Scattered Thoughts . . .

F or the past few days, we've had water heater problems.  There is never a good time for home maintenance problems but this is a lousy week for us to have an added thing that must be done as soon as possible.   First, I made a trip to Lowes to pick up a heating element.  A bad heating element would have been the typical problem so that is what I replaced first.  Even if the source of the problem wasn't the element, it wouldn't be a bad idea to install a new one so I did that.  Theoretically, a new one should be more efficient than one that has been used for many years.  Our water heater is now about 15 years old so it is near the end of its life span.  Actually, it is probably beyond its life span already.   With the heating element on hand, I then went about draining the water heater which was a bit time consuming.  I again had to clear a path to the back wall of the house (like I did to run water out to our outdoor shower a c...

I 've been feeling worse today than yesterday so I assume I overdid it yesterday.  Some of the ear infection pain has returned and I just feel kind of lousy.  Today was just the second day of antibiotics so I know this will take some time even though I seemed to feel great yesterday for some reason.  Plus, the antibiotics will do nothing for the COVID symptoms that I'm still feeling.  I'd really like to get beyond this ear infection pain though. So, while sitting on my butt today, I managed to put some paint on the couple of buildings I built yesterday for the garden railroad.  They are looking a bit more appropriate now. I applied a Barn Red stain on the little train station and painted the windows and doors white.  It is looking much better now even though I still need to install corrugated roofing panels and some trim... You can see the coal storage silos behind the station in this photo below... I applied a brown stain to the upper structure of the silo...

I don't know if I've mentioned it here in this blog, if so, I'll be repeating myself a bit.  Sheila and I had COVID again.  We both tested negative but at this point we're absolutely certain we've had COVID yet again.  I was at the doctor yesterday and they agree that we've had COVID again. When I got up out of bed yesterday, I was exhausted because I couldn't sleep the previous night due to significant pain.  The entire left side of my head was in unbearable pain.  The pain was radiating from my left ear and affected the entire left hemisphere of my head. I was so dizzy that it was making me extremely nauseated.  I took some Meclizine for the dizziness and some of my usual anti-nausea medication.  Then I took about 1000mg of Tylenol.  I was already loaded up on Aleve but that didn't seem to be touching this pain.  After calling the doctor to make an appointment, I even used a warm compress on my ear.  The combination of everything made...

I am still busy setting up my new, more powerful, mini computer...  personalizing the operating system, installing programs, upgrading hardware and setting up hard drives and automatic backups.  It is going well but this is a time consuming process.  I always forget how long all of this takes until I get a new computer.  Every time I think I might be finished, I remember something else that isn't installed and set up on this new computer. In the past, I've always had all my old photos from previous years stored on about ten 1tb external hard drives with no backups.  I've always known that I was taking a big chance by having no backups for these drives but that was something that was always easy to put off.  On the positive side, the only times I ever powered up any of these external hard drives was when I was searching for an old photo or two so these little external SSD drives have very, very few hours on them.  Still, I was taking a chance by not ba...

I grabbed one of my oldest digital cameras yesterday to shoot a few flower photos.  This camera is from 2005 but it has a very unique and irreplaceable sensor that I like very much for certain things.  It does exceptionally well with flowers, landscapes and macro photography. For those interested, these were shot with my Olympus E-500 using my Olympus 70-300mm lens.  The sun was bright and this old camera has limited dynamic range from brightest whites to black shadows so this allowed me to easily get the busy daylight backgrounds to appear almost completely darkened.  The sensor in this camera produces lush colors and sharp images...

W hile my thumb continues to heal (which is going well), I've been working on the seemingly never-ending process of setting up my new computer and sorting through all the photos and videos from our trip.   Each day, I install more software that I use regularly on the new computer.  Just setting up and updating Windows 11 required a couple of days then I needed to personalize the operating system to my tastes... which I'm still doing.  I have some new licenses to purchase for some of my software too so I still have a few more days of software setup to do.   I'm also waiting on another large hard drive to arrive too.  Since I have the room in the new hard drive enclosure, I decided to add a 22tb hard drive to store all my older archived photos so I will have easy access to all my photos.  Anyway, I've been busy with the new computer.  I can't do much with my thumb in its mangled condition so sitting around waiting for software to install seems ...

W e had some friends and Sheila's dad over yesterday to christen our new grill.  The weather was great and it was nice to catch up with some old friends that we haven't seen since before the pandemic. I started the day by preparing some shish-ka-bob skewers.  Cutting up five filet mignons, red onion, an assortment of peppers and fresh mushrooms was time consuming and a bit painful with my broken cut-off thumb.  Skewering everything took a bit longer and was bit more painful than anticipated too.  I left the potatoes and cherry tomatoes whole on their own skewers.   Usually, people assemble the skewers with all ingredients on each skewer so that each person can simply eat a whole skewer of grilled shish-ka-bob.  I don't like doing that though.  Each of these ingredients requires a different amount of time on the grill so I prefer to separate them by the amount of time required on the grill.  The meat and potatoes require the most time... ...