Scattered Thoughts . . .

We had a mild dusting today of yellow... pollen!   Actually, we've never seen pollen this thick and heavy here before...

I was down and, for the most part, relegated to the couch for about a month recently due to some significant foot problems. I visited the doctor... we did some x-rays... and came to some conclusions about tendonitis, arthritis and subsequent swelling. The swelling was significant enough that I could not walk on it nor could I fit into any of my shoes. After about a month of hobbling around with a cane and a lot of pain, my foot slowly felt more like "normal" again.  Then, after about a week of "relatively normal" activity on my foot, I suddenly began having problems again! The recurring tendonitis (Achilles tendon) was making it difficult and painful to walk again and I was feeling some swelling in my heel (as opposed to my entire foot last time around). Although there is no doubt that after decades of extreme sports and a physically demanding career that my feet are a weak point and prone to injury, I've been feeling as though something other than activit

I admit that I am 'hard' on my computers. That is a plain and simple fact.  The work I do on my desktop computer constantly keeps my processors crunching numbers, spinning my hard drives and heating up. Additionally, as my cameras (both stills and video) improve each year, I find that my computer has great difficulty keeping up while getting bogged down very quickly. Because of all this graphics processing, my computers rarely last more than three years before biting the dust. Now that 4K video is becoming more mainstream and 6K cameras are available (and 8K is right around the corner), the average computers from three years ago are not at all equipped to handle streaming video of this resolution. Even trying to edit multiple 'Full HD' video clips is enough to bog down an average three year old computer. As technology moves forward, all your tools must move forward and the computer is an important tool. My current desktop computer is now more than three years old

I wrote a quick blog entry the other day about Liza's graduation ceremony so I could share a few photos rather quickly. This morning, I'll share a few more photos, a small photo album and a very short video.  As I wrote previously, we are all very proud of what Liza has managed to accomplish. Attaining her BA in Psychology was no small feat. Attaining this degree with a high GPA is even more impressive. We are proud of her and she should be proud of herself. If one would like to skip this blog entry and run directly to the photo album, here is the link: Liza's Graduation - 13 May 2017 Edit:   After a week or so, I swapped out the color portraits for black and white versions.  I never liked those color versions because there were far too many wildly varying bright colors fighting against wildly differing patterns. (This is a problem I always encounter when shooting photos of the grandchildren too.)  I converted these portraits to black and white so I could at least eli