Scattered Thoughts . . .

A rare photo of a photographer without a camera pressed up to his face. I capture quite a few photos of Sheila but it is very rare when someone captures a photo of both Sheila and me together!  Since I usually have a camera covering my face, it is a rare occasion when someone grabs my camera and snaps a photo of me... and, although Sheila and I are together more often than not, even rarer is capturing the two of us together in the same photo.   While we were at The Munich Haus restaurant in Massachusetts this past weekend with family and friends, Jen asked if we would like a photo of the two of us... I could probably count on one hand how many times people have asked this question over the past eight years so it was a very nice surprise. I truly wish people would ask more often. I handed Jen my camera and gave a few quick instructions on how my camera operates. In hindsight, I should have simply switched my camera to one of the 'auto' modes to make things signific

My New York Central passenger set, headed by a Dreyfuss Hudson streamlined locomotive. As I mentioned in previous blog posts, I came home from the annual Amherst Railway Society's train show empty-handed this year. During our drive back home, I decided to do some model railroad shopping online when we arrived home.  Before we headed to the train show, I put together a pretty good sized list of things I might buy at the show if the price was right. From my experiences at past shows, I knew that I would not find three quarters of the stuff on my list so I made sure I had a pretty lengthy list to improve my odds of coming across something I wanted.  I had products on this wishlist from a number of different scales... N scale, HO scale, O scale (narrow gauge, 2-rail and 3-rail stuff), and even one F scale locomotive. I even had some products on my list which are not scale specific (ie, various power controllers, scenery products, etc). Even with this many products on my wishli

Sheila and I came back home from the Amherst Railway Society's train show with a cold. I always need some time to recover after any trip because of my spinal injuries and mostly due to my illness... Systemic Mastocytosis. Needing some time to recover is no surprise but having a cold on top of my usual need for recovery only compounds the problem. That being said, compared to my usual recoveries after trips, this cold so far has been rather 'mild' for me. Sheila is feeling well enough to be back at work today but my cold is still lingering... clogged head, runny nose, and painful swollen lymph nodes. Of course, whenever I run down my health since procuring this insidious illness, I experience these symptoms to some extent.... some times worse than others. Since Sheila has this cold at the same time that I'm experiencing these symptoms, I'm assuming that I'm also fighting off this bug in addition to trying to recover after wearing down my health.   My spinal i

Making our way to the door of the Big E for the train show... This past weekend we attended the Amherst Railway Society's 2016 Train Show... and, as always, it was a great weekend! I love model railroading but this weekend is about two things... Obviously, first and foremost, it's about model railroading but it is also a big social event. We've been attending this show long enough that we've established some 'tradition' for this busy weekend. We all arrive the day before the show begins, congregating in the hotel's lounge for dinner and drinks. We attend the show on Saturday the moment the gates open, spend the day perusing all the show has to offer and looking for good deals on trains, and then we all go to dinner at a German Festhaus. Relatively speaking, Sunday has become a rather peaceful day of meandering around the 8 acres of model railroading show. This year, Sheila and I arrived in Springfield Friday morning and spent the afternoon shopp

Sheila and I had a very peaceful weekend... and it was a much needed peaceful weekend! I'm trying to recover from our Christmas festivities and rest for our big upcoming train show weekend so this peaceful weekend was welcomed. The only two things I accomplished over the weekend was to help Sheila dig out the cars and shovel snow from our driveway yesterday afternoon and I assembled two new stools for our kitchen table. (Next on my list of fairly big projects is to make a new larger table to accommodate six of us for dinner.) I haven't posted many photos lately so here are a few very recent photos of the kids... Through the window of her dollhouse...

I've really been struggling with attaining video quality that meets my own standards. Contrary to what most people may think, although there are some similarities between photography and videography, there are very significant differences. I'm pretty good with photography but videography is something I would like to learn to do just as well. I've had to learn about file formats, frames per second, how shutter speed affects video and is not nearly as flexible as in photography, and how to find correct exposure when locking down frames per second and that shutter speed. I've learned that there is vastly less flexibility in attaining correct exposure in video when compared to photography.  I've had to learn about post-production editing and that will always be an on-going process. I actually like this part of the video process but I could definitely use a new Quadro graphics card to help make things flow more smoothly throughout this process. (It's on my wish

Our new weather station. We've had a weather station here in the house ever since I've lived here. Actually, when I moved in with Sheila, I brought my weather station at the time with me to Sheila's house.  Every few years, better weather stations at more affordable prices are manufactured so we've upgrade to newer models every five years or so. The weather station we've had for the past four or five years was okay but it was difficult to read in our hallway. We have a small area in our hallway just outside our kitchen where we have the house controls... our thermostat, our telephone/intercom base unit (yes, we still have a landline-based VOIP telephone system... two line... two remote handsets... because cell service is spotty, almost non-existent in our neck of the woods not to mention obscenely expensive) ... the weather station...  and this area is adjacent to our half bath and laundry room. It is just a nice common area of the house in close proximity

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, my health has been a bit lousy since my medical appointment earlier in the week. As a result, not much has been accomplished around the house other than making meals and cleaning myself up. It is during these quiet times when I have a little time to take notice of things I normally don't have the energy nor time to notice. This afternoon I decided to check my blog statistics to see how many people are viewing my blog, where these people are located, which pages they visit, which blog entries they read and how they found my blog. This is something I try to do at least once a week. The results are often interesting. More often than not, most of the people reading my blog are those researching chronic illness and my illness, Systemic Mastocytosis. Sometimes, however, a different blog entry will capture some attention and the tide of visitors shifts. This time of year usually finds traffic from a different source when compared to the rest of