Scattered Thoughts . . .

While I was sitting on the couch this evening, some movement caught my eye out our living room window in the road right outside our house. As I looked more carefully out the window, I could have sworn I saw a good sized Black Bear. I wasn't completely sure it was a bear since I only saw the rear half of the bear before he disappeared in our neighbor's yard.  Since there are quite a few kids who wander around this trailer park throughout the evening and early nightfall, I wanted to make sure I was seeing things clearly so I jumped up and quickly headed outside. Within a few feet of the house, I stopped in my tracks as a rather  big Black Bear was slowly sauntering toward me. He also stopped, looked up at me, and then turned into our neighbor's yard across the street. It was clear he wanted to avoid human contact and that is a good thing but I still had some concerns about a bear wandering through the streets in our little neighborhood. We continued to watch for the bear

I've mentioned in a previous blog entry that I've been working on getting some telescopes ready for nighttime viewing in the warmer weather. The grandkids are getting old enough to enjoy viewing the night sky so this gave me a good reason to play with some telescopes. I have a background in aerospace so this has always been an interest of mine but it is always nice to have another reason like grandkids. It makes it easier to justify the hobby. Naturally, it seems it has done nothing but rain (and snow) for all but one day since I assembled these telescopes in our living room a few weeks ago but this has given me time to decide what to do with one or two scopes that have been terribly frustrating to use. One of these telescopes in question was a Celestron   AstroMaster  114EQ reflector telescope. This telescope has been nothing but frustration since we bought it quite a few years ago. Nothing looked even halfway decent through this scope. I've collimated it (aligned the

The grandkids stayed with us over the past weekend and it was a nice break from all this fun cancer stuff. We haven't had much of an opportunity to spend time with them since the lake house early in the summer so it was nice to spend a whole weekend with them.  Shortly after our time at the lake house, the doctors found Sheila's cancer and our life instantly and drastically changed. We've been at the hospital every weekday getting worn down and then trying to catch up on sleep on the weekends. We both feel as though it has been months and months of grueling nothingness.  There has been absolutely no socializing since the cancer was found except for when Sheila would get an occasional visitor although we haven't had any visitors in the past few weeks. Actually, we've been a bit socially deprived so it was nice to have the weekend with the grandkids. I think we watched about eight Christmas movies over the course of the weekend. And, we played about a bajillion