Outside Cleanup

Sheila and I spent a good part of this past holiday weekend cleaning up the outside of the house.  The rain finally stopped for Labor Day weekend after an entire summer of daily rain and dark overcast skies.  We spent almost the entire summer indoors sheltered from the terrible weather.

This past weekend, we washed all the windows, inside and out.  We cleaned screens.  I even cleaned mold, algae and mildew off one side of our house including the oil tank and gas tank.  The amount of moisture we've had this summer seemed to cover everything in filthy growth, some black, some green, some very crusty.  I also did some landscaping and Sheila did some gardening attending to our remaining flowers.  The gardens are still looking pretty good for this time of year even though they got very little sun through the summer!

While I was cleaning windows on the back side of the house, I noticed that our neighbor's lawn is completely covered in leaves already!  Even though the temperature and humidity is high again (for now, anyway), I'm feeling as though we're going to see some very early snowfalls this autumn.  The trees are telling me we are in for an early snowfall.  Time will tell.  

After months of daily rain and overcast skies, the mosquitoes are a huge problem in the yard now.  It really is brutal out there.  You are attacked by swarms of mosquitoes within a few short minutes of stepping outside.  These swarming mosquitoes very much remind me of the Gulf coast except that our mosquitoes are about half the size of the Gulf coast mosquitoes.  

Typically, the mosquitoes are long gone by this time of year but this past year has been nothing even close to typical.  I think I'm going to have to spray the yard in the next day or two with a backyard bug control spray.  I did that earlier in the summer and that helped tremendously for a few weeks.  If I do it again in the next few days, that should take care of the mosquito problem for the rest of this year (well...  hopefully).  If we stay dry, for a change, I'd like to spend some time relaxing the backyard around a fire before the snow flies.  We've done very little of that this summer.  I think we did that only once in late June and once for our barbeque on July 1st...  maybe one more time.  We even had rain on those days but we managed to get a few hours to sit in the backyard between rain showers.

Washing the windows and cleaning the screens today made the biggest noticeable difference especially when looking out the windows from inside the house.  Although it is obvious that the windows and screens have been cleaned when viewed from outside the house too.  I'm always keeping an eye on our curb appeal.  

It was a fairly productive weekend but I'm still struggling with significant difficulty breathing a few times each day.  

I've noticed that the humidity really triggers this difficulty breathing.  We've had humidity ranging from around 70% to 96% each day over the past few days and the temperatures have been in the upper 80s during the day and in the mid-60s at night which makes it difficult to cool the house down (or to drop the humidity levels in the house).  My health is significantly impacted whenever the humidity rises above 60% and when the temperatures get above the 70s so the past few days have been quite lousy for my health but comes as no surprise to me.  

These breathing problems are a result of my bouts with COVID and my primary illness isn't helping at all.  Actually, the combination of both illnesses is compounding my breathing difficulties.  Without boring you with all the medical specifics, my doctors agree on this point.  Post-COVID inflammation aggravating my mast cells which is triggering significant, serious and debilitating health problems.

I'm also still struggling with joint inflammation due to COVID.  This calendar year has not improved much since my hospital visits in January through March.  We've had to cancel plans about half a dozen times this year as a result.  We've done relatively little other than deal with medical appointments and that is well beyond getting old at this point.  Actually, I'm beginning to dread medical appointments for myself.  I still don't mind accompanying Sheila for her appointments but I am sick and tired of my own poor health and medical appointments.  (I guess 25 years of regular hospital/doctor visits is my limit...  in case anyone was wondering.)

I started on a new drug a week ago in an attempt to bring my breathing issues under control and that seemed to be helping a bit until the humidity and temperature rose significantly this past weekend.  Honestly, I'm really not completely sure what is triggering these serious problems but I do know it is driving me crazy.  I have a few thoughts on some potential new triggers.  

I have another three weeks to try to make some headway with this new drug before I need to see my doctor again.  If my breathing does not improve, then I'll need to see a new specialist.  I'd really like for my breathing to improve.  Effective breathing is kind of necessary!  And, when you are having constant difficulty breathing, absolutely nothing is enjoyable...  oh...  and it is extremely difficult to accomplish anything!

In the meantime, I shot a photo that I thought I would share here.  This photo is a very different style than my usual photos.  My style of photography leans toward the contrasty side of things with deep dark colors but not over-saturated.  My typical photos are usually very sharp, crisp with a lot of contrast and deep shadows, however, this flower photo is quite the opposite of my usual...  here we have soft...  quite soft...  perhaps even wispy...  with muted, almost faint color.  I think the whitish negative space adds to this photo too.  Although this photo is quite different from my usual photos, I'm really liking it!

I initially had this photo rendered in black and white (seen below) which makes it look almost sketch-like which I also find quite nice.  I initially added this black and white version of this photo to this page before rendering a color version but I quickly realized that I might prefer it to have muted colors so I went back to my original image to work on it again and came up with the version with muted color, above.  Now I'm a bit conflicted on which version I prefer.  

I like the clarity of this black and white version but I do like having some of the original color of this flower present too.  Although the clarity is the same in the color photo, it appears to be much softer due to the faint muted colors.  The faint muted colors give it a hand-painted appearance.  At the moment, I think I'm leaning toward preferring the muted colors, above, but there is something about the simplicity of the black and white version, below, that I find very appealing too.  

Both of these versions would probably look great on heavyweight art paper!

I'll have to come back to revisit these two photos in a few days to see how I feel about each one after not seeing them for a short while.  Right now, I'm still preferring the muted colors of the topmost image.

EDIT:  A week as passed and I am still only slightly leaning toward preferring the color version.  I still feel as though both would look great printed professionally on heavyweight art paper.  

I'm going to go off on a short tangent here now...  

I was watching a video the other night of a guy who is building a model railroad in black and white.  Everything on this model railroad is in shades of gray.  The timeframe of his model is around 1910 and he reasoned that "everything was black and white then anyway", supposedly, in reference to the fact that he has only seen black and white photographs from this era.  He is quite wrong, however.  "Everything" certainly was not in black and white back then!  Even all photographs were not in black and white back then.  His statement (or claim) is absurd nonsense.

Color photographs were introduced to the world in the mid-1800s.  I admit these early color photographs were very simple, even faint, but quite complex to create.  By the early twentieth century, professional photographers were sometimes photographing in color as more film techniques became more known and practiced by professional photographers.  Even before capturing color on film, photographs were often hand-painted with muted colors that looked very, very natural.  These early color photography techniques go way back to the mid-nineteenth century.  

However, it wasn't until the 1930s that color films became more mainstream.  Actually, the long gone Kodak company introduced their Kodachrome films to the mass market in the mid-1930s.  Quite honestly, I've never been a big fan of Kodachrome film.  The colors that were unique to Kodachrome only realistically worked for a small percentage of scenes yet people tended to use this film for all scenes.  For most scenes, the colors were kind of funky yet people used this film for every type of scene and raved about it seemingly oblivious to the odd colors and odd color casts.  To this day, I swear that people don't actually see the nuances of color, tone, shadow, light and fine detail.  I firmly believe that most people are blind to fine details.  I'm afraid that, as I age and continue my own education everyday, I am finding that most people are really just ignorant lemmings.   

Anyway, this model railroading clown was going on and on about how everything was in black and white in the 1910s-1920s and he was using this as justification for creating a whole model railroad with zero color.  He modeled everything in tones of grays (and not all that well either, in my opinion).  In reality, color photographs had already been around for 50 years at that point.  

The most realistic models almost always have mostly muted colors within the scene.  You only use select vibrant color to draw the viewers' attention while most color appears muted  Not everything in real life is freshly painted in bright, saturated colors at all times.  Most things in life have muted, weathered color.  Models should represent this.

Models containing nothing but bright, saturated colors resembling bright clown make-up cause scenes to appear toy-like, elementary and child-like resembling cheap toys for toddlers.  The key to making color look good in realistic modeling is finding the right tones of modest color tone and saturation.

My color version of this flower photo, above, reminds me of early color photographs before the blight of the misuse and overuse of funky Kodachrome film.