Scattered Thoughts . . .

T oday we have some highly unusual sunny skies but it is still frigid out there at -8°.  I shot these two images through our living room window...  It actually looks great out there for some solar astronomy!  We rarely get clear skies in the winter here so these crystal clear deep blue skies are quite atypical for us.  There is no way I am heading out there though unless I absolutely must head out there.  It is far too cold for me!

M y health seems to be recovering over the past day or two, finally, so that is good.  I feel like I should be much farther along in my recovery at this point but the past day or two have seen a nice improvement in my overall health.  Unfortunately, we have other problems that are cutting into our sleep though which won't help my health at all. We learned recently that our furnace is on borrowed time now...  at the perfect wrong time considering the current frigid weather.  We spent around $800 just to hold us over through this heating season but the furnace is not running well.  Replacing the furnace in winter is rough because we would be without heat for at least a day.  If other parts need to be ordered, we could be without heat for more than a day.  That simply won't work in the dead of winter so we're trying to just make it through this heating season before we tackle installing a new furnace.   The temperatures have plunged well into sub-zero territory.  To make this

T he past few nights have been frigid in the sub-zero range but the days haven't been too bad...  until today, that is...   Fortunately, we have no need to be outside today.  I think we have some significant snow headed our way tomorrow night so we'll need to be outside on Monday to move snow and rake the roof so hopefully the weather will warm up a bit into the teens or 20s by then.

I suppose the title of this blog entry could lead people to believe I am referring to the weather but, unfortunately, I am referring to my health.   The weather is indeed still unseasonably warm with rain, sleet and ridiculously heavy snow like we are living in a coastal area hundreds of miles south of here so saying that the cold has returned would be appropriate if a normal northern mountain winter climate ever returns.  In this case, however, I am referring to a cold that I have had since just after Christmas! I've been feeling halfway decently for the past week suffering only from my primary illness and some lingering remnants of this season-long cold.  My nose had mostly dried up, finally...  cough mostly gone...  no sore throat...  aches and pains were more related to my primary illness at this point.  I still had a bit of gunk running down the back of my throat but the little bit I was experiencing was hardly worth mentioning.  I had thought (and hoped) that this two-mon

I haven't been writing much lately and I know that most people think that no news is good news.  That sentiment, however, is completely wrong in most cases.  We really have nothing but lousy news about lousy health to report.  I'm still knocked down with a miserable cold of some sort.  I feel quite lousy and because my body is fighting off a cold, it is making my mast cells even more active.  The mast cell disease causes my mast cells to be overactive already so adding more over-activity due to a cold makes my primary illness a bit worse.  I find myself seesawing between extra medications for my mast cell disease and extra medications for the annoying cold. All this sickness nonsense started sometime between Christmas and New Year's Eve.  I think it was a cold at that point.  Then, sometime in January it sort of progressed into a flu bug with lymph nodes swollen and painful, exhaustion, bone and joint pain, and all the typical cold and flu symptoms.   After a week or

This has been an absolutely brutal Christmas week so we have postponed Christmas until... well...  until things improve significantly. I haven't even written lately because my own health has been that poor.  I've still been trying to recover from a disastrous attempt at a colonoscopy in early September. It has been a terrible few months as far as my health goes so I have not written here in the blog nearly as often as I normally do.  Sheila is still struggling with terrible side effects of her cancer treatment.  Sleep is difficult for her for various reasons including pain, headaches and night sweats.  The sleep deprivation takes its toll on everything. On top of all that, she's even been trying to shake a nasty cold for the past two weeks. While Sheila has been trying to shake her cold, I developed her cold a few days ago and a nasty cold it is. No amount of cold medications have been able to even slow it down a little bit. I was up all through the night the other

Unfortunately, Sheila's health has been deteriorating more and more each day since beginning her radiation treatment last week. It actually has been pretty frightening watching this happen! The primary reason for this deteriorating health is that she picked up a cold right when treatment began and her overall health has been spiraling downward ever since.  Sleeping has been difficult for her for a number of reasons mostly related to her cancer treatments and surgeries starting 11 years ago so she is now getting worn down to dangerous levels. This second fight with cancer has only exasperated the problem.  She is also dealing with a weakened immune system now because she has started radiation treatment. About a week ago, she added a nasty cold into the mix which includes her radiation-induced weakened immune system and the result is that her declining health has quickly become out of control. Her Radiation Oncologist noticed this declining health in our visit to her yeste

My health has been quite lousy since January. Sheila and I seem to be passing a cold and a stomach bug back and forth between us, over and over. These types of 'common colds' always send my mast cells into a hyperactive tailspin so I'm having great difficulty focusing on anything because my thought processes are a muddled mess! I have a dozen different projects bouncing around in my head all at once. Most of these projects I actually want to accomplish... some I  need to accomplish as soon as I am feeling well enough... and all of these projects are occupying my thoughts at any given moment. If I'm not struggling with nausea and spending time in the bathroom, I'm struggling with pain and overwhelming fatigue. Sheila hasn't been much better lately. I feel as though I am spending all my time in bed, sleeping away the winter as projects keep backing up and my to-do list gets longer and longer. My spinal injuries are terribly inflamed. I assume much of t

Here are some photos from yesterday's frigid excursion to the Christmas Tree farm. I still have some photos from our lunch at The Whip that I'll share sometime later... for now, here are the photos from the tree farm. The wind chill was below zero but we all were ready for the cold and dressed appropriately. Well... that reminds me, I could use some gloves which would be more appropriate for photography while out in freezing temperatures. I had to resort to having one bare hand to operate the camera. I could not operate my camera while wearing a glove. That being said, I dressed for the weather and I stayed warm though... with the exception of my right hand! We managed to get trees and move on to lunch very quickly which was nice. It was a really nice day! Getting some warmth... Getting a ride back to the cars with the trees in the back of the wagon... You can definitely see how cold it is in this photo!

I've been feeling a bit better the past few days as related to the lingering cold that Sheila and I have been struggling with since January. Now I am struggling with lingering fatigue... an oppressingly overwhelming fatigue which defies any accurate description. I slept for 11 hours last night... 10 hours a night has been the norm since this cold started in January. I've also been sleeping for 3-4 hours every afternoon... and, sometimes, I've been napping for upwards of 5 hours. That doesn't leave much time awake each day! I manage to get beyond breakfast each day... make my lunch... but then have no energy for cooking dinner. I rarely even have the energy to shower although I do shower on some days but must skip breakfast in order to save some energy so I can shower.   Energy management... everything is a trade-off. My body is rundown and I can't seem to accomplish much. Needless to say, I am quite bored and feel the need to accomplish something.  A fe

My health is finally feeling as though I am over the hump with this nasty, lingering cold. Today is the first day where I feel as though I am "recovering" from the cold symptoms. Although, my overall health is still quite miserable and I'm still struggling with typical Systemic Mastocytosis symptoms which are probably as a result of the lingering cold. The cold itself, however, seems to be waning... finally. Since I was feeling a bit better this morning, I quickly decided to pull out a camera, a lens, a tripod, a light, and a remote shutter release to see if I could get a photo of myself. I think I had to shoot about two dozen photos just to get two decent shots. Absolutely accurate focus is impossible to do with a remote shutter release. Ohhh... I just remembered something I could have done... I could have used my Kindle Fire tablet to choose a focus point... uggg... I should have thought of that this morning. I have an app on my tablet which allows me to control my

It has been very Spring-like through December this year. We occasionally had some snow flurries but it was so warm during the days each day that we had some flowers blooming in our wildflower gardens as Christmas approached! As of last night, our temperatures have dipped down into the single digits and today promises wind chills below zero. And, we even had a bit of snow yesterday!  I think winter has arrived! My health was not feeling well enough to wander outside last night but I did manage to get a few photos from inside our house through the windows. Before it is time to turn off the Christmas lights, I'll need to get outside with a camera so get more shots...

I've been fighting a cold for months. With my health as poor as it is, a cold can be a major health risk and problem. In January, I developed a typical winter cold. It lingered through to mid-April before abruptly worsening significantly. When this cold worsened, my nose was running like a waterfall... constantly. My eyes were irritated to the point of mildly burning. After a few days and a lot of cold medications, this runny nose turned into a constant post-nasal drip... or flow. This caused me to lose my voice and I started a bit of coughing. I was having great difficulty breathing and was wondering if maybe I was developing pneumonia. Subsequently, my energy level plummeted to the lowest of lows.  After two weeks of these significantly worsened cold symptoms and months of lingering cold symptoms, I think I am just about back to "normal"... as "normal" as I could be with Systemic Mastocytosis and extensive spinal injuries anyway. Funny thing is that the

As expected, I am still struggling with my health after our long journey to and from San Antonio. What we didn't expect is for Sheila to be joining me this week! Sheila is home sick with a lousy cold... mostly sore throat, runny nose, stuffy head... and, some fatigue as well.  I'm still struggling with overwhelming fatigue, debilitating deep bone pain, and bouts with instantaneous dizziness so bad it knocks me over even when I am seated! This dizziness is actually a bit violent... Even when this dizziness hits me while seated, in an instant, I am trying to catch myself from hitting the floor. When I am standing, I stumble like my world has been instantly tilted to a 45 degree angle trying to grab ahold of something to keep me from losing to gravity.... gravity applying force in a very different direction from which my brain thinks.  What is really odd is that I am constantly falling to my right. In the past, I always fell to the left when these bouts would hit me. This

The wind chill outside is now at -20 degrees but it is sunny and clear out there!  It looks really nice from the living room window so I decided to pick up one of my cameras to shoot a few photos.   These photos are shot with my old camera body with the Kodak sensor in it.  I love the color tonality and depth that this sensor produces.  What I don't like is that I really should be using this particular camera body on a tripod because it does not have any image stabilization capabilities.  My shot of the mountains has a bit of camera shake in it so it is not as sharp as it should be... I had opened the window in the living room so I could shoot the photo of the mountains without shooting through the dirty glass window...  Turns out the heat that was escaping the house through the open window was causing those visual jello-type waves you see coming off hot pavement in the summer!  So, I had to step outside to shoot the photo of the mountains.  Yes, it is cold out there! Hope yo