Scattered Thoughts . . .

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...