Scattered Thoughts . . .

I 've been trying to keep up with moving snow each day this week.  Winter finally arrived here in our neck of the woods and we are finally seeing some snowfall.   The snow this morning is deep and exceptionally heavy.  We're trying to dig out as quickly as we can because Lukey has a state championship hockey game at 1pm today.   Getting to the game depends on two things...  digging out the car...  and my health after digging out...  I've been moving snow almost every day this week.  Most days I've had to move about four inches of mostly light snow.  Yesterday or the day before was about eight inches of snow that needed to be moved...  that is from our driveway, pathways around the house including to the oil tank and gas tank, and removing snow from the roof.  Today was clearly a minimum of 12 inches of wet heavy snow...  more in some spots, less in others.  Most important is removing the snow off the roof when it is heavy and over about six inches.  The biggest problem

Our new refrigerator arrived today, as scheduled, so that is a bit of good news during perhaps the worst start of any new year in my life.   The furnace broke down in the middle of the night in late January and now needs to be replaced.  The refrigerator broke down and needed to be replaced because it was beyond repair.  Sheila's mom is in the hospital with a fractured spine, Alheimer's, and now COVID.  Sheila's dad also now has COVID.  I spent some time in the hospital and I need to head back to the hospital next week for a bone marrow biopsy.  My health is still rather poor with continued problems that had landed me in the hospital about a month and a half ago.  It really has been a miserable start to the new year. Just as I finished shoveling the deck and snowblowing in preparation of this refrigerator delivery, the truck pulled up to the house.  That was perfect timing since it was still snowing fairly heavily.  If they had arrived later in the day I would have had to d

I think I had previously written that our big, high end and relatively new refrigerator (I think almost six years old) bit the dust late last week.  The icemaker was defective and has been a problem for a few years and that ended up frying our compressor.  There was also some other damage to another part that is not replaceable.  In the end, Sheila and I ordered a far lower end refrigerator which is scheduled to be delivered on Tuesday.   We had to compromise quite a bit in our selection of a new refrigerator.  There are not too many choices when you need a refrigerator as soon as possible.  The pandemic has put a hurt on the market as well so inventory is far lower than normal too.   As we wait for our new refrigerator to arrive, we moved all of our salvageable frozen meat to a cooler and secured it outside in the sub-freezing temperature.  We moved all of our refrigerated items to an unheated storage closet in our back hallway.  Fortunately, this happened during the winter.  If it w

I am still working on learning all I can about my new-to-me classic digital camera, the Fujifilm X30.  Each day I'm learning a bit more...  mostly good but I'm also finding its limitations.  No matter the tool, you must always know that tool's limitations and cameras are no exception.  Finding this camera's limitations is a good thing.  I want to know its limitations. I've saved seven custom profiles that I might prefer in various situations and environments.  I still need to get out to test these custom profiles but I now have a starting point for each.  One of the things that makes Fujifilm cameras so desirable to many photographers is the amount of customization you can do to each shot.  There is an uncharacteristically wide choice in choosing the perfect dynamic range, color, sharpness, shadows, highlights, noise reduction and white balance.  This camera provides more control for shifting the white balance than any other camera I have ever used whch is incredib