Scattered Thoughts . . .

It's that time of year again. This is when we head south for our annual train show at the largest train show in the United States.  A few other train shows around the country erroneously  claim to be the largest train show but, when we check the facts, none even come close to this show. This is a show we look forward to all year long.  Unfortunately, I am still exhausted from our past six months of hospital visits followed by a very eventful holiday season. Sheila is understandably exhausted too. She's having difficulty with this latest cancer treatment plan so far and it is cutting into her sleep significantly. Hopefully things will ease up soon since she has ten years of this last stage of cancer treatment. Regardless, we're both looking forward to getting out of town and strolling around the largest train show in the country.  There really isn't anything on my "wish list" for purchases this year so we don't need to attempt to see the entire sho...

Actually, the last two weeks of 2017 and the first three weeks (so far) of 2018 have been exceptionally lousy but this is giving me a very uneasy feeling about this new year.  In our case, it seems that things are constantly breaking. If it is not one thing, it is another. Touch this... it breaks. Look at something else... it breaks. Fix something... turn around and there are two other things broken. The list is so long at this point that I can't even remember everything that has broken in the past four weeks! The first two problems I can remember four weeks ago were related to our electrical and our furnace.  Our electronics were all acting a bit odd and quirky. Things were shutting down on their own. Other things weren't working correctly. After a couple of hours of troubleshooting with an electronics tester, I found myself at our circuit-breaker panel with the cover off testing the monster main lines coming into the house (something I'd prefer to avoid) ... the vol...

My five year old desktop computer was constantly crashing earlier this month. This old HP computer would suddenly go black... then the HP splash screen would appear... followed by a Windows reboot. This would happen whether I was simply typing email, or working in Photoshop, or working on a video, or even when no programs were opened. I knew that some component was failing.  At around five years old, this computer was already beyond its average life expectancy for a computer workstation. If there is any good news in this story it is that I was already shopping around for a new computer long before this one started to fail. Whenever Sheila and I would window shop, we were always impressed by the Lenovo computers whether they be desktop computers or laptop computers. Actually, Sheila has been drooling over their top-of-the-line Yoga laptop but we decided it would be overkill for reading books, reading magazines and accessing social media. Since her cellphone is a Samsung, we o...