Scattered Thoughts . . .

I 've been busy with landscaping projects over the past couple of weeks whenever I am feeling well enough.  This is good news because it has been helping me build up my strength again after months of COVID and long-COVID. Whenever I am done sweating from the morning of work in the yard, I then check myself for ticks before stepping into the shower.  Last night, unfortunately, I never made it to the shower because I was exhausted, I had to make dinner, I was still sweating, etc.  I just never got to the shower.  I had changed out of my sweaty clothes when I came in at lunchtime but I never did make it to the shower yesterday so I skipped a more thorough tick check too. This morning, I headed back outside to plant flowers into our window boxes.  We had purchased a bunch of flowers a few nights ago but I hadn't had time to plant them until this morning.  This was an easy job and only required about an hour of work.  After planting, I cleaned up the mess I made, put the gardening t

Over the past few days, I've been having a conversation in a photography forum about how to shoot monochrome images.  More specifically, someone had asked how to better utilize the in-camera color filters to get darkened skies.   She was having difficulty seeing much of a difference between images shot without a filter and images shot with a filter.   It just so happens that I spent some time running some experiments pertaining to this topic a couple of years ago so I had quite a bit of useful advice. This photographer explained that the skies were hazy and most of the scene was green foliage but that she could not see much of a difference between images shot without any in-camera color filters and those shot with a red in-camera filter.  Now she was wondering if she was doing something wrong or wondering if a true physical filter on the lens would be better. I was the first in this forum to respond to her.  I explained that hazy conditions are lousy for getting darkened skies in m

E ven though our summers are extremely short up here in Vermont, I've always had nagging thoughts about a small garden railroad nestled somewhere in amidst our flower gardens.  I think I finally found the right place among our gardens for a small elevated garden railroad.   Adjacent to where our backyard putting green was located (I'm in the process of repurposing this area to horseshoe pits...  another ongoing project for this spring), we had a small, overgrown garden area consisting of some shrubs, berry vines and mostly weeds.  In the process of cleaning up this area for the horseshoe pits, I saw this area in the very different light that I felt would be great for a small garden railroad.  The area is about 16' x 8'.   Here is an aerial view of this small area... The round things lined up in a row running across the top of the image are concrete test cylinders that I have been using as a border along one side of the pitching and putting green.  I've been using th