Scattered Thoughts . . .

A lmost all the hotels in mid-town Manhattan are a bit beyond our budget so we always stay in the area just south of the Empire State Building which happens to be Koreatown.  The prices seem to be the lowest in this area but, regardless of the budget prices, some of the hotels are quite nice.  For this next trip to Manhattan this coming Christmas with Lukey and Kenzie, we had already made reservations to stay at the Life Hotel on 31st Street just a block or two from the Empire State Building. The Life Hotel was just recently reopened and is actually quite nice.  This building used to be the headquarters for Life magazine but it more recently had been converted to a hotel.  We were really excited to be staying in a hotel that used to be the headquarters for Life magazine. Since I will be our tour guide and this is Lukey and Kenzie's first trip to Manhattan, I was familiarizing myself with Grand Central Terminal late last night in preparation of this upcoming Christmas visit to Manha

T his evening, we headed up to Burlington to purchase a new pair of figure skates for Gee.  She plans to skate before some of Kenzie's figure skating lessons in preparation of skating with Lukey and Kenzie at Rockefeller Center and Bryant Park at Christmastime.   Sheila hasn't skated in decades so this will be interesting.  I would like to join them but I know my spinal injuries could not handle skating and a fall would be, at a minimum, painful for my spinal injuries or, at worst, devastating.  Instead, I'll be trying to shoot some photos and maybe some video of them skating.  And, honestly, I really don't need another TBI by falling on the ice either.   Sheila wasn't sure what size skate she needed so she grabbed a generic brand skate that was easily accessible to us just to try for size.  She laced the skate up but, when she stood on the one foot with the skate, she didn't seem all that stable.  The blade on this particular brand of skate was cheap too.  As I

W e usually start all the Christmas festivities immediately after the holiday I despise, Thanksgiving.  There are one or two other holidays that bother me a bit but I truly despise Thanksgiving.  I always make the best of that holiday anyway and, by the end of that long holiday weekend, all of our Christmas decorations are up and the tree is decorated.  This year, however, Christmas came a little earlier.  We started our Christmas gift-giving on Halloween night! Those who read this blog regularly probably already know that this year has been absolutely miserable when it comes to my health but I'll add a little background here anyway.  This year started out with an ambulance ride to the hospital and I've had about a dozen visits since then for follow-ups and tests.  I had a more extensive bone marrow biopsy not long after my ambulance ride to the hospital.  Shortly after that biopsy, I fell on the biopsy site.  We've had to cancel about a half dozen weekend out-of-town   tri

I was sitting on the couch in the living room yesterday evening before starting on cooking dinner and picked up my notebook.  I write thoughts and ideas in this notebook everyday (I now have a whole library of notebooks tucked in all sorts of places around the house) and, quite often, add some sketches of some of my ideas or thoughts.  Yesterday, I was thinking about Christmas and the lake house. Every year of my life, in the few months preceding Christmas, my mind always drifts to spending Christmas in an Adirondack lodge-type of home or lake house setting.  I have not had the opportunity to do this just yet but I do plan to do this at least once before I have no Christmases left.   The closest I have come to living this annual dream of spending Christmas in an Adirondack-type lodge or lake house has been a few Christmases spent on various air bases.  Back in my earlier years of my Air Force career, the Airman's Club was typically the hub of social life on every base.  For variou