Scattered Thoughts . . .

W e have another rainy day here so I'm staying indoors today but I'm feeling better than I have in a couple of weeks.  It seems to be exceedingly rare when my health is in sync with the weather and today, although my health is cooperating, the weather is not.   I have a lot to do outside but between poor health lately, rain and snow, I haven't gotten outside to get anything accomplished.  As I get older, I have absolutely no desire to be outdoors if I'm going to be wet or uncomfortable.  Getting quite sick for a month or two last spring due to a tick bite does not make me want to run outside either!  I'd much rather sit comfortably and safely indoors now. I have a new grill for our outdoor kitchen sitting out there in pieces in a big box waiting to be assembled and installed.  Our old grill was completely rotted out so I have already removed that from the kitchen cabinets and mostly disassembled it so there is now a gaping hole where the grill belongs....

T his is just a short blog entry, mostly, to document my health.   I skim through my blog entries before each of my medical appointments to remind me of things that should be discussed so I try to document these things here.  In this case, I'm slowly recovering from my latest bout of rather poor health so there isn't much to discuss about the recovery but discussing another unexplained illness with fever is notable.   First, the title of this blog entry is "Health Improving" but this does not mean that my overall health is improving with few signs of my primary illness.  It simply is referring to my health improving after a couple of weeks of poor health.  My overall health still is what I would call "poor" so I didn't want to imply I'm miraculously getting better.  A "normal" day or "good" day still means a day that sees lousy health but not lousy enough to put me down on the couch.   My fever was gone yesterday so that was some ...

I 've been struggling with typical mast cell issues over the past week or so but things worsened significantly this past weekend.  I've had increased breathing difficulties, more nausea than usual, and increased bone and joint pain.  Generally, I feel quite lousy and I'm having more trouble than usual with my breathing. I started wondering if I had food poisoning of some sort on Sunday because I spent quite a bit of time in the bathroom and was nauseated most of the past couple of days.  That being said, this could also be my mast cells being over-active, as usual.   This evening, however, I realized that some of what I'm feeling feels a bit like a fever too so I checked my temperature...  the thermometer was showing 99.0°...  then, since I felt that I'm feeling worse than just a 99.0° fever, I quickly wiped off the thermometer's sensor with one of my cleaning cloths for my eyeglasses...  I was then registering at 99.6° consistently.  Now, t...

L ukey and Kenzie's birthday is just a couple of weeks after Ellie and Gee's birthday so it is more like a birthday month! We picked up Lukey and Kenzie from their dad's house (he lives very near us while Liza lives an hour away so we saved her a couple of hours of traveling) and we spent the afternoon with them before we headed to Sarducci's for their usual birthday dinner.  There were no presents this year other than this nice meal since they will be joining us on our upcoming cross-country Amtrak journey.  We had to talk about clothes, packing and measure them for clothes so it was good we had some time to spend with them before heading to Sarducci's.   This annual birthday dinner at Sarducci's is always nice though!   We picked up Pop on the way to the restaurant... I always forget just how dark this restaurant is until I attempt to shoot some photos...  I believe this is the darkest restaurant we have ever visited!  I'm still learning about t...

I 've fallen way behind in blog entries once again!  I've been focused more on my health, daily physical therapy and resting in preparation of a hectic spring and summer.  We have a big cross-country rail journey coming up and I need to be as strong and as rested as possible.  Of course, I also have health struggles most days too so I always seem to be trying to recover.   About a month ago, we had a little celebration at our house for Ellie's seventh birthday.  She shares a birthday with Gee so it was also a little bit of a celebration for Gee as well.  This was mostly Ellie's day though... Ellie has a couple of Disney trips early this year so this year's gifts were geared toward travel and Disney... Gee made some brownies for Ellie's birthday rather than a cake since there were only a few of us present... Ellie is always fun and always smiling so we had a good time celebrating her birthday with her!

T he other day, I went looking for photos here in my blog of a hike we did with Lukey and Kenzie back a few years ago but I couldn't find them anywhere in my blog.  This sent me on an even longer search yesterday sorting through my old hard drives looking for these photos.  I couldn't remember the date.  I couldn't even remember the year but I knew that I shot a bunch of photos while on this hike with the kids.   I eventually found the photos from this hike in a folder from August 15th, 2022 which happens to be the same day that Lukey and Kenzie got to shutdown a running diesel locomotive at the Montpelier train station.  I guess I was in a hurry to post the photos of them shutting down the locomotive and then I forgot about the photos from the hike. So, on August 15th, 2022, we loaded Lukey and Kenzie into the car and headed down to Montpelier.  There is a short hike behind the Capitol building that Sheila often walked during her lunch break (when she...