Scattered Thoughts . . .

T he other night, Sheila and I attended a Christmas concert at Ellie's school and watched her perform at her first concert.  Last night, we headed out again for a Christmas concert at Lukey and Kenzie's school.  This time Lukey was performing.  This school has a nice "performing arts" building albeit a bit small.  It is an exceptionally small school so perhaps this room is large enough for expected crowd size but it sure seemed quite small to me especially considering the size of the sound gear (big sound for big spaces).  The first thing I noticed when we stepped into this building is all the Yamaha sound gear, a few pianos and nice lighting.  I found this to be quite impressive since I prefer Yamaha sound gear myself and the photographer in me is always happy to see good, effective and dramatic lighting! On this night, we found out that Lukey was singing two or three songs.  Lukey, on more than one occasion, had told us that he has been playing ...

A  couple of nights ago, we attended Ellie's first Christmas concert and it was a nice night.   After the concert, we walked in a Parade of Light...  the kids made lanterns and we walked through town behind a SD Ireland concrete truck covered in Christmas lights  (quite erroneously and far too commonly referred to as a 'cee-ment truck'...  the civil engineer side of me must point out that ' concrete  truck' is the correct term) .  Ellie had surgery on her foot recently and was in a boot so, consequently, we lagged behind significantly in this parade through the streets.  Fortunately, a police car stayed behind us the whole way to keep traffic from hitting us. After a night of music, Sheila and I stopped at The Whip at The Green Mountain Inn in Stowe for dinner.  We made it there just before closing.  Actually, they were cleaning up and closing before we even left the restaurant.  Dinner was delicious though!  We reall...

W e're still waiting on the delivery of a few presents but most of the presents are wrapped and piled up around the Christmas tree now... There is still a lot to be done around the house before we can celebrate Christmas with the grandkids but things are slowly coming along.

A fter building and installing new front and rear bumpers on my large scale trolley, I felt that these new bumpers were a bit bare for being so large so I went on a search for detail parts that would make sense in this situation and fit on these bumpers. The first thing I knew I should add is an air tank on the rear bumper.  This would be an air tank (or auxiliary air tank) for the brakes so it would make sense that it would be located on the rear bumper.  Many small switching diesels (Plymouths) had rear mounted air tanks so that was the logical place to put one on my trolley.   Unfortunately, it turns out that finding a tank in the size I needed was a problem.   I wasn't finding anything in F scale which is what I needed.  Since I needed only a small tank, I tried finding a tank in smaller scales.  Unfortunately, I didn't find any G scale tanks that would look right.  I tried O scale but most of those would be ridiculously small.  I ev...

I don't know why for sure but Thanksgiving and Christmas really caught us by surprise this year.  My internal clock is feeling like it is only early autumn. It isn't like we've been busy with a full schedule of events or travel.  We've been home.   The summer was wet and pretty much non-existent.  It doesn't even feel like we had a summer.  Summer and fall have been filled with waiting for our new water main to be installed and hooked up to the house.  And, more recently, we've had nothing but problems with that hook-up to the house which is needlessly sapping me of what little energy I have these days. I'm trying to think back on what messed up our internal clocks.  This year started with a few months of COVID yet again.  Since the beginning of the pandemic, I've been sick with COVID from January through March/April every year.  This past year I picked up the virus in Manhattan just before Christmas and was sick and continually testing...

F or the past few years, I've had a specific camera body in my "wishlist" at a used camera website where I purchase most of my cameras and lenses.  It has sat in this wishlist for a few years because this happens to be a very expensive camera that is well beyond my budget even if purchased on the used market.  A few times each week over the course of a few years, I would check the price in the hope that the price would finally hit an affordable range.  Fortunately, this used camera store had a big "Black Friday" sale a couple of weeks ago which allowed me to finally purchase this significantly upgraded camera for a ridiculously low price. My primary camera is a Sony a7 but it is the first generation of the a7 series from 2013.  Since it was released back in 2013 and was the first full-frame mirrorless camera, consequently, it has some compromises when compared to other cameras released more recently.  I really love this camera though...  it is small and it ...