Scattered Thoughts . . .

K enzie sort of inherited a small lot of China dolls a few weeks ago.  These dolls needed a bit of attention so Kenzie and Gee went to work on them a couple of weeks ago.  First, Kenzie chose the dolls she liked the most out of the small lot of dolls.  I believe she chose about half of the dolls for various reasons.  These were some nice looking dolls! Then it was time to evaluate their condition to see what needed to be corrected.  All of the dolls needed some cleaning and some airing-out.  Hair needed to be cleaned and brushed.  Clothes were hand-washed.  Even Papa was asked to fix one China doll's figure skates.  I had a gel cyanoacrylate glue that worked perfectly for gluing the figure skate blades back to the white upper boots.   This little project gave Kenzie some one-on-one time with Gee.  Plus, these are things that Kenzie adores...  dolls.  She was pretty excited.  In the end, Kenzie went home with a nice selection of China dolls.  

We were happy to have Kenzie visit with us again over the weekend.  This gave her a chance to play with her dollhouse with Gee. The dollhouse that I had built for Kenzie a few years ago has been buried in one of the bedrooms that Adam resided in when he last visited a few months ago. As a result, this dollhouse hasn't gotten much use in the past six months or so because it was sitting behind a bunch of new kitchen supplies for our new kitchen in this bedroom.   Our kitchen renovation was put on hold the moment Sheila was diagnosed with cancer again almost a year and a half ago so all the supplies we had already bought for this project were piled up against a wall in the spare bedroom.  That project is now on indefinite hold due to the costs of cancer treatments and a few other reasons and Kenzie's townhouse dollhouse was residing somewhere behind all of these kitchen supplies...  until Sunday. Gee dug out the dollhouse and brought it out to the living room.  While Gee

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