Scattered Thoughts . . .

I shot quite a few photos while in Manhattan last week but a significant portion of these photos were shot atop the Empire State Building.  I decided to preview a couple of these photos and since they looked so good, I will share them here in this blog entry before I write about our visit to the famous observation deck towering above midtown Manhattan. To be honest, when I first previewed and sorted my photos from the trip, I was a bit disappointed by the photos I shot at the Empire State Building.  Even when I was shooting the photos, I was a bit uncertain about how good they would be for quite a few very good reasons.   First, it was frigid up there so I was shivering and distracted.  It is hard to stay focused and think clearly when you are being blasted by frigid air and wind.   As you would expect at this altitude (1,050 feet),  the wind was whipping so much that I had to brace myself to keep from wobbling and swaying in the wind...  I had no tripod since they are not allowed at

W hen we traveled to Manhattan from Vermont, we were supposed to arrive in Penn Station on Amtrak and the kids (mostly Lukey) were really looking forward to pulling into this station and riding the escalator up to the new main train hall.  Unfortunately, our Amtrak train was cancelled altogether due to flooding in Vermont so we had to drive down to Manhattan instead which meant that the kids missed out on their train ride on Amtrak as well as seeing Penn Station, especially the new train hall at Penn Station. On our second day in Manhattan, we found that even the Manhattan subway system was trying to recover from flooding.  This caused some transportation issues for us. We had a reservation for a visit at a specific time at the Museum of Natural History but we couldn't get there in time due to these subway problems.  On our way up to the museum, we only got as far as Columbus Circle (59th Street) but we had only minutes left to get to our reservation at the museum (81st Street).  N

T he past two nights have been quite lousy.  My health has been so lousy that I needed to use epinephrine during the night last night.   During my previous bouts of COVID, my doctors have assumed that COVID is causing an undesired response in my primary illness.  It causes inflammation which causes a response by my mast cells.  I already have a life threatening issue with inflammation and mast cells so anything that exasperates this is not a good thing.  So, in response, I need to throw medications at both problems.   I awoke in the middle of the night after only an hour or two of sleep both last night and the night before last.  I was having difficulty breathing both nights.  This was clearly a case of needing to clear out my lungs because, as I would do some coughing and huffing, I could get a little bit of phlegm to come up and that always seemed to help my breathing enough to be able to get back to sleep. Last night, however, regardless of some phlegm coming up from my lungs, I was

I spent a good portion of a recent summer on crutches due to 'long COVID' causing lingering inflammation and swelling of some of my joints.  The joints that seemed to be affected the most, for me, were my knees, ankles and elbows.  Sheila also had this problem around the same time in her wrist and elbow joints.   I'm still trying to recover from my latest COVID infection...  still seesawing back and forth with fevers, hacking up thick gunk, difficulty breathing, swollen eyelids, overwhelming fatigue...  but the past couple of days have also seen the return of extremely painful knee joints. The best way to describe this pain is it is a sharp but consistent pain deep in my knee...  behind the kneecap and between the femur and tibia.  I haven't noticed any swelling yet but I am familiar with this pain so I won't be surprised to see some swelling soon.  The pain is always there but worse during use of the joint. We were supposed to celebrate Christmas with the kids and

M y piano has been broken for almost two months which has been a bit frustrating.   It started showing signs of a problem with my pedals one day.  As I was playing a piece, I instantly noticed that the piano was sounding very muddy like I had my foot mashed down on the sustain pedal but I hadn't been using the pedal.  I stopped playing and then played a single staccato note...   the note sustained rather than being a short duration.  I snapped the sustain pedal up and down a few times...  the pedal unit still wasn't working correctly. I turned the piano off and went around to the other side of the piano to unplug the pedal unit and re-plug it into its jack.  I did that and then started up the piano again.  It seemed okay for a day or two but then the same thing happened again. Over the course of the next few days, sometimes the pedal unit would sustain all the time, other times it would not respond at all, sometimes it worked as it should.  Most of the time, however, it had a m

This is another blog entry with a lot of photos and a short video down at the bottom of the page. N ot only did Gee and Kenzie get to skate at Rockefeller Center but we also scheduled an early morning skating session at Bryant Park.  Of course, Lukey was supposed to skate with them on both days but he was on crutches with a broken foot so he stuck with me during the skating sessions.   This session at Bryant Park wasn't as early as the session we had previously at Rockefeller Center but it was their earliest session of the day for Bryant Park.  We figured that the crowd would be thinner earlier in the morning plus the ice would be best first thing in the morning.  The temperatures reached into the 40s during the day while we were there which isn't so great for ice, however, the ice would have a chance to freeze well through the night when nobody was skating on it and the temperatures were down around freezing again.  By the end of the day, both rinks had been soft with puddles

As with all my blog entries related to our trip to Manhattan, this one will  also be heavy in photos. There is also a relatively short video at the bottom of the page. W e were scheduled for skating sessions at Rockefeller Center and Bryant Park during our stay in Manhattan.  First up was Rockefeller Center though.  I don't remember why we chose Rockefeller Center first but it might have had something to do with being able to make a reservation much farther in advance than at Bryant Park. Sheila scheduled their skating session at Rockefeller Center for 7:20am which happened to be shortly after sunrise.  This meant we would be walking to Rockefeller Center in the dark which we didn't realize until after she chose the time.  Walking in the dark is not a problem.  We simply were not expecting it.  We wanted to beat the crowds and figured the earliest times would be best for less crowded rinks.  Actually, since it was still dark out, that made the walk even nicer with all the Chris

F irst, I'll address Sheila's current health with COVID...  She has a low grade fever coming and going all through the day.  She's exhausted.  She has a mild sore throat and she is coughing and sneezing with a runny nose.   Other than the fatigue which is noticeably affecting her, she seems to be doing better than she did with the flu a month ago.  I can only assume she is doing relatively well with this bout of COVID due to being current in her vaccinations and boosters.   The really frustrating thing is that when she contacted her doctor's office this morning they pretty much did nothing for her because she has not tested positive for COVID.  The fact that I have tested positive and she is symptomatic apparently means nothing for getting treatment.  She is over 50 years old so she is in the higher risk category so common sense is telling me that her doctor's office should have jumped on getting her on Paxlovid since she is symptomatic and I tested positive in the

A fter arriving at our hotel, the Hilton Midtown, we were anxious to go on our first site-seeing walk of this blustery cold Christmastime trip.   There would be plenty of walking over the next few days but I'm sure this first nighttime walk in midtown Manhattan was the most impressionable for Lukey and Kenzie.  This was a bit of a culture shock for them...  the skyscapers, the architecture, the lights, the hustle and bustle of crowds, the horns, the sirens, the trucks...  this was something different, for sure. We dropped off our bags, dressed warmly for the cold wind whipping off the ocean and through the canyons of tall building, and then headed back down to the lobby so we could make our way out the front doors of the hotel to Sixth Avenue.   Here is the very large, expansive lobby of the hotel... As you step out of the lobby onto Sixth Avenue, there is an old Checker Cab in front of the hotel.  Personally, I miss those unique giant cabs.  I'm not at all fond of all the new