Scattered Thoughts . . .

The back corner of our home, which lately has been bright and filled with the clutter, sounds and smells of construction, is dark and quiet today. I suspect things will remain this way for the rest of the week and through the weekend as I try to recover from yet another bout of poor health. I awoke feeling like I had been hit by a train. My bones hurt... "hurt"... that word doesn't even come close to accurately describing how my bones feel. My joints also hurt to the same level as my bone pain. My spine is inflamed and I can feel every injury my spine has ever endured... and, believe me, these injuries were many, severe and extensive leaving me with two herniated disks, four bulging disks, six compressed disks, two areas with spinal stenosis, osteophytosis, and a broken up disk and vertebra in my cervical spine. These injuries have left me almost two inches shorter and in pain every day. Now, add in all my bone and joint pain and this is what I felt as I awoke this morn

I've been actively working on building and installing a new half bath in our house over the past couple of weeks. "Actively working", considering my health, means working on it only on relatively good health days for a few hours each morning. To say this is a slow moving project is an accurate statement. One of the problems with only working on a project of this sort a few hours at a time is that I spend far too much time setting up, cleaning up and searching for tools I put away a night or a few nights earlier. Unfortunately, I don't have the energy to do anything longer than a few hours in a day so I do what I can when I am feeling capable. My health is kind of lousy today and tonight so I am spending a little time on the computer and thought I should share about a problem I had with this bathroom project over the past few days... The new drill and hole saw necessary for this small half bathroom installation. The latest frustrating problems arose while w

My latest dip in health started late last night. Nausea and associated lower gastro-intestinal issues kept me in the bathroom for an hour or two. (I really need to get that second bathroom finished... my current project.) In the big scheme of things, last night was not miserable but I knew it was a sign that things would deteriorate further today. There are all sorts of signs of quickly deteriorating health for Systemic Mastocytosis patients. During these periods, we become much more vulnerable to idiopathic anaphylaxis as our mast cells continue to degranulate at a rate which is much more disastrous than what should be normal. With this mast cell degranulation comes nerve irritation, inflammation and excruciating pain. My morning started with some minor cognitive issues. Needless to say, any cognitive difficulties makes home renovations next to impossible. As a result, I spent much of the morning researching and taking notes related to my next tasks in our home renovations rather

My health has been on quite a roller coaster ride lately with some really good days and some painful, lousy and downright miserable days. On those good days I've been keeping busy during my waking hours with some projects around the house. Of course, even on a good day, I can only get a few good hours of work accomplished before my body needs a serious break and a nap but at least I have been getting some things accomplished during my relatively good days. This past Saturday was a beautiful day and my health was cooperating so we headed north to Burlington for a cruise on the lake and then a few drinks at Vermont Pub & Brewery. Sheila's parents joined us and we had a really nice time.  It was nice to get out for a change which my health limits significantly.  Actually, I think the last time we were out of the house for the day was well over a month ago and excluding our time at the lake house was really perhaps two months ago. Needless to say, since I was feeling rela

For the most part, my health over the summer has been relatively good. I've had some lousy health each week but I've been able to accomplish a few things each week. Overall, lately I am finding that if I am religious about taking all my medications, careful about not straying from my very restrictive diet, keep my body as cool as possible and avoid all stress, my health stays relatively stable. Last night, however, my health crashed. It has been terribly hot and humid the past week... bad news for my health. I strayed from my limited diet last night at dinnertime... bad news for my health. I got stressed over a four day-long project getting damaged in an instant last night which means I wasted very precious energy... energy which is very rare to come by... bad news for my health. At some point yesterday, I screwed up one of my doses of medications which I did not realize until after my health started crashing... bad news for my health. I also didn't pick up on a v

I went back to the folder which is holding the few images I captured the other night of the "supermoon" to see if there was another image which I might have missed the other night. Sometimes I find it is best to come back to revisit photos a few nights later or weeks later or even months later. These photos get overlooked for various reasons... I'm tired when I first looked at them... the one with the most detail gets lost in a sea of decent photos... and sometimes I just miss the potential of a particular image. In this case, only a few days have passed but I think I did miss a nice image with some impressive detail for a full moon... I was hoping to get outside to shoot some photos tonight but the moonrise is quite late tonight and I am exhausted already. Trying to hold a camera steady while I am exhausted is difficult to do and getting all the camera settings correct at the same time I am exhausted and not thinking clearly is next to impossible.  I still do

Back a couple of years ago, we bought a fairly nice lawnmower. It was definitely more mower than we needed for our lawn but I didn't want to buy something that would be a pile of junk within a couple of years. Adam started using it to cut a neighbor's lawn in addition to cutting our lawn when I wasn't feeling up to it. This was all fine and dandy until some carelessness entered the picture... I kept harping on Adam to make sure the oil level is good since this is a four-cycle engine and, as such, oil was needed in a separate reservoir to keep the engine lubed. If the oil level gets low, the engine will seize up. Well... long story short... at some point between the two lawns Adam was cutting, the engine seized up.  I finished out that season cutting our entire lawn with a weed-whacker each week... fun times.  The following season I looked into buying a new engine... the cost of a new engine would cost more than a new lawnmower! That brought us again to the task of loo

Supermoon - 12 July 2014 Last night, our moon was a little closer to our home planet than usual. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as a 'supermoon' because the moon does appear ever so slightly larger in the night sky.  Anyone who has tried to shoot a photo of the full moon realizes that this is a rough task. The moon doesn't really seem all that bright but it really is exceptionally bright especially a full moon. This is why far too many photos of the moon only depict an overexposed, bright white splotch in the sky when they try to capture an image of the moon. You really need to use a camera which allows manual control over your exposure to get this right. Contrary to popular belief, you actually need to set your exposure as though you are shooting on a sunny afternoon... yes... as though you are shooting on a sunny afternoon! Another thing that most people don't understand, or realize, is that the full moon is the worst phase of the moon to try t

Seven seconds... That is all the time that elapsed between the first shot posted here which shows Adam a little bit bored and the second shot which shows Adam hiking over to keep the sailboat from capsizing... seven quick seconds.  Things change quickly on the water but when you are sailing such a small, light and nimble boat such as the Minifish, these quick changes require fast thinking and quick action to avoid heeling over and ending up in the water. We had a week of some pretty wild sailing conditions. The wind would be calm and then within seconds the wind would whip up suddenly creating white caps on the lake. The wind would gust to well over 30 knots from a sustained wind of only 12 knots... then the wind would instantly change direction by up to 90 degrees! Some of this quick thinking and fast action involved knowing how to duck in an instant as the wind suddenly gusted and changed direction, slamming the boom over to the other side of the boat, narrowly missing your hea

The light had changed outside so I went back out there with my camera in hand to see if I could compose a different sort of scene with the newest blooming flowers in our wildflower gardens.  Because of the change in light... direction, quality, softness... I had something different in mind this time around...  I again grabbed the camera which chooses its own settings...  randomly... at any given time... usually screwing up any notions I have of getting a good shot. Although, in hindsight, my newest camera might have been the best choice for this particular shot I wanted to stick with the color depth of the Kodak sensor on this malfunctioning camera.  Anyway... I had the camera...  I kept checking the settings to make sure they were the way I wanted them ensuring the camera wasn't changing them on me randomly... I had the lens I wanted... and I quickly captured a few frames.  Typically, I go for a contrasty scene with a lot of deep tonal qualities... very sharp... vivid colo