Scattered Thoughts . . .

A fter our absurdly long drive to Long Island the previous day, we got up early the following morning to catch a train on the Long Island Railroad.   Our hotel was backed-up against the railroad tracks so Lukey spent much of the night watching trains go back and forth past our windows.  There was only an alley between our hotel window and the elevated railroad tracks.   Most of the Long Island Railroad is electrified but I had forgotten that the far eastern end of Long Island still needs diesel engines to run trains.  I hadn't heard a diesel run on the Long Island Railroad in decades so was shocked to hear a diesel pass by the hotel that night.  The following day, my dad reminded me that the eastern end of Long Island is not electrified so they need to pull the passenger cars with diesel locomotives.  The sound of that diesel passing by our hotel instantly conjured up visions of Long Island Railroad diesels in the 1960s and 1970s though! In the mo...

T his past weekend, we headed down to Long Island with Lukey and Kenzie in tow to visit some of my family.  It is always a lot of fun or perhaps just "more amusing" traveling with Lukey and Kenzie but the drive down to Long Island was brutal and far too long this time!  We arrived completely spent, exhausted, and hungry. What should have taken less than six hours of drive time, ended up taking us over ten hours.  We had detours due to washed out roads and bridges, we had construction traffic, but mostly, we had significant problems with traffic volume.  The traffic volume problems started the moment we entered Connecticut and we crawled all the way through Connecticut and onto Long Island.  There are simply far too many cars on the road today.  Clearly, the cost of gas is far, far too low.   We eventually got into town just in time to get some pizza before all the restaurants closed.  We actually drove straight to a local pizzeria before chec...

Lukey and Kenzie's last day of school was Friday and we were on the road to Long Island with them in tow by early Saturday morning.  We all had a great time with family and at a few different events. The kids were really looking forward to some beach time though! Actually, I think we all were looking forward to some beach time. The beach was foggy and quite deserted when we arrived in the morning. We set up our stuff right where I figured the surf would be at high tide and it turns out I was right because the lifeguards placed an "Umbrella Line" sign just in front of us when they came on duty. The kids spent the entire previous day playing with their Long Island cousins. Little did they know, Aunt Margaret had planned to surprise them by joining us at the beach too. So, they spent the entire time on Long Island socializing with people and it was obvious they enjoyed themselves. Jones Beach was beautiful, as always. The sand at this particular beach is a fine whit...

As I've mentioned before in previous blog entries, whenever I am having health problems and feeling too lousy to accomplish much, I go back to my storage hard drives to revisit some of my old photos. I have many thousands of photos to sift through! Last night, while struggling with my eyesight (which is still a problem today), I scrolled through some photos on my big desktop computer's new pro-quality IPS monitor. This monitor makes viewing photos and websites a lot easier for me when I am having issues with my vision.   The folder I chose to sift through held photos from 2011 of a long weekend visit to Long Island. We had spent some time at Jones Beach that long weekend. I also have some photos from our walk along the Nautical Mile on Freeport's Woodcleft Canal. The photos of interest in this particular folder, however, were all the photos I shot of family members at my nephew's high school graduation party. (Although, truth be told, I shot a lot of really ni...