Scattered Thoughts . . .

There is an Aviation Trail of historical sites in the Dayton area (seven or eight sites in total, I think).  These are sites associated with the Wright brothers and, although we were not intending to knock off any part of this entire list, we did happen to visit most of the sites on this list during our stay in Dayton!  Two of these sites are within a couple of blocks of each other on the west side of downtown Dayton.  Hmmm....  actually...   I think there are three sites within a few blocks of each other and we saw all three.   First, walked over to the site of the Wright home on Hawthorn Street.  The original home has been moved but a replica porch still stands on the corner lot.  Also, there is a replica of the home that was built by a neighbor across the street. After visiting the site of their home on Hawthorn Street, we walked over to the Wright-Dunbar Heritage Center.... Next to the Heritage Center is one of the Wright brothers' b...

After we gave Lukey and Kenzie a relatively short campus tour at the University of Dayton , we drove the few blocks over to Woodland Cemetery.  Kenzie was a bit perplexed that we (or anyone, for that matter) would be visiting a cemetery but I knew this was a place I wanted to visit.  Sheila and I missed a visit to this cemetery the last two times we were in Dayton so I wanted to get here this time.  It is right next to the UD campus so it would have been silly for us to skip this visit since we were staying at UD.   I have always held a very deep interest in the Wright brothers since elementary school.  In fact, one of my first research essays in elementary school was about these two brothers.  I've done larger research papers on them in high school and college.  My father had purchased a few small books about the Wright brothers at my request (we regularly were given books that we chose).  By the time I was assigned to Wright-Patterson Air F...

Throughout our Amtrak journey to Ohio with Kenzie and Lukey back in June, we definitely ate well no matter which city we were in during our journey.  We always found exceptional restaurants.  The place we ate breakfast the most often was a small cafe at the University of Dayton called the Butter Cafe.  The place was a little run down but would have fit in perfectly in Vermont.  The food was quite good for breakfast so we ate here every morning while we were at UD... They offered fresh juices....  here we have a fresh watermelon juice in the middle...  the other two glasses are water and apple juice.  Lukey really enjoyed the fresh watermelon juice though... Sheila had this Dragon Fruit Smoothie Bowl every morning at Butter Cafe...   Lukey said the French Toast was good but not nearly as good as in Manhattan... The different flavors of "scrambles" were good but really looked like someone's garbage...  which reminds me of a line in "Uncle ...

For this trip, Lukey was using one of my smaller Panasonic cameras.  At the zoo, however, he had a fairly long zoom lens mounted on it so he could zoom in on the animals.  Although it had pretty good reach, physically, it was a smaller lens.  T his "medium-long" lens was smaller than the lens that Kenzie was using but his camera was probably a hair larger than the camera Kenzie used.  Putting aside the physical size differences of these little cameras, as I mentioned in the previous blog entry with Kenzie's zoo photos, I think both Lukey and Kenzie had to get used to having that zoom available.  Until this trip, they had always used my cameras with a single focal length prime lens...  no zooming available.   I'm noticing that Kenzie seems to gravitate toward seeing and capturing the whole scene whereas Lukey seems to like picking a subject and zooming in on it.  Neither is necessarily better than the other although the zooming in that Lukey d...

Kenzie was carrying one of my smaller Sony cameras while we were at the Cincinnati Zoo and she captured a few nice photos.   The camera she had at the zoo was the same camera that she often uses while visiting our house so she is familiar with this camera.  Lukey had a different camera that he sometimes uses to photograph Kenzie playing soccer or figure skating.   While reviewing Kenzie's photos, I noticed that she rarely used the zoom function of the lens I had mounted on her camera.  I think this was because she usually uses a fixed prime lens with no zoom when she uses this camera at our house so I think she kept forgetting that this lens she had on this trip was a zoom lens.  I noticed the same with some of Lukey's photos.  I think it took both of them a little while to get used to having that zoom available. Kenzie started the day with a selfie...  Hmmm...  now that I'm looking more closely at this photo, I think maybe I offered to ...