves stuck on the floor... and I couldn't get up!  As I laid there, contemplating whether to call out to Sheila for help, I eventually caught my breath and managed to get up and make my way to the living room where Sheila instantly noticed something was not right.  Now, my weekend has suddenly moved into the brutal stage... again... as I lay here on the couch icing my spine. 

Plain and simple, this past week has been brutal. Whenever we have a busy weekend of activities, it affects my health for the next week... or month. Last weekend was exceptionally busy from Friday through Sunday. We had squeezed in about three activities and three different places each day... I skipped my daily two hour naps... I was on my feet throughout most of the weekend... and we were on the go all the time. This is a recipe for a long bout of miserable health in my foreseeable future. In preparation of the long, busy weekend, I rested up in the days leading up to the weekend (longer naps each day and did virtually nothing each day in an effort to preserve energy). I also squeezed in more medications in the days leading up to the weekend as well as all through the three day weekend. I can get away with this particular plan of attack if I don't do it too often. It allows for fairly decent health for a few days but there is a price to pay... the price is exceptionally

My health has been quite lousy the past few days... I clearly overdid it this past weekend... and even my spine is painfully inflamed so I've been doing very little. I have, however, managed to spend a little time each day with a camera in my hand and that has been nice. This morning, I had intended to work on a different project but some trains from the long weekend with Lukey and Kenzie were in my way. As I was thinking about whether or not to use up the precious energy needed to put away these trains, I decided to shoot some photos of this particular set of trains instead (mostly, the locomotive interested me). It seemed like this option would use less energy than my original plan and, besides, this is another project I have been wanting to accomplish for quite some time anyway. So, here we have an O scale Hudson steam locomotive... with real smoke coming out of the boiler... and, I must say, this was a difficult shot to capture and it was a time consuming little project!

Every summer we try to get out on Lake Champlain at least once for a short cruise on The Spirit of Ethan Allen. The weather was forecast to be excellent this past Friday so we headed to Burlington with the grandkids in tow. They had never been on a larger boat so this was a first for them. However, the kids surprised us by not being too fond of the idea of a cruise at first. Yes... you read that right... the two kids who can't get enough of boats while they are at the lake house weren't too fond of the idea of a cruise! While they were eating breakfast on Friday morning, we asked them if they wanted to go on a cruise with us... they gave us some confused looks so I figured it was obvious they weren't too sure about the word "cruise"...  I then asked if they wanted to go out for a ride on a "boat"... oddly, they were enthusiastically negative about that idea too! What is odd about this is that neither one of them seem to get enough of rid