Scattered Thoughts . . .

I've been collecting all the photography-related things I'll need to pack for our Christmas trip to Manhattan.  I'm trying to stay as small and as lightweight as possible while still bringing enough high quality gear to get excellent photos and video.  It has been a bit of a struggle but I think I've narrowed down my photography gear making for perhaps the lightest travel photography bag I've ever had on any trip.   I usually pack my small Microsoft Surface tablet for storing photos at the end of each day and for some quick blog updates with photos.  My Surface is getting very old and the keyboard is actually falling apart now because of its age and the amount of use it has gotten over the past ten years so I'm packing a newer and, unfortunately, larger laptop that I use exclusively for astronomy.  This laptop has a touchpad but I'm not too fond of touchpads so I planned to bring along my old Microsoft Arc portable mouse from my Surface. I dug out this littl

S heila and I spent a good part of this past holiday weekend cleaning up the outside of the house.  The rain finally stopped for Labor Day weekend after an entire summer of daily rain and dark overcast skies.  We spent almost the entire summer indoors sheltered from the terrible weather. This past weekend, we washed all the windows, inside and out.  We cleaned screens.  I even cleaned mold, algae and mildew off one side of our house including the oil tank and gas tank.  The amount of moisture we've had this summer seemed to cover everything in filthy growth, some black, some green, some very crusty.  I also did some landscaping and Sheila did some gardening attending to our remaining flowers.  The gardens are still looking pretty good for this time of year even though they got very little sun through the summer! While I was cleaning windows on the back side of the house, I noticed that our neighbor's lawn is completely covered in leaves already!  Even though the temperature and

I t is that time of year...  albeit a very short period of time up here in Vermont...  but it is sailing season!   All the grandkids will be here this coming weekend so I want to make sure the sailboat is ready for playing.  I raise the sail, install the rudder and run all the lines so that the kids can play.  Well...  that's assuming it isn't too windy for the sail to be up. I store the sailboat upside-down through the very long winter.  Today, I cleaned the bottom of the hull and then Sheila and I turned her over so I could clean the topside.  She was filthy!   After I cleaned the hull, I applied a quick coat of wax and then buffed it out.  It could use another coat or two of wax but the hull is looking nice already with a minimal amount of work.   I still need to clean the sail, fix the mast with a new part which will test my metalworking skills (which I do rarely), run new lines, and put a quick coat of varnish on the rudder and centerboard.  All of this should go fairly qu

I mentioned in a previous blog entry that I had a big dust spot or dirt spot on the sensor of my newly converted infrared camera.  I also mentioned that I didn't know if I could still clean this sensor the same way I clean all other types of camera sensors so I went  back to the website for the place that converted my camera to infrared to see if they address this question. It turns out that I can clean my infrared converted sensor the same way I clean the sensors in all my other cameras.  That was good news because I am already well-versed in doing that quickly and easily.   This morning, I removed the lens and placed my camera under my magnifying lamp on my desk.  I immediately saw that changing lenses outside in the windy environment the other day was an exceptionally bad idea.  I have never seen so much debris on a sensor!  I would definitely need to clean up this sensor. My first step in cleaning a sensor is blowing it with a bulb blower.  I hold the camera in the air with th

Last night was one of those nights when you simply cannot sleep and you end up getting up out of bed at 5:30am because you know sleeping is a lost cause.  This is exceptionally rare for me but it was my night last night. I was having a little bit of difficulty breathing last night after going to bed but I wouldn't call those breathing difficulties anything more than mild.  Needless to say, that was the start of my lack of sleeping.  I was lying there wondering, "Should I go get my inhaler and epinephrine?  Or, will this pass?"  The problem is that if I get up to retrieve my inhaler and epinephrine, that act alone will cause me to lose some sleep because I'll need to calm down again and slow my heartrate down again in order to have any chance of falling asleep.  If I need to take epinephrine, that will keep me up for a while too.  So, I laid there wondering what to do which is also a sign that my breathing difficulties were no worse than mild. Then, I couldn't get