Scattered Thoughts . . .

A lthough I made great progress on a nice looking bridge for our garden railroad over the past few days (see previous blog entries), I am now paying the price! As most people who know me should already know, my original disability is due to an active career in the Air Force resulting in extensive spinal injuries after two separate line-of-duty injuries.   After the second injury, I was left with two herniated disks, four bulging disks, six compressed disks, spinal stenosis, thoracic osteophytosis, and a broken up vertebra in my cervical spine.  Needless to say, I've been in pain 24 hours a day for the past twenty-nine years.  Some days are worse than others but the pain is always there even on the best of days. Many years ago, two separate surgeons in two separate periods reviewed my MRIs and regrettably informed me that they could possibly fix one or two areas of my spine but the rest of the damage would still exist making it seem like no progress had been made by t...

I made some significant progress on our newly designed and now fully built girder bridge for our garden railroad yesterday.  Hmmm...  well, I guess it is not fully built just yet because I still need to pave it with fine sand and I need to add lights.  The bridge, itself, is fully built though.   Consequently, my spinal pain last night was unbearable.  My spine was on fire with sharp pain radiating to my hips, pelvic region and kidneys.  The pain truly was brutal, take-your-breath away type of pain.  I'm feeling significantly better this morning so that is good! Yesterday's primary job was to assemble all the balusters, the top rail and the parapet bearings at each corner.   This promised to be a tedious job but it went more smoothly and more quickly than I expected.   Each baluster needed to be glued and nailed in place, one-by-one, using a nail gun so it was definitely a tedious process.   My air compressor and nail gun...

A s summer was coming to a close and the leaves turning last year, Lukey (one of our grandchildren) and I were walking around the garden railroad talking about what improvements we could make by adding various features to this relatively tiny garden railroad.   One idea was to add an automobile bridge from near the passenger station to the other side of the garden railroad near the truss bridge.  This bridge would "bridge" one side of our imaginary land to the other through the garden sort of like a worm-hole in space.  I liked the idea of adding more road-bound vehicles to this model railroad so I felt this bridge would be a good idea.   I started working on the bridge over this past weekend and, as seen in the photos below, I made some good progress. I have a long list of things that need to be done on our house too but I started with this little garden railroad project to refresh my memory on the intricacies of woodworking.  I'd rather make the inev...

Yesterday, I got to thinking about macro photos.  These close-up photos require some special equipment so I was wondering if I could patch something together to allow me to do some macro photography. Back a couple of weeks ago, I did try adding a macro converter lens to the front end of a couple of my old Pentax 645 lenses.  That worked "okay" but I did need to crop the photos a bit to eliminate hard vignetting.  It worked but it wasn't ideal. Yesterday, I remembered that one of the lenses I have been using on this Fuji GFX medium format camera is a Pentacon 50mm lens with a m42 mount.  The m42 mount is really just m42 threads.  It just so happens that I already use m42 fittings for my astronomy gear so I had a few m42 extension tubes on hand already.  Adding an extension tube allows me to get far closer to the object I'm photographing.   Every lens has a minimum focus distance...  if you try to get closer than this minimum focus distance, th...