Scattered Thoughts . . .

I was feeling halfway decent this morning so I spent the morning working on the master bathroom. (Having only one toilet in the house this past week is getting old already! I'm definitely looking forward to having a nice new second toilet in the house!) I had previously removed the old finish flooring to reveal a lot of rotten wood subflooring and about three layers of old, nasty vinyl flooring. Today I needed to figure out how much of the floor was rotten and remove it all. I started pulling up the subflooring with my hands... it would just crumble as I grabbed it so it pulled apart quite easily but made a huge mess. It wasn't long before I decided to just cut back enough to make a 24"x24" hole. First I marked off a 24" square... then out came the circular saw... and I started cutting... first, at only a 1/2" deep... I pulled up more subflooring...  then I cut a bit deeper... pulled out more subflooring... I changed the depth of the cut four times

The few months after Christmas are always rough months for my health so I always expect health issues after the ramp-up to Christmas. This year is no different except that my energy levels seem to be at an all-time low too. Leading up to Christmas and through Christmas, I pound extra medications... adrenaline is flowing... and, I'm careful about my diet and managing energy. Once Christmas Day has passed, I'm exhausted... I mean completely spent... I mean overwhelmingly fatigued... I mean that just taking a shower oftentimes will use up whatever energy I had to use for that particular day. All this fatigue is accompanied by bone and joint pain. The joint pain is easy to describe... it feels like an ice pick being stabbed into the joint... my ankles hurt, my knees hurt, my hips hurt, my spine hurts, my shoulders hurt, my elbows hurt, my wrists hurt, my fingers hurt. If I attempt to hold anything... ie, a plate while attempting to wash a few dishes... the pain in my fingers, w

This past weekend, Sheila and I finally managed to get to one of Lukey's hockey sessions. We had a really nice time! This was my first attempt at shooting photos of ice hockey and I'd been looking forward to this opportunity in shooting photos of Lukey for a long time. (I also look forward to shooting photos of Kenzie at gymnastics... hopefully soon!) As far as photography goes, fortunately for me, the young 'House Mites' aren't really lightning fast so keeping up with them was fairly easy... they don't move fast enough to introduce motion blurring issues... and I recently picked up a Sony camera which is geared toward fast action. This all worked in my favor so I managed to capture some nice photos. Naturally, with a new camera there was a bit of a learning curve. I spent the past month working on setting up the camera to ideal settings for sports... then would get frustrated because I had no fast moving objects available to practice shooting... so I woul