Scattered Thoughts . . .

I really dislike cellphones and I probably mention that far too often in this blog but I recently upgraded my cellphone so felt it was time for a blog entry about "smart" devices.  How often I mention this dislike of cellphones here should be an indication of how much I truly dislike these things and especially in regard to how people can't seem to put them down.   I used cellphones during my career through the 1990s along with radios and landlines but effective and immediate communication was truly essential in my job.  I'm retired now and have absolutely no desire to be attached to a phone all the time.  In fact, my cellphone is set to "Do Not Disturb" almost always  unless I am waiting on an important phone call.  I have absolutely no desire to be fielding telephone calls at all times and I especially have no desire to be fielding any type of text messaging which is almost always poorly communicated, hence, I actually do prefer a phone call over text me

U nlike any other night in recent memory, tonight's sky appears to be crystal clear! We were at Shaw's to do our weekly shopping tonight (not in Waterbury, for a change) and to get our flu shots (last week was COVID shots) and, when we stepped out of the store, we were greeted with a very bright and noticeably sharp moon low in the sky.  I knew that when I got home, if it was still clear, I would be attempting to capture another photo of the moon.   Well, surprisingly, it was still clear when we arrived home so I put together a combination of lens and camera body that I have not used yet other than for capturing only a few photos of birds in our backyard.  I truly expected Waterbury to be cloudy when we got back home so I was quite surprised to see we also had clear skies here at home.  Using this combination of lens and body would be interesting especially handholding this very long, heavy and unwieldly combination.   For this photo, I reluctantly used a Panasonic G9 body (thi

A s I wait for my latest oncology test results, I've been doing some research about treatments and drugs that my oncologist has discussed with us in a recent visit.  I have to admit that I actually have been losing sleep over the direction my health is headed in recent years and this research isn't helping any.  If anything, I'm losing more sleep! My health has been so poor that the poor health makes it very difficult to sleep at times.  Most times, however, I can't keep my eyes open but, now, what I'm learning in my current research is keeping me up at night.   For the first five years or so that I've had this illness, I was very active in support groups and research.  I was actually a board member and had written a few lengthy papers for this national support group to help newly diagnosed patients.   In the beginning, this research helped me understand and come to terms with my future of surviving with this incurable illness.  Also, I was helping others in thi

I  don't think I've pointed a telescope nor camera toward the sky since the total eclipse on April 8th and even that day was overcast with thin clouds.  It has been a truly abysmal year for astronomy.   While the rest of the east coast has been capturing photos of a comet lingering in our night sky as well as capturing photos of unusually southernly northern lights colorfully illuminating the night sky, we've been under the clouds, rain and fog.  Even on the rare mostly clear nights, we've seen no northern lights.  Then again, I may have headed to bed far too early on those few clear nights to see the northern lights.  Regardless, as far as astronomy goes, the past six months have been absolutely horrible whether we're talking about daytime solar astronomy or nighttime astronomy. Tonight, however, I noticed the moon trying to shine through the clouds and decided to grab a camera, open the living room window, and shoot a few quick photos.  The moon was bright and il

I had a bit of a list of tasks to complete today before the temperatures drop below freezing.  I didn't get any of that stuff done though.  It was far too cold and wet outside today to spend any amount of time out there so I had no desire to head outside to work on everything that has water in it.  Instead, I stayed indoors. I did straighten up the house a bit...  did a load of laundry (although, now that I'm thinking about it, my laundry is still sitting in the dryer)...  and I installed the interior window of our kitchen garden window.  So, I did accomplish a few small things before sleeping all afternoon.  Actually, I didn't start on the garden window winterization until after my long afternoon nap.  Whenever I plan to accomplish something on any particular day, it must be right after waking up in the morning or after a nap.  I run out of energy far too quickly to wait an hour or two so I always jump on any tasks that must be done immediately.  Quite often, I even jump

W e had to head up to the hospital yesterday (for me) and, as always, I brought one of my cameras along in case I saw anything worth capturing.  This time I grabbed my compact Fuji X30 camera with its fixed zoom lens.   For those interested, the Fuji X30 is a small camera with classic rangefinder camera styling that was released about 12 years ago.  It has a fixed lens so there is no need for carrying extra lenses.  The disadvantage of this camera is the sensor is smaller than the sensors in my other cameras so the tonal quality isn't as nice as my other cameras.  Nevertheless, it does capture some nice images...  certainly better than any cellphone. Since I was sitting in the passenger seat of the car while we were driving on the highway, the car was moving at 65mph while I was shooting photos.  This meant I needed as high a shutter speed as I could get to avoid any motion blurring due to our speed as well as due to bumps.  Sheila's Honda Accord has a very stiff suspension mak

A fter our visit to the hospital yesterday morning for more testing requested by my oncologist, I did a bit of painting in the afternoon.  I managed to paint the newly constructed top truss of the truss bridge for our little garden railroad.  Painting this bridge is actually quite tedious especially those thinner diagonal supports on this top truss.  It is like painting a wrought iron railing or balustrade...  tedious and time consuming. There is a lot of brushwork...  back side, front side, left side, right side...  of each piece so it always ends up being more time consuming than I thought it would be.  This does no favors for my spinal injuries.  This sort of tedious activity with my hands out in front of me puts so much pressure on my spinal injuries that it takes my breath away and makes it hurt to breathe after just a few short minutes.   I hope to do some additional painting today too.  I think I'll just add more photos to this blog entry until the bridge is in place outdoor

A s I had mentioned in previous blog entries, although adding the truss plates and bolt detail made a significant difference in bridge detail, this morning I worked on the top truss to add even more detail.  More detail is always better! Oh yeah...  and yesterday, I managed to mix more paint and repaint the entire bridge.  Well...  I still need to paint the wood I added for the top truss but I have the rest of the bridge painted in the new color. This color is difficult to see indoors but it is a medium to dark charcoal with a slight green tint.  Under indoor light, this color appears rather bluish but it does appear green under sunlight.   Below, you can see the new parts of the top truss system that I added today... In order to keep the new top truss square as the glue dries, I clamped it in place on top of the side trusses... There is no bottom to this bridge because that is already in place on the garden railroad.  All I need to do is place this down on the support cross-pieces tha

I sanded down the trusses of the truss bridge this morning, cleaned off all the remaining dust and then primed all the new brass truss plates.  I had only a small amount of red oxide spray primer left at this point so I decided to use up the rest of the can on the rest of the bridge trusses.   You know...  some bridges are even painted in this  red oxide color and left that way...  I don't think I'm going to leave it this color though.  I'm still leaning toward a medium to dark gray with it tinted slightly toward green or a light gray tinted more obviously toward green.  At the moment, I'm leaning toward the medium-to-dark gray tinted slightly green.   I just remembered that I didn't do anything with the top cross-bars...  I really should sand them to get them ready for more paint.  Actually, I should sand them to get them ready to be glued to some stringers and diagonal cross pieces.  Then I can focus on paint for that top section of the bridge.  

B efore it rained again today, I managed to get the truss plates drilled and installed on my garden railroad homebuilt truss bridge.  Now that I see these plates installed with the bolt details, this is definitely one of the things I felt the bridge had been lacking.  What a tremendous difference these relatively small details make!  Well, maybe I shouldn't call these truss plates a "small detail"...  it was a bit tedious making them and installing them. I had originally intended to glue these truss plates in place but, after I drilled all the holes in every plate using a drill press, I felt I could easily drill tiny partial holes into the bridge through each hole in the truss plates and then hammer in a nail.  I drilled the holes only halfway into the bridge trusses so that the nails still had a bit of bite.  Plus, the diameter of the holes was smaller than the diameter of the nails so that also helped to keep the nails in place.  The holes were only large enough to keep