Scattered Thoughts . . .

I 've been wanting to go back to medium format film since the very beginning of the pandemic.  In fact, I restored a 75 year old folding 6x6 medium format camera in January of 2020 when the pandemic first began.  Now it is six years later and I still have not shot any film through that camera but I'm still itching to go back to film alongside my digital photography. I do occasionally shoot some instant medium format film through a twin lens reflex camera (shown in photo below) and I have a medium format printer that prints any of my digital images on instant medium format film.  My Sony a7 images look great on this film. I suppose the main reason I have delayed shooting any film stock in my older film camera is because I have had COVID twice a year, every year, since January of 2020.  Each time I get this virus, it knocks me down for a few months.  By the time I'm feeling well enough to tackle anything, my list of priorities has changed drastically with repairs ...

W e've had an old, beat-up, dented, filthy range hood residing in our kitchen longer than I myself have lived here.  Shortly after I moved in, I noticed it was an eyesore so I cleaned it up and sprayed a nice new coat of paint on it.  Now it looked a bit better but it didn't work all that well so it always seemed to be perpetually covered in slimy grease.  The light wasn't working on it anymore either so I replaced the electrical bulb socket too.  This was a "temporary fix" until we were able to renovate the kitchen. Well, we still have not yet gotten to renovating the kitchen although quite a few more temporary fixes were done to various parts of the kitchen.  We've been slowly reconfiguring the kitchen to our planned new kitchen.  We never did anything with that old, dented, ugly range hood though other than my initial repairs and deep cleaning.   About a week ago, I knew that the range hood filter was in need of cleaning so I pulled that out in...

I nside the house throughout the winter, we've always had extremely dry air that dries out our sinuses.  It gets so unbelievably dry that we even have difficulty swallowing while sleeping because our throats and mouths get so dry!  Not only is that annoying but it also makes it a bit difficult to sleep through the night.   To counter this, we've always left a big stock pot of water simmering on the stove.  Unfortunately, this simmering stock pot remedy never seemed to resolve the dry throats and mouths.  It did help increase the humidity in the house but it wasn't effective enough.  This 24 hour a day simmer stock pot idea also caused a pot to rot out on us due to constant use with hard water!  The mineral deposits ate right through that first stock pot.   The humidity in the house drops down below 10% in winter.  For comfort, it really should be in the 40-60% range but the stock pot solution wasn't getting us any higher than around...

W e awoke this morning while it was still dark outside to another blackout due to downed tree limbs covered in heavy ice falling on power lines nearby.  The ice adds too much weight for the branches to bear and it has been a bit windy too which doesn't help.  I think we had power again in about two hours.  That was just long enough for us to collect all of our battery operated lamps, lanterns, flashlights and power stations.  This time of year we worry about freezing pipes but short blackouts aren't a major problem unless they fry electronic components throughout the house and we had that potential today! When we lost power, the power was flickering for about ten or fifteen minutes which caused all sorts of problems with our electronic devices, appliances and entertainment center.  Once we had power back on I quickly realized that all the flickering had pushed everything into "pairing mode".  This meant that I needed to set up each device again.  We al...

I n just another seven days, we'll have a house full of people including excited grandchildren bursting with energy to open Christmas gifts.   There is no more room left under the Christmas tree for more presents.  We even have presents stacked up against an armchair and the piano.  We only have a few more presents to wrap but those presents still have not yet arrived here at the house.  We had a couple of late additions to our Christmas present list.  Most of these gifts were purchased in early November!  I think the last present will be delivered to us on Friday, the day before our Christmas party.  That is cutting it too close for comfort! I've already decided on what we will be eating for dinner on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and on Saturday for the party but we still need to compile a shopping list of food and to go grocery shopping.  We'll do that sometime early in the week.  If all goes well, we won't need to go back to the groce...

My health this week has been rather miserable.  I don't know if I had a stomach virus or if it was just my usual problems due to my systemic mastocytosis but this week has been pretty miserable.   I seem to always get sick after spending time with the grandchildren and we spent time with the grandchildren this past weekend.  By Monday, I was spending much of the day in the bathroom every day.  So, either I picked up a bug from the grandchildren yet again or my primary illness had crashed my overall health.  Either way, this week has been rather miserable. I guess this is a good indication of how lousy my health is due to my illness...  it is indistinguishable from a stomach virus that lasts for days.  This illness doesn't always cause gastrointestinal problems but it doesn't some of the time.  When this happens, the nausea is unbearable, the diarrhea is relentless, and the vomiting is really annoying.  Then combine all three of those at ...

A fter my previous blog entry where I was complaining about a crappy Olympus camera sensor and sensor format, I decided to shoot a few photos of some of our Christmas ornaments in a much larger sensor format...  645 medium format with a classic medium format manual lens.   These images look great!  I did nothing with these images other than some very mild sharpening before resizing them down to web-sized images in contrast to the images in the previous blog entry that required hours of processing.   Shooting these images was incredibly simple and yet they look great!  

I was on a search, deep into my archived hard drive, for a specific old photo yesterday morning (I don't even remember what I was searching for because my mind was distracted by other photos while searching!) and I came across a folder of photos that I never did anything with at the time because I was so incredibly frustrated with the whole shoot on that day.  Every photo was soft, unsharp, flat, dull with a significant blue hue throughout the entire image. I don't like to waste energy.  My health is relatively poor and I have to constantly manage what little energy and reasonably good health I have every single day, all day.  When I do an activity, I need to get something positive out of it otherwise I feel I wasted much needed energy and run down my health for no purpose.  If I had an active day, it takes a lot out of me and I need a day or two to recover, sometimes I need a week or more to recover.  Needless to say, I don't like to waste my active time....

L ate last night, Sheila noticed something tiny latched onto her inner leg just above the ankle.   It looked like a tick with its head buried into her skin so I grabbed the magnifying glass from my desk and a flashlight to get a closer look.  I would need the magnifying glass to remove this tiny thing anyway.   Looking at it under the magnifying glass wasn't much better than looking at it with my bare eyes.  It was too small to lightly grasp with my fingers so I retrieved a pair of tweezers.  I carefully grasped the tiny thing with the tweezers and pulled.  It easily unlatched from Sheila's leg.   Whatever this tiny thing was, it sort of resembled a tick that had been accidentally partially brushed off or unknowingly scratched because it appeared to be crushed.  When I lightly grasped it with the tweezers, it pulled off so easily that I was thinking to myself that this came off far easier than the bloated tick I had embedded in my s...

S heila and I had a quiet Thanksgiving at home.   I've been sick with a cold of some sort over the past few days and I'm still feeling pretty lousy.  Laying down causes the stream flowing from my nose to run down my throat so sleeping has been difficult.  Breathing is difficult.  And, it is mildly affecting my mast cell disease too.  It was good we had no plans to go anywhere because I definitely would not have been up for it.   Honestly, I don't like going anywhere on Thanksgiving anyway.  I despise the "so-called traditional" Thanksgiving dinner (it is not traditional to me) so I don't eat much when that garbage is offered at someone else's house and then I'm starving by the time we get home.   Even as a child, one of my uncles and I used to throw some steaks on the grill (and fresh fish if I had been fishing earlier in the day) on Thanksgiving while the rest of the family ate that Thanksgiving garbage.  So not liking the tra...

I had already posted about this television commercial on my Facebook newsfeed about a month or so ago but thought I should probably share it here too since this is where I write about my illness and living life with a chronic illness.   In that Facebook post, I had mentioned that I had never seen a commercial about my primary illness before seeing this commercial.  I've had this illness for more than two decades and very few people know anything about this illness including many medical professionals so we've always been hoping for some awareness.  I've always felt that if there was more awareness, then there would be more understanding.  If there was more awareness among the medical professionals, then I wouldn't have to educate medical staff in emergency departments every time I land in their hospital.  There is so little understanding and familiarity of this illness even among medical professionals that both Sheila and I must carry around an emergency c...

O n our last journey to Ohio on Amtrak with Lukey and Kenzie, we spent a little bit of time in Manhattan, both coming and going on our journey.  We had a layover in Manhattan going each way so we could transfer from one Amtrak route to another.  This allowed us to walk around a little bit and to get some "real"  pizza each time we were there.  Honestly, the pizza alone is worth the nightlong layover! This first photo, below, shows us in Penn Station's subway corridors.  This part of Penn Station has not yet been renovated (Penn Station is undergoing a decade-long, much-needed renovation) so it is still the same dark and dirty place it has been for many decades.  We also encountered some problems here at the beginning of our trip.   Naturally, we had planned for either Sheila or me to pay for the subway tickets so we had both of our phones all set up already in anticipation of having to pay.  The current way you pay for the subway is electroni...