Scattered Thoughts . . .

M y right eye is back to feeling normal again so I guess my scratched cornea has healed.  It was quite painful for a while! In the beginning of the pain, I didn't remember doing anything that could have caused a scratched cornea.  Then one evening when I was tending to my eye in front of the bathroom mirror, I did something that reminded me exactly of what caused my scratched cornea.   I had picked up my eyeglasses with one hand because the eye drops were in my other hand.  Usually I use two hands with my eyeglasses so that I don't cause bent lopsided eyeglasses.  This time I had the eye drops in one hand and tried putting my eyeglasses on my head with the other hand.  I suddenly remembered that I did the same thing a few nights previously... Back a few nights previously, I had something else in my right hand when I attempted to place my eyeglasses on my head with my left hand.  Unfortunately, I misjudged distance and I poked my right eye with the right temple tip of my eyeglas

M ost of our 50 tulips have bloomed in our playhouse gardens.  We have two new gardens flanking each side of the steps leading up to the playhouse.  Kenzie and Gee did a good job at planting last fall.  Thanks to Will and Sue's gift of tulip bulbs and Gee and Kenzie's work, we now have two very colorful tulip gardens in front of the playhouse! A few days ago, we started to worry about whether this tulip garden idea would work in this location.  The few tulips that had bloomed weren't looking all that healthy.  They were wilting a bit and the long leaves were sort of curling over.  Actually, even those that hadn't bloomed yet weren't looking too healthy either.  So, we were a bit worried. We weren't sure if maybe there is too little sun (which is true since these gardens are under a big tree) or if these young tulips were already somehow diseased in some way.  I determined that the soil may have been a bit too wet especially for two gardens that are mostly in sha

I finished my homemade telescope pier extension project today and it seems to be working as planned. There isn't a whole lot in life that is more satisfying than designing something in sketches in a notebook, then building each individual part yourself, then assembling all the parts and finding that everything works just as designed and planned! My primary problem that prompted this project was that my longer telescopes would hit the tripod legs when viewing almost straight upward.  Also a factor in my decision is that my astronomy tripod isn't tall enough for my longer refractor telescopes which meant I would need to sit down very low on the ground to see into the eyepiece.  I needed a pier extension to raise the mount and telescope higher.   Some may ask why I don't just extend the legs fully to gain some overall height but this is a bad idea for two reasons.  First, it will do nothing for me to resolve the telescope colliding with the tripod legs.  And next, the more yo