Scattered Thoughts . . .

We've traveled quite a bit by train over the years. Naturally, there have been a few memorably long delays due to derailments. Derailments are quite rare and I've only been affected by two in about thirty years of Amtrak rail travel but, when they happen, it is time consuming, frustrating and memorable! I was on one train that derailed in one incident and, in another, we were delayed by about eight hours due to a freight train derailing up ahead of us. During both incidents, it really would have been nice to know what was happening and to have an estimated time of when we'd be back on track (pun intended). But, how would that be possible? When the train that I was on derailed while I was on my way to my sister's wedding,  Amtrak resolved the issue within a couple of hours. T he tracks were washed out due to heavy rains in the preceding weeks and only one or two of the cars came off the tracks. They sent buses to pick us up and transported us to a station about sixty

I just thought I'd write a quick update on Sheila's treatment problems.   After the ER visit a few weeks ago, Sheila's Oncology team decided that the significant symptoms she was experiencing were probably not due to her new treatment drug.  Since they were fairly certain that the treatment wasn't presenting these significant symptoms as side effects of the treatment drug, we came up with a plan to get back on the treatment plan and give it a shot again. Unfortunately, Sheila was back on this particular treatment drug only two days before one of the significant symptoms appeared again... and now it is only a week later and both of the significant symptoms that landed her in the ER are back again. At this point, we're both quite certain that these are actually side effects of her cancer treatment and they are far too severe to be tolerated for a long term treatment plan. Right now, these symptoms are more mild than the first time around but it is still only a m

My health took a nosedive more than a week ago... and then, more recently, took a deeper nosedive with terrible nausea, weakness and general malaise holding me back and keeping near the bathroom. I'm still recovering but, as always when I am recovering, I am now trying to find little things around the house that I can actually accomplish without triggering my health to crash yet again.  This time around, I decided to scroll through some old photos to see if could find anything worth salvaging. All three of these photos, below, were shot at Oakledge Park on Lake Champlain. These photos were shot back a number of years ago when I was shooting with a couple of cameras that did nothing but cause me grief. I always seemed to struggle to get decent shots and especially when the light was not ideal. Ironically, the light was terrible for all three of these photos below. I really had to search to find good, interesting light. This first photo was shot from a rocky beach looking towar

Talking with the staff at The Presidio, planning our visit... Our cross country rail journey to San Francisco by way of The Lakeshore Limited and California Zephyr trains has been foremost in our thoughts lately (even more than all our health problems so that is good news). This past weekend, we made some progress on these plans as we booked rooms for our stay in San Francisco.  At this point, we're not sure if we'll ever make it back to San Francisco so we decided to choose rooms which are unique, in a great location, moderately affordable, and meet the highest of standards. With this criteria, there wasn't much of a list of options. We quickly chose to stay at an inn on National Park grounds at The Presidio.  We needed to jump on booking these particular reservations because the rooms in this Inn on the grounds of The Presidio have a booked rate of 100% every single day since the inn opened more than six years ago. We knew that if we waited too long to make reser