Scattered Thoughts . . .

Typically, whenever the kids visit, the living room floor becomes obscured by a toy-box-ful of toys making it difficult to find enough floor to walk without painfully stepping on hard little pointy toys. During a recent visit, however, we changed things up a little by replacing the toy-box-ful of toys with the big trains which pleased Lukey immensely! While Lukey played with the trains... multiple locomotives... experimenting with the different sound effects and learning how to control these trains... Kenzie was content to just sit on the couch and play with Grammy.  Surprisingly, there were no cries when I asked Lukey to help me clean up for dinner. We dismantled all the track, stacked it all neatly next to their toy-box, and placed the heavy trains on their shelf... then we all moved to the dinner table. I was shocked that there were no complaints nor crying! After dinner there was a little bit of pouting because the trains were put to bed for the night but Lukey was qu

I've been stuck in the house for quite some time. Actually, I may have been stuck in the house for the longest time ever... in my entire life... anywhere.  It has been so frigid cold for the past couple of months that I have not wandered from the house for more than a few minutes at a time. These drastic temperature changes caused by moving from indoors to outdoors and then back indoors have been miserable for my health.  Another issue keeping me homebound is that my car has been sitting silently in the driveway, buried under snow, for more than a month. The car won't start so has not even run at all even to warm it up. If we have some tolerable, sunny days sometime soon, then I will get outside to see if I can salvage what is left of the old Honda and get her running again. A 15 year old car in the northeast where salt is used on the roads for more than half the year is an exceptionally old car. I fear we are at the end of this car's life expectancy. There have been

The other day I realized that this blog needed some updating. I just was not happy with how it looked so I spent a couple of nights trying to change the look as well as a little bit of the functionality but really had a tough time with it. Any change I made seemed to just make it worse. After thinking about what I wanted, sketching and jotting down some ideas, I started to get a clearer picture in my head of what I want. I have to admit that this is still not exactly what I want, but it is closer.  So, this morning was the rollout of the new look for my blog! I suspect there will some additional small changes in the coming days so don't be surprised by more changes...  change is good!

I went back into one of my external hard drive to search for a photo I thought I had shot while in New York City a year ago. In my mind, I remembered a shot that captured both the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building in the same frame. It turns out that my memory was remembering this composition a little differently than how I actually captured this composition. When you are limited by distance and elevation, it is tough to get the shots you want... exactly the way you want or envision them... especially when you are just a speck in a large landscape which stretches in all directions including vertically.  In this case, the Chrysler Building is a little low and the angle is slightly off for my taste but it was worth trying out a composition with my location when I shot this image.  Putting these two iconic art deco buildings into the same frame with no other distractions seems like the right thing to do...

A little over a year ago, we brought Adam to New York City for his last visit to Manhattan before he graduated high school and left for the Air Force. As always, we had a busy schedule during our visit to New York and I shot a lot of photographs. Upon arriving back home, my health needed some time to recover and I somehow lost track of most of those photos from that trip. On this particular visit to New York, we spent a very busy day sightseeing in Manhattan. The goal was to show Adam some new sights we had not shown him already in previous visits to New York. Of course, some sights are visible no matter where you go in Manhattan... such as the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. We did a lot of walking and even encountered some long detours and delays due to a parade that day. In the end, I believe I shot almost three hundred photos... many of which are quite impressive yet have never been seen by anyone other than myself. This past weekend, while we were shopping

I am on a roll... or tumble... and the hill I am tumbling down seems to be much bigger than I had originally thought. My health began its roll down this hill a few weeks ago and it just continues to tumble downhill. I slept for about four hours this afternoon and felt pretty good when I awoke. I honestly thought it would be a night of good health and feeling well. Within a half hour things started to deteriorate and things deteriorated rather quickly. First was the nausea... In hindsight, I should have taken this as a sign of impending doom. To make a long story short, I didn't realize that my health had crashed into brief anaphylaxis until my body responded naturally. I had missed all the signs. My body responding naturally to anaphylaxis is a good thing though! It isn't something I like to or should test but it is a good thing! Sometimes, either I am not thinking clearly enough to catch these signs... or, I am feeling so well that impending doom with my health seems so

We had the grandkids at the house for dinner again last night... no, the grandkids weren't for dinner... they joined us for dinner last night.  As always, it was a funny, amusing night! The kids also picked up a cold around the time of the train show so the three of us are still trying to shake this cold. It was obvious that they are feeling just like I am... a bit worn out and stuffy. Anyway, it was nice spending some time with Lukey and Kenzie! Here are a few photos... Some train time... Some stinky feet... I don't remember what this face was about...  I think it was about wanting to watch trains on the television... but mostly about being exhausted... The kids were introduced to a new movie while eating dinner...  "The Croods"... it captivated Lukey! This last photo reminds me... mark my words... I believe Kenzie is entering a stage of life that finds her avoiding cameras at all cost... I'll be shooting a l

I don't really get much accomplished when my health is lousy and, for the past few weeks, my health has been pretty lousy. I don't even remember when I last immersed myself into an art project. I've been fighting off a cold for at least two weeks now. A cold isn't a big deal for most people but, for me, a cold only compounds my problems with my mast cell disease. The cold ends up knocking me for a loop and it seems to take forever to shake it. My body already has too many mast cells and too many overactive mast cells. When we add a cold to this environment, my mast cells are even more overactive wreaking havoc on all fronts. To make matters worse, I really wore myself down over the past few months. I knew this would be a recovery period for me but my mast cells are a bit angry right now as well. Angry mast cells make for prolonged cold symptoms, bone pain, joint pain, fatigue, intermittent anaphylaxis, and a bit of nausea. This makes for some very long but very bori

Leading up to Christmas, I had finished the new half bathroom (I finished it on Christmas Eve just before Sheila arrived home from work) but I just realized that I never did shoot any photos of the finish room. I had already shown some photos of this project but those previous photos did not show the ceiling trim being finished. Actually, my previous photos purposely avoided showing the ceiling because none of the trim was installed yet. Now that the trim is installed, I should shoot and post some photos of this project before it is looking a bit rundown. I had some exposed plumbing running across the ceiling over the pedestal sink that needed to be hidden somehow. I decided to hide it by building and installing a faux beam around the plumbing. This plumbing was the hot and cold supply pipes running to the kitchen.  I also hung a few photos... added a wastebasket... and some accessories. We 'settled' for this particular wastebasket because we could not find one even c

It doesn't matter what I attempt to fix... the house, the car, my bicycle... I always end up with complications requiring more time, more effort and more parts. Working on my small collection of model railroad trains is no different.   I acquired a broken Lionel GP-7 diesel from a friend. This engine just would not kick into gear. It turns out that there were no gears attached to either of the motors to engage those gears!   I did a little research and found that Lionel had come up with a really poor design for some of these engines which used a plastic gear affixed to a smooth metal shaft... the gear inevitably would quickly work itself free from the smooth shaft leaving no way for the motor(s) to engage the gears. The motors would just spin and spin while the locomotive remained motionless.  So, I figured, "I'll just replace those motors with new motors that have metal gears on their shafts." As is the case with most projects, I thought it would be a relati