Scattered Thoughts . . .

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