Scattered Thoughts . . .

For the most part, my health over the summer has been relatively good. I've had some lousy health each week but I've been able to accomplish a few things each week. Overall, lately I am finding that if I am religious about taking all my medications, careful about not straying from my very restrictive diet, keep my body as cool as possible and avoid all stress, my health stays relatively stable. Last night, however, my health crashed. It has been terribly hot and humid the past week... bad news for my health. I strayed from my limited diet last night at dinnertime... bad news for my health. I got stressed over a four day-long project getting damaged in an instant last night which means I wasted very precious energy... energy which is very rare to come by... bad news for my health. At some point yesterday, I screwed up one of my doses of medications which I did not realize until after my health started crashing... bad news for my health. I also didn't pick up on a v

I went back to the folder which is holding the few images I captured the other night of the "supermoon" to see if there was another image which I might have missed the other night. Sometimes I find it is best to come back to revisit photos a few nights later or weeks later or even months later. These photos get overlooked for various reasons... I'm tired when I first looked at them... the one with the most detail gets lost in a sea of decent photos... and sometimes I just miss the potential of a particular image. In this case, only a few days have passed but I think I did miss a nice image with some impressive detail for a full moon... I was hoping to get outside to shoot some photos tonight but the moonrise is quite late tonight and I am exhausted already. Trying to hold a camera steady while I am exhausted is difficult to do and getting all the camera settings correct at the same time I am exhausted and not thinking clearly is next to impossible.  I still do

Back a couple of years ago, we bought a fairly nice lawnmower. It was definitely more mower than we needed for our lawn but I didn't want to buy something that would be a pile of junk within a couple of years. Adam started using it to cut a neighbor's lawn in addition to cutting our lawn when I wasn't feeling up to it. This was all fine and dandy until some carelessness entered the picture... I kept harping on Adam to make sure the oil level is good since this is a four-cycle engine and, as such, oil was needed in a separate reservoir to keep the engine lubed. If the oil level gets low, the engine will seize up. Well... long story short... at some point between the two lawns Adam was cutting, the engine seized up.  I finished out that season cutting our entire lawn with a weed-whacker each week... fun times.  The following season I looked into buying a new engine... the cost of a new engine would cost more than a new lawnmower! That brought us again to the task of loo

Supermoon - 12 July 2014 Last night, our moon was a little closer to our home planet than usual. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as a 'supermoon' because the moon does appear ever so slightly larger in the night sky.  Anyone who has tried to shoot a photo of the full moon realizes that this is a rough task. The moon doesn't really seem all that bright but it really is exceptionally bright especially a full moon. This is why far too many photos of the moon only depict an overexposed, bright white splotch in the sky when they try to capture an image of the moon. You really need to use a camera which allows manual control over your exposure to get this right. Contrary to popular belief, you actually need to set your exposure as though you are shooting on a sunny afternoon... yes... as though you are shooting on a sunny afternoon! Another thing that most people don't understand, or realize, is that the full moon is the worst phase of the moon to try t

Seven seconds... That is all the time that elapsed between the first shot posted here which shows Adam a little bit bored and the second shot which shows Adam hiking over to keep the sailboat from capsizing... seven quick seconds.  Things change quickly on the water but when you are sailing such a small, light and nimble boat such as the Minifish, these quick changes require fast thinking and quick action to avoid heeling over and ending up in the water. We had a week of some pretty wild sailing conditions. The wind would be calm and then within seconds the wind would whip up suddenly creating white caps on the lake. The wind would gust to well over 30 knots from a sustained wind of only 12 knots... then the wind would instantly change direction by up to 90 degrees! Some of this quick thinking and fast action involved knowing how to duck in an instant as the wind suddenly gusted and changed direction, slamming the boom over to the other side of the boat, narrowly missing your hea

The light had changed outside so I went back out there with my camera in hand to see if I could compose a different sort of scene with the newest blooming flowers in our wildflower gardens.  Because of the change in light... direction, quality, softness... I had something different in mind this time around...  I again grabbed the camera which chooses its own settings...  randomly... at any given time... usually screwing up any notions I have of getting a good shot. Although, in hindsight, my newest camera might have been the best choice for this particular shot I wanted to stick with the color depth of the Kodak sensor on this malfunctioning camera.  Anyway... I had the camera...  I kept checking the settings to make sure they were the way I wanted them ensuring the camera wasn't changing them on me randomly... I had the lens I wanted... and I quickly captured a few frames.  Typically, I go for a contrasty scene with a lot of deep tonal qualities... very sharp... vivid colo

We had a very late start to summer this year due to some snowfall in April and May. I couldn't plant anything until very late in May because the ground was still frozen. We even had some piles of snow and chunks of ice leftover through Memorial Day weekend which still needed to thaw. Needless to say, we by-passed spring altogether and summer has been late. This morning, while I was staining our front deck (a continuation of yesterday morning's little staining project... and a project which will continue into tomorrow morning), I noticed that we are finally beginning to get some flowers in our wildflower gardens around the house. We have three good-sized wildflower gardens and, oddly enough, the garden which is doing best this year is a garden which hardly had any growth in previous years. Maybe our other two gardens are a bit tired and need a year of rest. After cleaning up from my staining project, I decided to grab one of my cameras to attempt to capture a few shots..

After a very rough week of lousy health and a lot of pain, I started feeling a bit better last night and this morning. As a result, I managed to get a little bit of work done on the house.  In the big scheme of things, what I accomplished was very little, actually...  just a tiny little bit of staining outdoors... but it was more than I had accomplished in at least a week. I stained a new landscaping step I installed a couple of weeks ago along our short stone pathway to the back door. While I had the stain out, mixed, and ready-to-go, I decided to stain the two steps leading up to our front deck as well as a small landing at our back door.  The positive thing is I managed to get a small task accomplished this morning. The negative thing is I feel as though my health has now taken a couple of steps backward again. I slept all afternoon which was necessary and really nice especially since I slept in a nice, cool, air-conditioned room. Unfortunately, I am still completely exhausted

I am starting to feel a little better so I think it is time for a blog post which is a little bit on the lighter side... A couple of weeks ago, Sheila, Adam and I climbed to the summit of Owl's Head Mountain overlooking Lake Groton. Because of my health, we drove up most of the way and then climbed for about 15 minutes to get to the summit. My days of climbing thousands of vertical feet in a day are behind me. I've climbed many mountains and reached many summits over the decades but now I need some help getting to even the shortest mountains. Any activity which raises my body temperature can trigger anaphylaxis so I always try to stay near roads and hospitals. I definitely try to keep my body temperature as low as possible too. Hiking and climbing deep in the woods could be a bit too risky so in recent years we have been choosing mountaintops which have roads winding to the summit. Besides, I have already climbed my share of mountains, many requiring steep vertical climbs

As I wrote in a previous blog post, I've been experiencing horrific pain all throughout my body for the past week and it has seriously affected my mood in a negative way. The level of pain was worst through this holiday weekend. At times like this, I increase my normal dosages of medications to try to bring my body back into check. This past week has been no different. On the positive side, I am feeling a bit better today but I have to say that just the simple act of walking across a room is still quite painful. Now, add to this pain and lousy mood a weekend full of constant fireworks... We had been invited to view Burlington's fireworks a few days ago but I quickly declined. I've always had a bit of a problem with the logistics of this particular event considering my health issues and disabilities so that made me hesitant to accept this offer but I also do have a problem with fireworks in general... and especially, the smell of gunpowder. The constant barrage of firework