Scattered Thoughts . . .

After a very busy day of traveling to San Francisco from Sacramento, checking into our inn, walking to lunch, hiking up Inspiration Point and watching the sunset on Crissy Field, we spent a quiet evening back at the inn.   After a long and busy day, dinner was clearly going to be later than we wanted.  We relaxed in our suite, had a few drinks, and talked while we waited for the food to arrive...  this downtime made it difficult to keep our eyes open at this point after a long, busy, active day... We ordered an assorted barbeque dinner for six and had it delivered to our suite.  When it arrived, we brought the food down to the dining room to eat.  The dining was comfortable and the food was delicious!  We ordered from The Pub in Ghirardelli Square (yes, the chocolate people) opposite the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park.  The food really was delicious but it was far more food than we could eat! After dinner, we spent a little time out back at the firepit...

My health often resembles a see-saw... my health swings upward and I experience relatively good days... then swings down and I experience rather miserable days... back up... back down... sometimes it balances in the middle for a relatively short period if I managed my health effectively and luck was on my side but, more often than not, it seems to move up and down like a pendulum moves side to side. Yesterday afternoon the see-saw started moving downward... after a little bit of dinner (I didn't eat much because I was feeling poorly), I had hoped that my health had leveled out in this short period before bedtime though... no such luck... Apparently, this see-saw continued on its downward swing through the night.  I was quite sick and in the bathroom for far too much of the night when I preferred to be and needed to be sleeping. Actually, I was overwhelmingly exhausted and struggling to keep my eyes open even while I was sick as a dog.  I really hate these nights. It takes a

The moon... crisp, clear skies with no light pollution help in capturing some crisp crater detail. For the most part, the weather at the lake has been beautiful. Most of the clouds and rain have been at night. Getting the rainy weather only at night has been great and makes for a lot of beautiful, sunny days but it really puts a damper on any photography of the night skies. Fortunately, we did have a few nights of clear weather at night... very few. On one such night, I grabbed my tripod, my best camera, a couple of good lenses, and a wireless remote shutter release and headed outside to the dark and very buggy deck. One of the newer cameras I have been using is amazing for low-light work but I am still learning what it can do and trying to figure out how to do different things such as shooting night skies. The unique thing about shooting night skies is that each exposure requires a few minutes plus a couple of minutes of adjusting settings... over and over... until you get