Scattered Thoughts . . .

W e have a tall spruce tree in our yard that hasn't been doing too well in recent years.  It was a beautiful tree up until about ten years ago when it developed some sort of disease.  Now, every time we have a bit of wind, branches fall off this tree.  Yesterday, I watched the top section of this tree break off in the wind and crash down with a big thud on our next door neighbor's roof! Most of the time, the falling branches have been no problem since we can always use firewood.  Plus, the boughs can be used for making wreaths for Christmas.  Yesterday, however, the top 12 feet of this tall spruce was blown off and it fell directly on our next door neighbor's roof! As you can see in this first photo, below, the top section of the tree is now missing.  Also worth noting is how much the tree has thinned in recent years.  There aren't many branches left on this tree! The top 12 feet of the tree fell right on our neighbor's house and then rolled off the ro...

I dream just about every time I fall asleep.  That isn't so unusual though because I think everyone probably dreams every night.  What is unusual is I almost always remember these dreams as though they happened in real life whereas most people don't even remember dreaming at all.  My dreams are often vivid with sounds, sights, colors, touch, smells and real life references.  This is great, for the most part, but I do have to say that the overwhelming realism in these dreams often leaves me feeling completely exhausted when I awaken in the morning.   As most readers should know by now, I am disabled and have been for the past 27 years.  As such and as one would expect, I can't do most of the things I did when I was younger and healthy.  On the positive side, this sudden disability was fairly easy to accept (after some grueling and painful therapy to walk and learn to live my daily life again) because I always had this nagging voice in my head tell...

A fter our experiences with this new Whirlpool refrigerator, I am left feeling that these refrigerators are typical US-made garbage and not a day goes by that I don't swear at this piece of junk appliance. Two years ago, we needed a new refrigerator as soon as possible since our previous refrigerator suddenly bit the dust and was unrepairable.  Unfortunately, finding anything during the pandemic that requires circuit boards for manufacture was exceptionally difficult.  Our best option at the time  (pretty much our  only  option)  was to purchase a Whirlpool side-by-side refrigerator and I have regretted this purchase every single day since it arrived in our kitchen. We didn't want a Whirlpool refrigerator.  In fact, we didn't even care for this Whirlpool refrigerator nor was there a single feature that attracted us to this cheap product (cheap refers to quality, never is it an adjective for price) .  It is a rather generic refrigerator but at...

W e have a total lunar eclipse occurring in our area next week so I've been preparing for it.   I decided it would be best to shoot photos of this eclipse through my Explore Scientific APO 102mm refractor telescope.  I'll mount this telescope on my good tracking mount so the telescope will track the moon through the night.  I also decided to use my best camera...  my Sony a7RIIIa. I set up this combination of equipment in the living room this morning so I could test everything.  I set this up early because I wanted to know if I need any extension tubes to get the camera to focus.  It turns out that I actually needed to remove an extension tube.  It is more convenient to get all of this out of the way before I'm outside in the dark and cold.   Below is a photo showing the view through this telescope using this camera.  This is the ridge of a mountaintop quite a distance away (2-3 miles away?)... Unfortunately, all of this is likely ...

L ate at night over the past month or two, on those nights when I've felt up for it, I've been working on a painting of Cincinnati.   We're booked for a trip to Cincinnati and Dayton, via Manhattan and Washington DC, in June with Lukey and Kenzie in tow.  In preparation of this trip, I've pulled out some of my photos from past visits so I can show the kids.   We're all pretty excited about this trip but, considering what is happening with the Federal government now, I'm not too sure we'll be able to go on this trip.   So much is being carelessly cut that I worry about funding being cut to Amtrak.  I'm worried about Amtrak long distance routes being eliminated (as has been threatened).  I'm very concerned that my disability pay will be cut, interrupted or completely taken away.  I'm worried that my retirement pay will be eliminated, temporarily or even permanently.  And, of course, if there is a significant uptick in civil unrest in...

M y goal for yesterday was to get the cockpit seat for the new biplane built, painted and installed.   As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, this biplane is for our garden railroad.  This plane is approximately 1:24 scale which is slightly smaller than the 1:20.3 scale of the trains.  Since this biplane will be positioned over tall plants a few feet over the garden railroad I figured being slightly smaller in scale was a good idea for getting just a little bit of forced perspective.   I needed to make a seat for the cockpit mostly so the pilot could be positioned correctly and not fall into the fuselage of the plane.  This wasn't about modeling an accurate seat but more about a sturdy place for the pilot to be mounted in the cockpit since the seat is not visible with the pilot in place.  If the seat was visible, then I would have spent more time making it look like it belonged in the open cockpit of an old biplane. I had already made one seat f...

A fter our recent visit to the annual train show in Springfield, I thought it would be a cool idea to add an airplane to our backyard garden railroad.  I figured it would look good swooping down right over the tallest of plants.   I haven't fully worked out how I'm going to do this but my first thought was to have a long, tall wood stake hidden in the plants.  I'm thinking that the top 12 inches or so could be clear acrylic.  Then the acrylic could be somehow inserted into the bottom of the plane.  I know I'll come up with some way to mount this plane over the plants but, at the moment, I'm not completely certain.  My timeframe for this railroad is the early 20th century so I decided that a biplane would be ideal.  Finding a biplane in the right scale turned out to be fairly easy (I found one at Wayfair).  Once I had the biplane, I realized that, since it has an open cockpit, I should also find a pilot to purchase. I found a pilot figure on e...

T oday, my new LCD protectors arrived in the mail so I put aside some time to install one on my newest camera body. Back about a month or two ago, I stumbled upon a great sale on a Sony camera body that I have had my eye on for a couple of years.  In short, I picked up this camera at about one-third of its retail price.  This is, by far, the most professional camera body I've ever used so I definitely want to protect it as best as possible. Admittedly, I'm a bit rough on LCD screens.  I've had to replace quite a few over the years.  Grease from noses and fingers are not good for these fragile screens.  Worse yet, sunscreen can damage an LCD screen very quickly and render it useless.  The oils from the face and fingers and especially sunscreen tend to delaminate LCD screens.  For this reason alone, I am now reluctant to use any sunscreen for fear of damaging another camera and I'm always carrying a camera when we are outside. The other problem is that w...

D uring the pandemic, my oncologist was only doing televisits for her regular patients.  I'd still go the hospital for all my bloodwork and other tests but our discussions about the every six month test results would be done over the internet on streaming video as well as through messages in the hospital portal. Since the pandemic, we've been back to visits in the hospital.  This was mostly due to my insistence though.  The last time we attempted a televisit, I was sent the wrong link...  or my oncologist was given the wrong link...  which meant it was a missed appointment and a waste of an hour for me since I had logged on early enough to not miss my doctor.  Then I stayed online using the provided link for another 30 minutes after our appointment starting time.  I eventually got a notification for a missed appointment.   Needless to say, I responded to this "missed appointment" notification informing them we (Sheila and me) were indeed onli...

A lthough I haven't used this particular camera in almost two decades, it was an important camera to me back then.  The Fujifilm FinePix S5000 Zoom was my first Fujifilm camera way back in 2003 and this camera introduced me to the uniqueness and beauty of Fuji cameras.   This was not my first digital camera as I had a few different one through the 1990s.  This was definitely not my first camera as I had been using film cameras since the 1960s.  This was, however, my first Fujifilm camera and although my primary camera has been a Sony camera for the past ten years, Fujifilm has always been very special to me and perhaps my favorite cameras. This camera was the first one I found to be an affordable digital camera that had some film-like qualities so it definitely had its place in my long line of cameras through to today.  I stopped using this camera around 2007 but it was still my first Fujifilm digital camera. I had tried a few other brands of digital camer...