Scattered Thoughts . . .

J ust about all of this summer, thus far, has been nothing but rain showers, thunderstorms and flooding.  In between rain showers we get some sun trying to shine but, if the sun isn't obscured by clouds, the sun is mostly obscured by wildfire smoke from the Canadian wildfires.  For the most part, the skies have been far too consistently either cloudy or white due to wildfire smoke.   This wildfire smoke does not help my breathing issues at all.  I've been managing to get through each day without any major catastrophes (unlike earlier this year) but this calendar year, as a whole so far, has been filled with health problems and the leading and most consistently nagging problem has been difficulty breathing.  I'm pretty sure that even without the wildfire smoke, I would be struggling with breathing problems.  These breathing problems started with one of my bouts with COVID and it has not let up after my last bout with the virus.  The wildfire smoke is just not helping in the

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!