Scattered Thoughts . . .

I have a little bit of time to kill before heading to another medical appointment this morning so I thought I would add a few more photos to my blog.  I'm heading to a new specialist this morning... a type of appointment which is never really 'fun' and with a new doctor you never know what to expect. There is a lot of unnecessary crap hanging over my head right now including the threat of losing my Social Security Disability Insurance benefits. Actually, this really pisses me off and adding in this new specialist isn't helping any.  So, I have a bit of time to kill this morning and thought I would share a few photos from last week... This first photo is of a slightly uncooperative loon. Although he was paddling away from me, he kept looking back to see if I was still there photographing him...  This was an early morning photo. The contrast was low because I had to bump up the exposure quite a bit to capture some detail in this mostly black loon. Now the loon ...

About three weeks ago, I wrote about buying an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) and being certified by the FAA to fly one of these things. My plan was to get some aerial video footage of the lake house and some of our activities.  As often seems to be the case when it comes to my experiences in new endeavors, nothing really went according to plan with this UAS. In my initial flight tests (just a couple of short flights in my first outing), I found that control of this UAS was rather lousy. You use your phone or tablet with an app to control this UAS and there was a lot of lag. You would use the app to try to rotate clockwise... lag...  lag... lag... finally, it would either slowly start to turn clockwise like it was trying to fly through molasses or it would suddenly start a fast, jerky movement to clockwise. It was usable but it was disconcerting and a bit frustrating. Next, I quickly realized that the video quality wasn't nearly as good as I had hoped. The bit depth was la...

Although we have not made a 100% final decision just yet, we did say farewell to the lake house again yesterday and, perhaps, this was also our final farewell.  Upon arriving back home, last night we sat down and compiled a list of pro's and con's related to heading to the lake house every summer. There are very many pro's on this list but the con's are quite compelling and pretty damning.  I spent much of the past week sleeping through our time at the lake house. I was exhausted but I didn't want to sleep because there were so many fun things to do that I still had not crossed off my own 'to-do' list. Instead, I slept... then we packed up over the course of three days... and we headed back home.  I'll be sharing more photos and videos of our time at the lake over the course of the foreseeable future so this does not mean an end to that! Right now I need to rest up a bit so we can try to do a few more things this summer...  I'd especi...