Scattered Thoughts . . .

While we were in Dayton with our two oldest grandchildren back in June, we visited Young's Dairy in Yellow Springs.  Most of this long Amtrak journey had been a learning experience of science, technology, history and zoos but we wanted to fit in some recreation too so we put aside an afternoon to visit Young's Dairy. This farm has grown significantly since I had lived in Dayton but it still has the same general vibe...  you know it is a farm but there are quite a few things to do.  Of course, it is a dairy so there is homemade ice cream too.   You'd think that the ice cream would have hit the spot on a day that was in the triple digits with humidity close to 100% but, by the time we were ready for some ice cream, we were completely drenched in sweat.  Sitting in the air conditioned creamery while completely soaked with clothes sticking to us was quite uncomfortable!  By this time, the sky had opened up with heavy rain and a passing thunderstorm so sitt...

I had a busy day today.  It was a very rare sunny day and the temperature was around 60 degrees so I figured I should not put off some outdoor tasks that I've been putting off for one reason or another for the past month or two.  I doubt we'll get any other days like today and my health was pretty stable so I put on some work clothes and headed outside.   First off, it was extremely muddy out there.  I don't know how the climate has been for those who read this blog but I can say that we've had so much rain over the summer and fall here in our neck of the woods that our yard is a mud pit.  This made the lawn work that I needed to do a bit of a pain in the butt.  The lawn is ready for winter now though.   I fixed our snowblower.  That broke late in the season last winter season.  Because of all the road construction we had last year when they installed a new water main, we had rocks everywhere all winter.  The rocks ended up get...

There is an Aviation Trail of historical sites in the Dayton area (seven or eight sites in total, I think).  These are sites associated with the Wright brothers and, although we were not intending to knock off any part of this entire list, we did happen to visit most of the sites on this list during our stay in Dayton!  Two of these sites are within a couple of blocks of each other on the west side of downtown Dayton.  Hmmm....  actually...   I think there are three sites within a few blocks of each other and we saw all three.   First, walked over to the site of the Wright home on Hawthorn Street.  The original home has been moved but a replica porch still stands on the corner lot.  Also, there is a replica of the home that was built by a neighbor across the street. After visiting the site of their home on Hawthorn Street, we walked over to the Wright-Dunbar Heritage Center.... Next to the Heritage Center is one of the Wright brothers' b...

After we gave Lukey and Kenzie a relatively short campus tour at the University of Dayton , we drove the few blocks over to Woodland Cemetery.  Kenzie was a bit perplexed that we (or anyone, for that matter) would be visiting a cemetery but I knew this was a place I wanted to visit.  Sheila and I missed a visit to this cemetery the last two times we were in Dayton so I wanted to get here this time.  It is right next to the UD campus so it would have been silly for us to skip this visit since we were staying at UD.   I have always held a very deep interest in the Wright brothers since elementary school.  In fact, one of my first research essays in elementary school was about these two brothers.  I've done larger research papers on them in high school and college.  My father had purchased a few small books about the Wright brothers at my request (we regularly were given books that we chose).  By the time I was assigned to Wright-Patterson Air F...

Throughout our Amtrak journey to Ohio with Kenzie and Lukey back in June, we definitely ate well no matter which city we were in during our journey.  We always found exceptional restaurants.  The place we ate breakfast the most often was a small cafe at the University of Dayton called the Butter Cafe.  The place was a little run down but would have fit in perfectly in Vermont.  The food was quite good for breakfast so we ate here every morning while we were at UD... They offered fresh juices....  here we have a fresh watermelon juice in the middle...  the other two glasses are water and apple juice.  Lukey really enjoyed the fresh watermelon juice though... Sheila had this Dragon Fruit Smoothie Bowl every morning at Butter Cafe...   Lukey said the French Toast was good but not nearly as good as in Manhattan... The different flavors of "scrambles" were good but really looked like someone's garbage...  which reminds me of a line in "Uncle ...

For this trip, Lukey was using one of my smaller Panasonic cameras.  At the zoo, however, he had a fairly long zoom lens mounted on it so he could zoom in on the animals.  Although it had pretty good reach, physically, it was a smaller lens.  T his "medium-long" lens was smaller than the lens that Kenzie was using but his camera was probably a hair larger than the camera Kenzie used.  Putting aside the physical size differences of these little cameras, as I mentioned in the previous blog entry with Kenzie's zoo photos, I think both Lukey and Kenzie had to get used to having that zoom available.  Until this trip, they had always used my cameras with a single focal length prime lens...  no zooming available.   I'm noticing that Kenzie seems to gravitate toward seeing and capturing the whole scene whereas Lukey seems to like picking a subject and zooming in on it.  Neither is necessarily better than the other although the zooming in that Lukey d...