Scattered Thoughts . . .

O nce again, I have fallen behind in writing here.   My health has been really lousy...  the fatigue has been brutal and then I spent most of today in the bathroom.  I just can't seem to get much of anything accomplished.  Things have been lousy and leaning toward miserable (especially today).   I have a lot to get done this week and it's beginning to look like I will not get everything done before Christmas at this point.  I'm hoping that my health improves through the night tonight so I can jump on a few things tomorrow morning.  Honestly though, at this point, I don't think there are enough hours in the day to get done what I need to get done this week before Christmas.  Add in the fact that I need to sleep a few hours every afternoon and this means it is less likely that I will get everything done at this point.  To say that this is frustrating is an understatement.   Anyway...  I shot a few photos of our outside ...

Not much has been getting accomplished on the house lately. My health and the weather are not cooperating with each other in the least. I've been feeling absolutely miserable on some rare beautiful weather days and I've been feeling halfway decent on some rainy days... and, even if I were healthy, we've had a lot of rainy days this summer so getting much accomplished on the house would be difficult anyway. Regardless, I'm not too pleased with how little I've accomplished and how much it affects my health. At some point, I need to feel very well on a few very nice days! In the meantime, I'm trying to keep busy in the house. Most of my down time has been spent sketching plans for various projects around the house, researching building products, and even sitting at the piano whenever I'm feeling up to it. This evening, however, I decided to sift through some of my latest photos to see if I could find anything interesting. The first photo that captured my at...

Slowly, and in between health issues and medical appointments, we are making some headway on our summer home renovation plans.   Our latest project is to paint the house. Well... to at least paint the part of the house that is mostly finished!  We plan to finish another part of the exterior this summer but we wanted to get the design and colors right first. I think we are moving in the right direction but this little exercise has pointed out the need for some minor adjustments that weren't in the original plan. This current project is going well and it involves designing, building and installing some new architectural details for the exterior which match our new renovations on the interior. Between a drastic color change and adding these architectural details, the house is beginning to show some character! In this photo, below, we can see the new lighting at our front door... The weather has been rather wet this summer so I had to set up a little workshop outdoors u...

I have a little bit of time to kill before heading to another medical appointment this morning so I thought I would add a few more photos to my blog.  I'm heading to a new specialist this morning... a type of appointment which is never really 'fun' and with a new doctor you never know what to expect. There is a lot of unnecessary crap hanging over my head right now including the threat of losing my Social Security Disability Insurance benefits. Actually, this really pisses me off and adding in this new specialist isn't helping any.  So, I have a bit of time to kill this morning and thought I would share a few photos from last week... This first photo is of a slightly uncooperative loon. Although he was paddling away from me, he kept looking back to see if I was still there photographing him...  This was an early morning photo. The contrast was low because I had to bump up the exposure quite a bit to capture some detail in this mostly black loon. Now the loon ...

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry this past week or two, the lake house has been on our minds because now is the time of year for planning our summer and, since the lake house is on my mind, I've been sorting through old photos of our times at the lake house. A few photos have caught my eye while sifting through these old photos.  Okay... really... quite a few photos have caught my eye and I'm left wondering why I didn't do anything with them. In this case, two photos of Kenzie from last summer caught my eye that I wanted to share here. In this first one, Kenzie is fishing on our dock. I found her expression amusing... it appears as though she is saying, "What's on my line? WHAT's on my line???" Either that or the dock is too hot for her feet and she is wincing in pain! Either way, it is an amusing expression making for an interesting photo... I've shared this next one before but I never told the story behind it so it was worth sharin...

I have so many photos from our years at the lake house that I don't have a clue what to do with them all! Whenever I go back to look through photos from previous years, I always find a few to share that haven't been shared before.  Lately, we've been talking about schedules at the lake house for this summer... who might want to visit,  who gets which timeframe,  when to schedule trips for resupplying food and drinks, etc. Needless to say, the lake house has been on our minds. It is this time of year when we are both ready for some time at the lake but it is also the time of year when I need to start getting ready for our summer.  I must ensure that all our lake house stuff is ready to go... chairs, canopies, the kayaks, the sailboat, radios, lights, life preservers, etc. Once the snow clears out, I need to get hopping on this stuff.  Of course, most years the snow doesn't clear out until late April or early May...  sometimes not until early June... ...

One of my cousins, Kathy, recently posted a photo of having morning coffee while relaxing on the edge of a river. Her photo immediately reminded me of many years of morning coffee at my own home on a river quite a few years ago before my health took a serious nosedive.  Thinking about this old home also reminded me of all the visitors I had coming and going... all the weekend parties... all my friends' kayaks and canoes that resided in my yard all summer... and it reminded me of all the friends who still talk about my old house on the river whenever I bump into them. We had some really great times at that house! View from the firepit in the backyard. Seeing Kathy's photo encouraged me to dig out some old photos of this house to share here. For the most part, these are really lousy photos but they are good enough to see some of the memorable parts of this property and to remind me of some really nice times.  I wish I had better and more photos to share but this was ...