Scattered Thoughts . . .

It was a rough, uneventful and rather boring morning with my health problems (see my previous blog posts). Times like this always feel like periods of 'nothingness'.  I took some extra medications around lunchtime and then I ended up sleeping through the afternoon. When Sheila arrived home at 5pm, she noticed our resident cat sitting on our deck outside our front 15-lite glass door...  sitting in the rain...   watching through the glass at me lying on the couch...keeping a close eye on me through the glass. Whenever I get this type of attention from any cat, particularly this cat, it is a sign of exceptionally poor health... dangerously low levels of health.  Fortunately, I had medicated myself as best as I could...  well, I suppose I could have added a bit more medications... but, I'm awake now and feeling 'okay'. I'm not feeling 'good', but well enough to find something to eat for dinner.   I guess we had better do something about dinner befo

When I first procured this illness... Systemic Mastocytosis... I experienced a lot of very varied symptoms. Once I started on a cocktail of medications, some of these symptoms slowly waned. Most did not, but some did. Back then, I experienced all sorts of neurological symptoms. I experienced so many of these neurological symptoms that all my doctors thought I was developing Multiple Sclerosis. Fortunately, my cocktail of medications slowly helped to alleviate these symptoms. Sometimes, however, my health dips quite low and these symptoms appear again...  today is one such time. Today, my left hand has been twitching consistently all day thus far. Also, my taste buds seem to be all screwed up today... nothing tastes right! Everything is tasting very acidic.  In the big scheme of things, these two symptoms are hardly worth mentioning but it is worth mentioning that when twitching appears and continues for a few hours, it becomes quite maddening! All food tasting acidic is frust

It is only 9:30 in the morning yet I am already ready for bed. I'm exhausted... fatigued... feel like I have been awake for weeks... I'm weak... I'm having difficulty breathing... I simply don't have the energy for anything. There are a million things I actually want to do... work on the house... work on a dollhouse I designed and have started building... work on some model railroading projects... do some landscaping... get some more work accomplished on the bbq grill kitchen area outside in the backyard... do some biking... get out to do some landscape photography... take a short hike to a nearby mountain summit... lately, I've even been thinking of sitting down at the piano again after a very long break from music in general.  (A side note here:  I did, however, have an unusually good day yesterday... I ran some electrical through some existing renovations... I did a little painting... I did a little bit of spackling... I even did a load of laundry which is

The new Comcast Xfinity X1 Entertainment System A few days ago, our Comcast box required another hard reboot which, of course, erased all of our recorded programs. This is something we needed to do far too often... upwards of ten times each year. This is frustrating, time consuming (you need to gain access to the cabling in order to pull cables and power for a hard reboot and then the reloading requires another five to ten minutes), and unnecessary for today's electronics. Worse yet, Comcast's interface has been clunky... sort of like 1980's-style graphic design... slow... dog slow... and the menus were insane! Comcast has been in need of a major upgrade for many, many years... decades, actually. So, our box was not working correctly yet again and needed a hard reboot. Oh, and I should point out that, up until now, we've installed more 'new' boxes (because of burned out components) than years we've had Comcast service. Those older HD Comcast boxes w

I've always had a problem with color mixes whenever I've attempted studio portraits. For instance, my flashes are color balanced to "daylight"... and when we are indoors in a makeshift studio, most of the lights lighting the room are either incandescent or fluorescent. The problem is that incandescent lighting is much warmer than daylight creating a yellow or orange color cast... and flourescent lighting is much colder than daylight creating green to blue color casts. Needless to say, this is a problem and it has always drove me nuts whenever I've attempted studio photography. Turning off all ambient lighting makes seeing anything in the room impossible. It also makes focusing the camera impossible since nothing can be seen in darkness. I knew that I needed some sort of light to light the room. Using dim ambient lighting at a fraction of the brightness of your studio strobes can work but can also cause mild color casts in your portrait studio photography wh

Everything laid out flat as I visually placed the doors and windows for appealing spacing.   The weather was beautiful the other day so I was able to pull some tools out of the shed to do some woodworking out on our front deck. I am trying to avoid doing any woodworking indoors because of all the sawdust it spreads. The project I chose to work on was the dollhouse. I had some 1/2" cabinet grade plywood available in our shed so I decided to use this for the dollhouse. Now that I've cut and notched everything to its basic shape, in hindsight, I could have used some thinner plywood. The doors I bought for this dollhouse were made for thinner walls so now I'll need to add some scale jamb extensions to the two doors. On the positive side, the five windows are made for 1/2" walls so I'm good to go with those. This townhouse dollhouse is beginning to take shape! I'm looking forward to getting it assembled. Clamped together for a dry fit... all the pieces

I sent my two compositions of this week's lunar eclipse to the printer this evening.  I have all my prints done professionally so when I say I sent images to a printer, I am referring to a professional shop and not my own printer connected to my computer. For the final version of the prints, I added text on each. I wanted to make it easy to figure out the date, time and location of this event without having to go digging into the EXIF info (file properties). I wanted this info to be visible on the print itself. Although I feel text on photos adds a distraction, having this added information works in this situation. I'm looking forward to getting the high quality, Fuji Pearl Paper prints (Fuji Crystal Archive Digital Pearl Paper is glossy surface, silver halide color paper with a unique pearl-like, silvery iridescent appearance. The embedded pearl-like crystals give a high gloss effect reflectance) ... I order prints printed on this paper regularly and I have to say that t

This summer at the lake house was a bit unusual in that we saw and heard fewer loons than we normally do.  Loons are a bit odd. They are elusive yet they can be very playful around humans when they want to be but only when they don't feel threatened. They can be territorial yet they can congregate in groups of loons at times. For much of our time at the lake house this year and much to our disappointment, the loons tended to be elusive and quiet. One particular evening, however, a pair of loons approached the house... they paddled back and forth in front of the house about 200 feet from shore. They weren't bobbing and diving for food nor did they seem to be in any hurry to be anywhere. They just sort of slowly paddled back and forth as I quickly, but quietly, headed to our deckside dock with a camera in hand. For the most part, they ignored me as I laid across our dock shooting photos of them.  It was getting darker and darker by the second... it was dusk on this mountain

Waiting for the moon to rise above the treeline... As is the case when trying to accomplish anything, there were some obstacles to overcome when shooting the eclipse the other night. First, I should mention that there were a few things working in my favor which is unusual. The weather was good with clear skies at the same time as a major astronomical event. This combination has been a rarity in my lifetime. My health was doing quite well this particular day so I there were no major health problems to drag me down. (Plus, I pre-medicated with extra medications, just in case.) I was exhausted but I easily found a solution to that problem... just set up the tripod at the living room window and shoot out the window! The fact that these three things came together for one event was amazing... a rare lunar eclipse... on a night when we had clear skies... and also a day when I was feeling relatively well... this was amazing. Power lines and telephone lines getting in the way

It required approximately eight hours of work today (not including all the time spent preparing my gear and shooting), but I managed to put together a full composition of last night's supermoon lunar eclipse (photo below). This composition is comprised of twelve images... eleven shots of the moon as it rose into the starry sky (chosen out of approximately 300 images I shot)... and one shot of the starfield which was in the background of this rare show. The final composition is 6000 x 4800 pixels which would make a beautiful high resolution 8"x10" print. If necessary and if I desired, I suppose I could even produce a high resolution 16"x20" print of this composition.  My original plan was to try to capture a few good images of the eclipse. I had never shot an eclipse before so I was prepared for problems and I tried to keep my goal simple. I kept saying to myself,  "I'll be happy with just a few good images of the blood red eclipsed moon."  Ev