Scattered Thoughts . . .

The hot, humid weather has finally broken!  Let's hope that the rain goes back to normal rainfall amounts and frequencies too! Now that the weather is cooler, I have tons of energy again.  That is great news!  So, I started working on the house again yesterday. I decided to continue the renovation that involves replacing most of our waste plumbing.  In particular, I started working on our new half bathroom yesterday and figuring out how to tie this into my waste plumbing plan. I had replaced all of our supply plumbing a few years ago.  That was a major upgrade and I can't tell you how comforting it is to know that all of our supply plumbing is brand, spanking new!  Now comes the much dirtier job of doing everything I can to upgrade and fix our waste plumbing (not to mention being a much stinkier job).  This waste plumbing project must be completed in order to install this new half bath. Test fitting fixtures... We have almost everything we need for the bathroom...  

As many of you know, I have tons of video files of sailing from our latest visit to Lake Groton to use for producing a relatively short sailing video.  I have already sorted through all the video.  That alone took hours considering most of the video clips are 30 minutes long.  So, now I have a pretty good list of shorter video clips to cut from the longer clips. Now that I've put together a storyboard and am now trying to produce this video, I am running into a problem with my video editing software freezing up on me and crashing.  I spent hours working on an ending last night and never accomplished a thing because my software kept freezing up. I've figured out how I want to start the video and have created most of that already.  Now I am playing with a couple of ideas for ending the video.  I want to put together a couple of different versions and then put them aside and work on putting together the meat of the video...  the middle.  Then after I have the middle put togeth

If you've been following this blog, you know we had a mama squirrel and her babies living in our attic space through the winter and spring.  We constantly heard mama running across our ceilings all winter and suspected that she was making a nest for babies.  Then, in early spring, the pitter-patter of little feet across our ceilings did indeed foretell the arrival of some babies. We then found a few areas around our roof and facia where the mama squirrel was entering and exiting the attic space and closed those access points.  We caught and released mama but soon found that the babies were difficult to catch. I think the babies had difficulty finding their way from the ceiling areas between ceiling joists to the attic space where we positioned the trap.  When the babies gained more mobility, two of them eventually found their way to the trap following the sweet aroma of some hot peanuts and peanut butter.  Again, we released both of these young squirrels in our yard, under the

When we arrived at the house on Lake Groton a couple of weeks ago, there was a little sign in our parking area greeting us...  "Welcome Maher Family".  That was a nice gesture and a pleasant surprise! I've always wanted to get some photographs of the inside of the house but that has always been one of those things that you never remember until you are back at home...  and missing the lake house...   and wishing you could scroll through some photos.  This year I was determined to get some decent photos.  (Which means shooting these photos was a task on a 'to-do' list I had for myself...  if it is not on a list, I never get to it.) I shot a group of photos shortly after arriving at the house.  I had two reasons for jumping on this little project right after we first arrived...  First, the house was still organized and clean because we had just arrived...  and second, I knew I had to jump on this project while it was still fresh in my mind and not pushed out by

As many of you have seen in my photographs, Lake Groton is a beautiful place...  serene and peaceful at times... yet, like a big playground sounding more like a crowded beach at other times.  What I cannot convey in my photographs, however, is how Lake Groton sounds. I was sitting at my desk which is in a corner of the living room facing out two walls of windows overlooking the lake.  The sun was beginning to set...   the temperature was dropping...  the lake was calm and reflecting the colorful sky...  the fish, as far as the eye could see, were beginning to jump in their attempts to gobble up insects on the surface of the water...  if you looked high in the sky, it was almost nighttime and dark...  as the eye approached the horizon, the colors changed from deep blue to bright orange to bright yellow...   and you could hear the distinctive haunting echoes of loon calls all around the lake. My desk was home to my netbook which is where I upload and review all my photographs and

For the most part, healthwise, I had a good week while we were at the lake house last week.  And, the previous week was pretty good too.  I am definitely paying the price for all that good health now though! " All that good health"...  That seems to imply that I had years of good health...  or even months...  No, this was just a matter of 12 days or so. A body burdened with a myeloproliferative neoplasm such as Systemic Mastocytosis rarely goes longer than a few days without some debilitating symptomatology.  Having 12 relatively good days was a blessing. Unfortunately, when I have a few "good" days, I tend to overdo it.  I don't nap...  I stray from my specialized diet which minimizes mast cell degranulation...  I become active which causes a rise in body temperature which causes idiopathic anaphylaxia...  activity also causes inflammation and pain in my spine due to all my spinal injuries (for those unfamiliar with my spinal injuries, the injuries inclu

I decided that one of the first things I should work on this week is putting together a short 'teaser' video of some of our sailing at Lake Groton.  I have a lot of video footage to sort through but here are a few short clips of some of the excitement we had while sailing last week at Lake Groton... I have video clips shot from the rudder, low on the mast, on top of the mast looking down, from the end of the boom, and from shore.  Certainly, the most exciting video is shot from the boat during periods of relatively high winds!  The view from the top of the mast proved to be a bit boring because the view was not wide enough to get a real feel for what was really happening.  I did manage to get some decent footage from this view, however.  I will include some of these clips in the full-length video. The camera mount on the rudder broke after the first half hour of video!  Adam was sailing the boat at the time...   he was tacking and, as the boom swung overhead,

We brought two high-powered, waterproof walkie talkies and a base station with us to the lake.  This turned out to be a great idea and the whole plan of using radios for communication at the lake worked out great!  We had some initial bugs to work out at first (operator errors related to feature setup), but overall, this form of communication made life so much easier for us. Mostly, these radios were used whenever we were kayaking or sailing.  We also used them in the cars which turned out to be a great idea as well.  The Groton State Forest has no cellphone coverage at all so our cellphones were useless.  Not only did the radios work where the cellphone would not, but they were much easier to use than a cellphone.  No dialing required...  just push to talk (or voice activated, if you wish...  we prefer push to talk). The radios were invaluable while sailing... this is a frame capture from video of me sailing. Adam even took a walkie talkie with him on a bike ride.  The conc

I have always wanted a photograph of the view from the house at Lake Groton...   to choose a beautiful time of day and shoot a panoramic of the same view we get from the house each day...   I think I may have succeeded this year!  This one below is the best one I have captured to date. The view from the house on Lake Groton has always amazed and captivated us.  This view is not only seen from the deck and dock, but it can be seen from inside the house as well.  The lake-end of the house is actually out over the water like a houseboat and the windows wrap around three sides of the house allowing us this beautiful view everyday... 180 degree panoramic view from the house... This panoramic image consists of eight photographs...  I started on the right, which is what is seen from the kitchen and dining room of the house...   then kept shooting shots as I turned left...  until I was facing the view from my desk overlooking the lake. I stitched these eight photos together last nigh

We are back home from the lake house now.  Although it was a great week on Lake Groton and I prepared for this week for months by being vigilant with my daily physical therapy (a daily ritual since my second line-of-duty spinal injury in 1998), it has really taken a lot out of me. My spine is inflamed from dragging around kayaks and the sailboat.  Packing bags into the car didn't help either!  As bad as the spinal pain is, problems associated with my Systemic Mastocytosis are far worse and much more debilitating. Wearing myself down is one of the worst things I can do to my health today and has the same effect on all Systemic Mastocytosis patients.  The absolute worst thing we can do is to miss a dose of medications.  Wearing oneself down takes a close second though and requires the longest amount of time to recover. It just so happens that I did miss a dose of medications on our first night at the lake.  Our daily lifestyle changed so much at the lake that my medications wer