Scattered Thoughts . . .

I n addition to Sheila's doorstep colony of frogs arriving late, we had a new mantle clock arrive on Christmas Eve.  So, this was sort of a late Christmas gift to both of us from ourselves.   Most people simply use their cable set top box to display the time near the television.  Unfortunately, when Comcast installed their high end, high speed Xfinity set top box at our house, the first thing the technician pointed out was that this box has no display on it at all so there is no clock.  Actually, it is not even a "box"...   it is a big, monstrous tower that just barely fits in our shelves next to the fireplace and under the television.  I figured, "No problem...  our router can display the time" and that is what we used for a short while.   Our high speed router has a big colorful display on it which makes using the router abundantly easy.  It didn't take long before we noticed that the router was beginning to work intermittently.  I pinpointed the problem t

O ne of Sheila's childhood friends passed away a few years ago.  She left Sheila with a porcelain frog because...  well...  Dawn loved frogs and it was something that Sheila had always been very aware of throughout their childhood.  Sheila inherited this frog as a reminder of Dawn always being with us.   Well...  this porcelain frog sat comfortably on the step outside our door for only a month or so before I accidentally bumped it while doing some landscaping.  The frog fell off the step and shattered into too many pieces to repair.  I felt terrible so I immediately brought Sheila out shopping so we could pick a new frog.   We found a frog statue that is a frog sitting next to a Welcome sign.  We placed this replacement frog at our front door on the topmost step to our front deck.  This frog, by now affectionately name Dawn, sat there safely for years.  Unfortunately, the sun has not kind to this little frog and it is deteriorating terribly now.  I figured Christmas would be a good

Note:  Kenzie will not receive this Christmas gift for another week  (New Years Day)  so, if you should happen to be reading this blog before then, please say absolutely nothing to Kenzie about this gift.  We would like this to be a surprise for her! I 've been busy the past few weeks designing and building a new dollhouse addition for Kenzie.  A few years ago, I designed and built a dollhouse townhouse for her and, over the years, we've added to the interior furniture and the number of dolls for the townhouse.  We've even added window boxes, shrubbery and a tree in subsequent Christmases.   This year, Kenzie asked for some food for the dollhouse.  She wanted only food, presumably to put on her kitchen table and countertops.  She circled a number of items in one of my dollhouse catalogs so I purchased these items for her townhouse.  I still felt like her gift should be more than just a bit of food for her dollhouse, so... Since Kenzie enjoys cooking and baking, I decided to

S heila and I decided today would be a good day for a half pot of chili today.  I started early this morning by slow cooking the pork.  I got that done by lunchtime.  It was so tender and juicy that it took all my willpower not to eat everything as I pulled it apart!  Mid-afternoon, I got started on chopping all the peppers and onions.  Whenever I make chili, I add an assortment of peppers for some depth.  Today, we have three different types of peppers.   I started by sauteing about five cloves of garlic, the onion, and the peppers.  After a few minutes, I added some dark red kidney beans and black beans.  Once everything started warming up, I added a can of San Marzano crushed tomatoes followed by some beef stock with a bit of corn starch and cream.   After mixing it all together very well, I added the pulled pork from this morning.  I often just opt for ground beef because it is easier but I definitely prefer pulled pork.  Today I made the extra effort so we could add pulled pork in

A fter a few mistakes made this past weekend which delayed our traditional Thanksgiving dinner and resulted in some ruined alternate meals throughout the weekend, we managed to have a very-well prepared but rather belated Thanksgiving dinner this evening.  My favorite dish of this dinner was and always is the homemade cranberry sauce.  I added some diced apples and diced pears to the cranberry sauce this time around and that really worked out well.  I think I'll be doing that again in the future (if I remember).  It was delicious.  I had prepared the cranberry sauce on Wednesday so all we had to do this evening was open a jar where we had stored it.   I normally totally despise green bean casserole because most people make it with a can of soup and a can of fried onions.  I don't do it this way.  Actually, if I had my way, canned soup would never be in my house and especially not to be used as an ingredient to another dish.  For this green bean casserole, I made a white bechame

W e ended up changing plans for our Thanksgiving day for various reasons all more than likely related to my history of bad luck on past Thanksgivings.  This day has always been my least favorite day of the year and today was a great example of why I feel this way. First, at some point when I started to prep for our Thanksgiving dinner, I realized that I forgot to set a calendar alarm to remind me to remove the turkey breast from the freezer on Tuesday.  That meant that our turkey breast was still in the freezer and frozen solid.  After a few choice words flew from my mouth, I moved the turkey breast to the fridge and quickly accepted the fact that our traditional Thanksgiving dinner was now moved to Saturday.  I don't even like turkey so I'm not sure why I continue to make this particular meal.   Then, we received a weather alert...  A snowstorm was approaching and would begin sometime Thanksgiving night.  This meant that I would need to head outside to prepare for significant

W e started our Thanksgiving weekend yesterday with some food prep, Florida and Dayton NCAA Tournament basketball games ( never, never, never  lunkhead football in this house), and a nice Thanksgiving Eve dinner.   Yesterday, I started my morning making some sweet mint tea and homemade blackberry syrup.  Then I got started on making homemade cranberry sauce.  I made very small batches this year since we will again be home alone due to the lingering and once again flaring pandemic.   Sheila and I both had this virus before testing was even available last year (not that I have any faith in our lame testing and almost non-existent standard guidelines for testing) and it was an absolutely miserable experience so we are avoiding all chances of getting this virus again.  I am actually still struggling with debilitating inflammation and swelling so I have no desire to prolong this any longer than necessary.  So, we'll be home alone again for this holiday.  We do, however, have our Alexa S

T he moon was shining brightly through our living room window as we headed to the bedroom so I figured I would take a quick view through that new little Orion 102mm Mak-Cassegrain telescope I evaluated recently.   Sheila was in the bathroom getting ready for bed so I had a few minutes to kill.  I went to retrieve a lightweight mount and the telescope and set it up at the window to take a quick look...  I easily found the bright moon in the sky and saw nothing but out-of-focus mush.  I again repeated what I had been saying all along about this little Mak-Cass telescope...  "what a piece of junk." This prompted me to go retrieve my Skywatcher 72mm refractor which is equally as small but with a much short focal length.  I brought that out to the living room and I was immediately treated to a stunningly sharp view of the moon.   Viewing through a window with optics is a no-no because glass will cause all sorts of problems.  Heat escaping the house through an open window is often

In the past few days, I had some hands-on experience with a new Lionel train set.  When I was a child, I used Lionel trains exclusively in my model railroading hobby.  I actually had a large model railroad in our attic.  By high school, I had progressed into more realistic trains in N scale (realistic track, realistic slow speeds, realistic direction control, realistic and detailed trains, etc) but I continued using my large Lionel model railroad on the other side of the attic space.   Sometime in the 1970s, Lionel started producing more toy-like plastic trains including their locomotives.  I'm sure they still had some of their higher end, highly detailed metal trains but I only had access to my friends' lower end new Lionel trains.  Unfortunately, my experience just the other day was with very low end, almost what I would consider junk, toy-like plastic Lionel trains.  This train set is very toy-like and, worse yet, likely to prove to be easily broken by a child.   This train

I am all set up to do some solar imaging but I am now waiting for the sun to clear the trees.  This time of year, the sun travels very low across the sky so I only have a relatively short window of opportunity to observe or view the sun.   I plan to start with some white light observing and imaging of the sun's photosphere.  My solar wedge solar filter includes a Continuum filter as well as the usual IR/UV Cut, Neutral Density and Polarizing filters which has always worked fairly well for me.  I've observed and imaged this way before so there is nothing new with this configuration.  I plan to do something new today too though.  I now have a narrowband 3nm Calcium K filter inside a different solar wedge filter that I have yet to try so that will be part of today's plan.  This should produce nicer results.   The one "different" thing about this filter is that this Calcium K filter is not an observing filter.  Actually, my eyes should see nothing through this filter.

A fter a mostly sleepless night the night before last with some health issues that kept me in the bathroom and seriously cut into my sleep, I managed to get some sleep yesterday afternoon for about three or four hours in preparation of a clear night last night.  Clear nights around here are few and far between any time of year but especially in the November through March timeframe so I don't like to waste these rare nights, if possible.  This meant a relatively rare opportunity for viewing some objects in our solar system.   As the sky darkened to a deep dark blue, I set up a new telescope of mine that I have been evaluating as an option for beginners.  I had three eyepieces on hand;  a low power wide eyepiece, a medium power eyepiece, and a high power eyepiece.  I also had my Sony a6000 camera ready to go with a nosepiece on it so I could slide the camera into the diagonal in place of an eyepiece when I felt the view was worthy of recording.  Facing the back end of our backyard in

S heila was featured on the evening news this evening!  I took the easy route and just recorded it with one of my cameras while standing in front of the television.  

I was notified today that my Oncologist wants to discuss something with me again on Monday.  I'm not sure what she feels the need to discuss though since we just had a long discussion and exam at the hospital just yesterday.  I hope I'm not losing another specialist requiring me to search for a new one yet again. Sheila and I discussed a few possibilities...  like prompting me to go see my Primary Care doctor about my joint issues...  or seeing an Orthopedic specialist...  or maybe some additional bloodwork...  or maybe another bone marrow biopsy...  or maybe adding another medication to my long list of medications...   Naturally, I'll be wondering about this all weekend long.   UPDATE:  Nov 1st, 2021 - As I mentioned, above, I was notified that my Oncologist wanted to do a Televideo chat today, Nov 1st.  So, I called the office this morning to find out how they wanted to connect in Zoom.  The receptionist thought it was strange that I didn't get an email with a link

S heila and I had to run to the hospital unexpectedly at the last minute the other day to visit the lab in preparation of today's scheduled visit.  I figured I would be heading to the lab after my appointment that was scheduled for today but my oncologist wanted the lab tests done beforehand.  I got a phone call from Oncology requesting I head to the hospital two days earlier than planned.  Then, this morning, we headed up to UVM Oncology again for my scheduled appointment.   My usual lab results had no changes which is good news, I suppose.  The same things that have always been wrong with my lab results indicating Systemic Mastocytosis are unchanged.  The good news part of this equation is that the numbers aren't worse. My oncologist was a bit concerned about two things...  1) She seemed shocked by how low my oxygen saturation is getting at least once every week.  She was visibly surprised hearing that my O2 levels are getting down into the 80s (%) and sometimes even lower. 

Introduction T his blog entry is a little different than my usual entries.  Then again, my thoughts are often a bit scattered so there isn't really a consistent theme to this blog.  I do sometimes write about my hobbies including astronomy but this blog entry is not one of my typical short blog entries about viewing this or that or about some small astronomy project.  This is more along the lines of a casual review of my thoughts about a telescope.  If you are more interested in some astrophotography images rather than read about a boring telescope evaluation, then just scroll down to the closing of this blog entry (about halfway down this page). Quite often, people who are wanting to get involved in backyard astronomy for the first time ask other astronomers which telescope would be best to purchase as their first telescope.  This is a very common question that is asked at least once a day.  As a result, I find myself trying to provide advice to astronomy beginners a few times eac