Scattered Thoughts . . .

T he other night, Sheila and I were both awakened by a chirping alarm.  We're in the midst of furnace problems so I immediately jumped out of bed to go investigate.   I checked the smoke detector in the kitchen first...  removed the battery...  I still heard chirping so I headed to the hallway.   I pulled the smoke detector off the ceiling in the laundry room and hallway....  removed the battery...  then headed to the bathroom to relieve myself.  While in the bathroom, I heard chirping again coming from the laundry room!   My initial thoughts were of an episode of "Friends" when Phoebe has a chirping smoke detector in the middle of the night and removing the battery did not stop the chirping.  Now I was thinking that maybe there was some truth to that comedic episode and perhaps there is a capacitor inside the smoke detector that is storing power even after I remove the battery.  Now I was wondering how I might remedy that in the middle of the night without resorting to P

T oday we have some highly unusual sunny skies but it is still frigid out there at -8°.  I shot these two images through our living room window...  It actually looks great out there for some solar astronomy!  We rarely get clear skies in the winter here so these crystal clear deep blue skies are quite atypical for us.  There is no way I am heading out there though unless I absolutely must head out there.  It is far too cold for me!

M y health seems to be recovering over the past day or two, finally, so that is good.  I feel like I should be much farther along in my recovery at this point but the past day or two have seen a nice improvement in my overall health.  Unfortunately, we have other problems that are cutting into our sleep though which won't help my health at all. We learned recently that our furnace is on borrowed time now...  at the perfect wrong time considering the current frigid weather.  We spent around $800 just to hold us over through this heating season but the furnace is not running well.  Replacing the furnace in winter is rough because we would be without heat for at least a day.  If other parts need to be ordered, we could be without heat for more than a day.  That simply won't work in the dead of winter so we're trying to just make it through this heating season before we tackle installing a new furnace.   The temperatures have plunged well into sub-zero territory.  To make this

I had mentioned in a previous blog entry that we had to call a service technician to repair our furnace.  He made a bunch of necessary repairs but we still had one intermittent recurring issue.   I kept an eye on all the parts that the service technician replaced and I have to say that it is good that we called for service.  Some of the parts were cracked, deteriorated and corroded.  Those parts definitely needed to be replaced.  The service technician was at our house one night and then the following day doing repairs.  It really hurts when you have to call for service during the night! The day after his second day working on the furnace, we noticed some odd sounds coming from the furnace.  I was still feeling miserable so I was of no help.  I can barely think straight nevermind work on a furnace.  Sheila called the fuel company again to schedule service.  It would be a week before the service technician could fit us in again unless we wanted to pay the emergency visit fee again.  Th

I had been complaining about an overly short dovetail bar on one of my telescopes so I finally tackled that problem this morning.   I simply bolted a longer dovetail bar to the overly short dovetail bar.   When I have a lot of weight on the back end of this telescope (ie, diagonal, heavy eyepiece, camera, etc), I run out of dovetail length to move the telescope forward enough in the mount's saddle to properly balance the telescope.  Now, with this longer dovetail bar, I should have no problems with balance.   I still need to figure out why the views are terrible through this particular little scope but that is a different problem for a different day when I can get outside with this telescope to refine the collimation.  If refining the collimation does not help, I'll need to completely disassemble the telescope to see if I can spot any problems but I'd prefer to avoid that.  If I do have to disassemble the whole scope and I still can't spot any problems, then the cause

O verall, I have felt like I was recovering fairly steadily over the past two and a half weeks since my emergency hospital visit.  There was a bit of seesawing back and forth but I took a couple of significant steps backward last night.  Today, I'm actually feeling as though I am back at square one which would be the day after coming home from the hospital. At dinnertime last night, Sheila and I headed to Shaw's to do our weekly food shopping.  I hadn't done this since before my ambulance ride to the hospital a few weeks ago so this would be the first big test of my current health and recovery.   Although the store is only about seven minutes away, I started feeling health problems coming on about halfway there.  It started with some relatively minor difficulty breathing.  I used my inhaler in an attempt to stay ahead of the problem.  Also, I "just didn't feel right".  I couldn't put my finger on what exactly wasn't right but I knew I didn't feel r

I really hate having to collimate any telescope which is just one reason why I prefer refractor telescopes.  I have a few refractor telescopes at different focal lengths, however, I do have one Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope that does require occasional collimation.  It doesn't require collimation nearly as often as a typical Newtonian reflector telescope but it does require it occasionally.   I have the tools and the skills to collimate any telescope but having to align mirrors just to view the sky simply grates on my nerves.  I feel like it is a waste of precious time.  I have other telescopes that are ready to go at a moment's notice but I have one telescope that requires time and effort to simply view the sky...  so, I find that having to spend time and effort collimating this scope is frustrating.  It is much easier and satisfying to just grab one of my refractor telescopes to view the sky without any other pre-requisites.  Collimation is the act of aligning mirrors in an

A s I wrote in a previous blog entry, we had cancelled our plans for this past weekend and decided to do something in Waterbury that would be far less taxing on my body.  Unfortunately, it turns out that I couldn't even do that. We previously cancelled our plans for going out of town for an annual train show.  This is a very big event that requires many miles of walking each day.  It is crowded.  It is often hot in each of the four large buildings.  I knew my health was not ready for that.  Actually, I still didn't trust my health enough to simply ride in a car for three hours to get to the show.  A few days before the event, we cancelled our plans and decided to stay home. Another concern with going out of town was there is still a good chance that I might struggle with anaphylaxis while we are on the road traveling.  Then, we would need to find a hospital very quickly.  The risk was too high so we cancelled the out of town plans.  Our grandson, Lukey, had two hockey games her