Scattered Thoughts . . .

When I saw this photo that I shot of Sheila and Kenzie, it immediately reminded me of a line which was said to me more than thirty years ago... "A little culture never hurt anyone". Although it was said to me decades ago, it is a line which has always stuck in my mind and is a line which I believe in deeply. Also, it is memorable line from a time of my life I will never forget.  I certainly agree with this sentiment. Culture is a good thing. Learning about as much culture as possible is a good thing. Understanding culture is important simply to become an understanding, educated person. Being exposed to a varied culture at a young age is a very good thing. Seeing Kenzie excitedly looking at the jacket of Les Miserables left me feeling good about exposing the kids to culture in art, music, and life.  A little over thirty years ago, my squadron commander said these very words to me... "A little culture never hurt anyone" and these words made a very deep imp

Sheila and I had a visit from the grandchildren this past Saturday. As always, we had fun with the kids... some train videos, playing with the trains, watched Planes , had some lunch, watched Finding Nemo (I slept through most of this movie... we had hoped the kids would sleep too but, no such luck), and we watched a bunch of short Choo Choo Soul videos. They really enjoy the Choo Choo Soul videos, especially Lukey, and they get a bit animated so I thought I would do a quick post here to share a short video of the kids dancing around the living room while watching Choo Choo Soul...  

As I wrote in my previous blog entry, I am in need of a few days of recovery after yesterday's bout with poor health. It is Day 1 of recovery and I am already bored. My boredom and need to accomplish something overruled my need to rest and recover (I may pay for this tomorrow). I pulled the new large scale steam locomotive and its tender down to the floor... grabbed some tools... plugged in a DC transformer from my O scale narrow gauge trains... and started to unscrew hidden screws... No task is simple, especially when trying to recover from anaphylaxis the day before, but I quickly realized that the first four screws I needed to remove were a bit stripped and none of my screwdrivers could hold well enough to be effective. Quickest solution... grind down one of my screwdrivers to make it fit well enough... After some grinding, one of my screwdrivers fit well and I managed to disassemble the tender which houses the sound card. The battery contacts powering the sound card wer

Yesterday... it was brutal for a couple of hours. I was in and out of the bathroom, terribly sick and nauseated, and teetering on complete anaphylaxis. It was not a pleasant few hours. Systemic Mastocytosis is a rare illness in which the body's mast cells will indiscriminately 'attack' the body rather than their usual enemies such as wounds, pathogens and allergy. During this process, the mast cells will release a bunch of mediators which causes countless symptoms including anaphylaxis.  Typically, I do well at handling most of the resulting symptoms but anaphylaxis is a tough one to handle. When all these mediators are dumped into the body by my mast cells, my body responds by going into anaphylactic shock or at least bordering on anaphylactic shock or anaphylaxis. Yesterday, after breakfast, I started feeling rather poorly. My stomach was bothering me. I was a bit nauseated. Before long, I knew I would be sick and in the bathroom. I checked for my pulse... I had a

As many of you know, a group of us attend the annual Amherst Railway Society's Railroad Hobby Show every January. It is now the time of year when we must start counting heads and reserving rooms. The number of hotels offering special rates for this event has diminished significantly this year. Actually, most of the hotels offering price breaks are hotels we would not stay at even if they were free! This has severely limited our options this year. We have decided to try to reserve a block of rooms at the La Quinta Hotel in Springfield. La Quinta is not offering any kind of event pricing nor group pricing so we are stuck with regular rates minus a AAA discount. Fortunately, La Quinta is only slightly more expensive than the event rate we were offered last year. Unfortunately, although only slightly more expensive, this means the price has increased nevertheless. We stayed at La Quinta last year and we had a nice time. The location was very convenient... the hotel was clean... a

Today was a good day!   I actually accomplished quite a bit on the half bathroom today in the way of finish carpentry. I had hung the new custom door I built yesterday. Today I cut and installed the door stop... trimmed out both sides of the door... cut and installed a top rail for the wainscoting... added some architectural details... cut the wood needed for crown molding... and even masked off the new tile floor in preparation of painting.  There were a few plumbing fittings to assemble and I managed to assemble those today as well. I had two supply valve assemblies for the sink and one supply valve assembly for the toilet which needed to be put together. Since it was nice outdoors today, I managed to get those done as well.   I hope to get some staining and painting accomplished tomorrow. If that goes well, I will cut off the water supply so I can install the three valve assemblies that I assembled today. Things are moving along and I'm happy report that I made some

I'm still working on this custom door. The door is residing in our kitchen on top of the jig which is on top of two sawhorses. The weather has been lousy so I am stuck working indoors this week. Throw in Adam's wisdom teeth problems and my off-and-on lousy health, and things are moving a bit slowly... Since my last blog entry about making some progress in assembling the door for our new half bathroom, I've managed to drill out the holes for the pegs which are intended to hold each joint together. Unfortunately, like so many other things on this half bathroom project, this didn't go as smoothly as I would have liked. Worse yet, I need to make three more of these doors so I need to figure out how to avoid repeating these mistakes. I figured that writing about the problems might help in avoiding these same mistakes on the next three doors.  Pegs are inserted through this joint to hold the pieces together. First let me explain how I intended to fasten each of th

The door... finally cut, sanded and assembled! I finally had a productive day today! It has been a rough week or so of lousy health which caused the installation of the new half bathroom to stall for almost two weeks. Today I managed to get some significant work accomplished! I was having some cognitive issues first thing this morning so I decided to weigh my options... take another day off to recover or try to accomplish something. In the end, the weather forecast was the determining factor. The moment I saw that the rest of this week is supposed to be rainy, I knew I had to try to accomplish something outdoors in the decent weather. The thing to accomplish today was cutting up all the pieces for the custom door since this particular project needed to be done outdoors. I cut up all the lumber... shaped all the joints... and then sanded everything. By the time I finished this, it was definitely lunchtime. My stomach had been telling me the same for at least an hour at this poin

My health has been pretty lousy this past week with various issues overlapping each day. Overall, I've been feeling worn out, weak, and just generally lousy. I've had problems intermittently with breathing, dizziness, stomach/gastro-intestinal, nausea, vision, bone pain, joint pain, spleen pain, cognitive function, bordering on anaphylaxis, and probably a few other things I have forgotten about right now. It has just been a rather lousy week. I laid down this afternoon for my daily two to four hour nap. Adam had his wisdom teeth pulled yesterday so we were all already camped out on the couch all day so I just napped on the couch while Sheila and Adam continued to watch television. Our neighbor's two cats spend much of their time every day at our place and today was no different. Before I fell asleep, I saw one of the cats pass back and forth outside. Since seeing the cats coming and going is something I see everyday, I didn't think much of it.  When I awoke from m

This entire week has been one health problem after another. I honestly was fighting back tears as my health crashed into anaphylaxis last night. The tears weren't because of pain nor simply because I was feeling miserable. The tears were because I have been so unproductive this week and I now had to accept the fact that the next few days would be, at best, a recovery period of more nonproductivity. This weighs so heavily on me, I suppose, because I want to do so many things around the house but can't... because each day I lose due to this debilitating illness, is one less day I will have in my life. Now, once again, I didn't just lose another day, I just lost a full work-week and this downtime of nothingness promises to be longer. We were doing some light shopping in Williston and South Burlington last night... the first store we visited was all it took. As we were walking into Bed, Bath & Beyond (we hadn't even entered the store yet), I was experiencing breathing