Scattered Thoughts . . .

As I had written previously, we spent the day outdoors decorating the house and yard for Christmas. It looks great out there! The only thing which can make it look better is some fresh snow. After finishing decorating outdoors, we headed indoors and continued since we already had all the storage bins of decorations out and open. Now, the inside of the house is looking pretty nice too!

Today was sunny and near 70 degrees so we took advantage of the beautiful, unseasonable weather to get our outdoor Christmas decorating out of the way. It felt great to have a very productive day... first time in months! I'm usually outdoors putting up Christmas decorations in mid-December... in weather in the 30s... raining... soaked and freezing so badly that my fingers will no longer move. This year we got lucky! They say we have about a foot of snow arriving tomorrow but I'll believe it when I see it. Regardless, the outside of the house is ready for the holidays. We even managed to get a head start on indoors. We don't plan to get all of the indoor stuff done this weekend but we will be close! We even put about 1400 lights on that tall, neatly trimmed tree in the background...   We've been on a roll with decorating and needed to pull out all the storage bins since they weren't labeled by "indoor decorations" and "outdoor decoratio...

I don't have a whole lot of recordings of myself on piano but I still do have a few audio clips left to share. So, before I head to bed and call it a night, I thought I would share a couple more recordings. Tonight's theme is movies. I'm going to share themes to two movies... the theme to "The Notebook" and the theme to "Chances Are". For what it's worth, I think that both are good movies but "Chances Are" is a much more entertaining movie. Actually, I wouldn't mind watching it again right now! As I've mentioned when sharing audio clips previously, these are just clips and not the full pieces.  Theme from "The Notebook", written by Aaron Zigman Unsupported Browser! Theme from "Chances Are" called "After All", written by Dean Pitchford and Tom Snow Unsupported Browser!

My health seems to be slowly recovering (from these latest issues) which has allowed me to have a fairly productive day for a change.  Well... by "day", I really mean morning. I sleep every afternoon so nothing ever gets accomplished in the afternoons. I did have a relatively good morning though and I have to say, "it's about time!" I've been getting a bit anxious about getting everything ready for Christmas since my health has caused my to-do list to do nothing but grow longer and longer since before we headed to the lake house in June. It was nice to be able to do a few things around the house this morning like laundry and other little projects. Mostly, my priority right now is to get a jump on getting ready for Christmas in case my health deteriorates again. We've managed to get most of our Christmas shopping out of the way and, today, I started to pull out some Christmas decorations. We should have some good weather over the next two days so I ho...

I've spent almost all of the past eight or nine days split between the couch and the bathroom due to multiple health issues. This morning, however, I felt halfway decent... I was still overwhelmingly exhausted but I felt halfway decent. I was itching to accomplish something... anything... It just so happens that this morning was warm and sunny. Combine this type of weather with feeling halfway decent for the first time in well over a week and it is safe to say that I was going to wander outdoors.  I still didn't feel well enough to work on the yard or house so I decided to attempt some photography in the backyard. I grabbed my camera and decided to test out my newly acquired Canon FD 135mm f2.0 all-manual lens (no auto-focus, no auto-exposure). I mounted this hefty lens on my camera and headed outdoors. This lens is more appropriate as a portrait lens and I was immediately reminded of this fact when I tried to shoot a photo of some dried up autumn flowers... I couldn...

In my previous blog entry, I mentioned that I've been experiencing more than a week of quite miserable health. Since I sort of use my blog as a journal for some of the more significant health issues, I suppose I should write about this here. At first, I thought maybe I was experiencing food poisoning... but, sometime in the middle of this holiday weekend, Sheila began to get, stomach cramps and diarrhea too. Now I'm thinking I've been trying to shake a virus... and history has proven that due to my health issues, I sometimes need a few months to shake something like this... or, sometimes I can shake it in a week or two. Time will tell. I was in and out of the bathroom for more than a week... about eight solid days of sickening diarrhea. This isn't "typical" diarrhea of a relatively healthy person who ate something nasty. This was more like the typical diarrhea of people struggling with Systemic Mastocytosis and/or various carcinoid tumors. I'm going to...

Tonight... just before dawn on the east coast... 6:22am, to be exact... our moon will be the closest to Earth tonight until we have another "supermoon" in 2034. I had hoped to capture the moon as it rose over the mountains outside our living room. More specifically, I had hoped to capture the moon just as it was cresting over the tree lined mountain ridge, capturing crisp trees with the supermoon behind it.  I peered through the window before coming to my desk but there was no moon in the sky just yet. It wasn't even five minutes later when I heard Sheila ask from the other room, "Is the supermoon tonight?"   I immediately asked, "Is the moon over the mountains already ?" "Yup." "Ugggg."  Then I grabbed my camera, a freshly charged battery, and my newly purchased Canon 400mm f5.6L lens. I have very little experience with this lens but I knew that this particular lens should be, by far, the best super-telephoto lens I...