Scattered Thoughts . . .

A s expected, we ate too much corned beef and cabbage last night.  That was good!  We always eat so much corned beef that we run out of meat long before running out of potatoes, cabbage and carrots.  In the future, perhaps I should make about four pounds of corned beef whenever I make this meal.  We finished dinner completely stuffed...  over-stuffed. Now that was a good meal.

T he Irish Soda Bread is now out of the oven and being eaten...  and it is very good, as always! This really is easy to make but it gets a bit frustrating when mixing of the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients.  The dough gets so sticky and thick that it is difficult to mix and handle.  It sticks to everything!  You mix it with a big wooden spoon and you end up with more on the spoon than in the bowl.  If you knead it with your hands, you quickly have nothing left to knead because the dough is completely sticking to and covering your hands.  You end up spending a lot of time effort getting the dough from your spoon, your hands and the bowl into the springform pan.   It is good though! I have already put the corned beef in the oven and started prepping dinner.   This time I added dried cranberries as well as the usual golden raisins.  We'll see how we like it with the cranberries added.  I usually soak the golden raisins in bourbon or rum but we don't have any in the house

A s I mentioned in a few previous blog entries, I sent an old Panasonic camera in for service to be converted to infrared sensitivity.  This will allow this particular camera to capture only monochrome infrared images rather than color images in visible light.   Once I get the camera back, I'll be able to show some good examples of monochrome infrared images and more easily explain how this differs from typical black and white photography in visible light.   In the meantime, I ordered a tiny pancake lens (on the camera in this lead photo) which is supposed to be good in infrared light so it would be the perfect lens for this newly converted infrared camera.   Some (or perhaps most) lenses are poor for infrared photography.  This particular one I ordered is reported by many photographers to be good in infrared light.  Another plus is that it is a tiny lens and I wanted a small lens for this small camera that I had converted to infrared.  Another plus is that it is a wider than aver

I was intending to make some homemade home fries, bacon, eggs and toast for breakfast followed by some fried apples but I was too hungry to make such a large meal.  I needed to eat as soon as possible so I changed my breakfast plan to having French toast, berries, and bacon.  It was easier to make, would require less energy, require less energy, and it turned out to be delicious! This breakfast really has nothing to do with Ireland but it was a good breakfast that was easy to make.  The food of Ireland will come later today. After lunch, I'll be baking some homemade Irish Soda Bread.  That is something both Sheila and I really like.  My Irish Soda Bread is softer than most and definitely more moist that typical store-bought Irish Soda Bread.  I also make some sweet butter to go with it.  It is really like a dessert dish.  I sort of has a cake-like texture to it but it is crusty like a bread.   After the bread goes in the oven, I'll clean up the kitchen and start prepping for c

While Sheila and I were moving the wet, heavy, foot or more of snow this evening, I tripped while trying to move the snowblower in reverse and I fell right onto my right pelvis...  the site of last week's biopsy...  and the pain was so brutal that I was seeing stars and just continued to lie there in the snow where I landed.   I figured that, at that point, it was probably good to just lie there in the cold snow.  Lying on my back in the snow actually was applying pressure and ice on the site of my biopsy so I really was in no hurry to attempt to get back up on my feet.  The pain was bad enough that trying to get back up to my feet would be difficult anyway.   How I ended up in this predicament is I was blowing snow on the back side of the house cutting a clear path from the road back to our oil tank and gas tank.  This put me out of sight from Sheila who was in the driveway on the other side of the house.  After my trip and fall, I figured I would take a little break and lie there

W e are in the midst of a bit of a snowstorm here at the moment so, while I wait for the storm to subside a bit before heading out to remove snow from our roof, I dug out some additional Panasonic G3 color photos that I shot while at the lake house back in 2015.   I enjoy getting out on a kayak and shooting wildlife photos.  While at the lake, these photos were mostly of loons.  I also have some nice duck photos and some Bald Eagle photos.  The Bald Eagle photos were shot with my Sony cameras though so they are not included here.  The past few blog entries have been solely about my little old Panasonic G3 so I've only included photos that I shot using that camera. The first two photos here were shot at dusk.  This old camera struggled a bit once the light dropped off to lower levels.  What I like about this first photo is you can actually make out the iridescent blue band on the loon's neck.  This loon was looking for fish to eat and I captured this photo just as he took his he

T oday I went digging into old hard drives searching for some old photos from the camera that I just sent in to be converted to Monochrome Infrared.  The camera I am having converted to monochrome is my old Panasonic Lumix G3.  I won't be able to shoot color photos with this camera anymore so I figured I should dig out some old color photos that I shot using this camera as a reminder of its colorful days.  Truth be told, I never really shot a whole lot of photos using this camera.  For a relatively short one or two summers, however, it was my main camera for wildlife photography while at the lake house due to its slightly larger crop factor (2x) which provided me with a longer zoom.  I have captured quite a few really nice images of loons, ducks, and nature but each of those images always needed a lot of post-processing work.  This camera was replaced as my primary wildlife photography camera when I purchased my first Sony camera.  Those Sony cameras produce so much nicer results a

Yesterday morning, I packaged up a small mirrorless camera of mine to ship to a camera facility for service.  Sheila and I then dropped it off at the Post Office.   The short trip down to the Post Office and back was enough to do me in for the rest of the day though.  Riding in a car, especially on the rougher than usual roads in the winter, is brutal.  Riding in a car normally bothers my spinal injuries and often affects my Systemic Mastocytosis by agitating and activating my mast cells but yesterday's very short trip to the local Post Office was a painful ride due to my recent bone marrow biopsy.  I was glad to be back home after this short trip. I sent my small Panasonic Lumix G3 camera to a place on the west coast that specializes in infrared conversions.  This conversion will allow my camera to record in the infrared wavelengths rather than the usual visible light wavelengths.  To be more precise, I am having it converted to pick up light only in the  wavelengths from  830nm

I'm slowly but steadily recovering from my bone marrow biopsy.  It seems like the biopsy was the day before yesterday but today is the fourth day of recovery.  I've done a lot of sleeping when the pain would allow for some sleep.   I slept about 13 hours last night so that was good.  I awoke at around 5:30am but, contrary to the past few mornings, I was able to go back to sleep with no difficulty.  We got up at around 9am and Sheila did some yoga and then I made a fairly big breakfast.  So, I suppose I'm feeling well enough to do some cooking. Breakfast was good! I still have quite a bit of pain whenever I attempt to do anything.  Bending especially is painful...  sitting back against anything that puts some pressure on the site of the biopsy is even more painful...  and laying on my right side is better than it has been but at least it is possible now for short periods...  so things are improving.   At rest when nothing is touching the area of the biopsy, the pain is now a