Scattered Thoughts . . .

I had previously written about problems I was having with editing video for my sailing video.  My software was freezing up constantly and, as a result, I just couldn't seem to make any headway whatsoever.  I may have found a solution to my problem. In the last day or so, I managed to make some real progress in editing and producing this video. Whenever I make significant progress, I get excited about the whole project again! CyberLink PowerDirector Ultra...  a very nice program but proving to be annoyingly unstable. One of my problems is that I have a vast amount of video footage that I must review, cut, and edit and it is more than my computer can process all at once.  Many of the video clips are 30 minutes long because we just left the camera running while it was mounted on each of the camera mounts.  So, for each 30 minute video, I need to snip out the best 15 second clips.  All this excess video footage was bogging down my computer. ...

Last night wasn't one of the best nights of my life.  It certainly wasn't the worst, but it was lousy nevertheless. Once again, my Systemic Mastocytosis negatively impacted my health.  This illness affects my health negatively every day, but that is my "new normal" so I don't really think much about my limitations when my health stays in this "new normal" range. How any transient symptoms manifest can vary greatly so, each time I have any problem of failing, debilitating health, it can be a relatively new experience.  Last night was a little strange... Earlier in the night, I felt 'okay'.  I was feeling a little full or bloated but nothing that would arouse suspicion.  (In hindsight, it should have.)  I had some moderate joint pain, but with the drastic change in weather today, I attributed this pain to the weather.  I was wrong, however, and these couple of things should have aroused some suspicion! In the middle of the night I ended up ...

Yesterday, we attended a little birthday celebration for Sheila's mom.  Fortunately, the weather was unusually cooperative and tolerable with temperatures 15-20 degrees cooler than it has been in recent weeks...  yesterday was sunny, 83 degrees and slightly breezy. That was some really nice weather for sitting out on the deck. If we had last week's weather with temperatures over 100 degrees, the afternoon would have been completely unbearable and miserable!  But, this short post isn't really about the local weather, it' s about Nan's birthday celebration yesterday.  Actually, it is about Nan's surprise birthday celebration yesterday... Will had quietly invited the family to come over to celebrate Sue's birthday.  We arrived first and I suspect Sue simply thought we stopped by to see the grandchildren.  Although we were indeed interested in spending time with the grandchildren, we were really there to celebrate Sue's birthday.   As a few more g...