Scattered Thoughts . . .

I bought a couple of "My Passport" external drives a few days ago so I could backup all my years and years of files and photos. I had these files strewn across numerous external drives and I recently started to have problems with one of these drives. It was time to upgrade. These 2 terabyte "My Passport" drives arrived a few days ago... I immediately started copying all the files from all these drives... then, yesterday, I backed up this new drive onto a second "My Passport" drive.  This morning, I randomly checked the drives to ensure everything copied accurately... it all looked good. Then came the scary part... deleting files on my computer which I had already backed-up redundantly on these two new drives.  This process of deleting took much more time than I had anticipated but it resulted in freeing up about 75% of my desktop computer's hard drive. After freeing up all this disk space, I ran a registry cleaner to tie up all the lose ends

I wrote a couple of days ago about making a couple of hot dogs for lunch. I had created a new recipe but felt it was missing a couple of things. Today, I decided to give it a shot again while it was fresh in my memory.... Hot dogs in oil in a pan until slightly browned and crispy... a slice of crispy smoked bacon on each bun... add the hot dog... squirt on some horseradish sauce...  add some shredded lettuce... add some sliced tomatoes... add some crisp dill pickles sliced crossways... and, finally, sprinkle with salt and pepper...   It was delicious so I'm sticking with this recipe!

In today's digital world, it is extremely important to back up all your work. Any computer could fail in an instant leaving you with a feeling of doom in the pit of your stomach and missing weeks, months or even years of work. Back about a year and a half ago, I decided to purchase an online backup service for my desktop computer (after my previous computer failed instantly). All the files on this desktop are backed-up daily. I've been comfortable in knowing that if my computer becomes inoperable, for whatever reason, I still have all my files stored in a safe place. I also had three external hard drives of old photos, videos, music and documents sitting around on my desk. The good thing about this is that I had photos on external drives. The bad thing is that none of these drives were backed up.  I tried to access one of these drives a few days ago and found that this particular drive was behaving erratically. This instantly reminded me that I never did backup any of the

This is almost not worth writing about but I'm still pretty excited by this so I felt I should write something. Plus, I'm worn out enough to keep me a bit sedentary and at my desk today. I'm so worn out, actually, that my vision is a bit lousy today too. Anyway, I'm here at my desk and figured I should write a little bit. I've been evaluating my lens and camera needs over the past few weeks. I'm not going to bore you with all of the details of my decisions but this evaluation process got me looking at what is available at this moment in time. I found a couple of Hasselblad lenses on clearance... at a fraction of their original cost... brand new... at prices so low that I could not walk away from the deals. I picked up a Hasselblad E 16mm f2.8 pancake lens. I actually needed to replace a Sony version of this lens that I had dropped and I accidentally found this one on clearance.  The image quality created by this new Hasselblad lens is far better than the

Today I needed to search the house for things to eat for lunch... I'm not in much of a mood to wander out into our lousy weather today...  I knew we had some Hebrew National hot dogs in the fridge but I didn't want a plain old typical boring hot dog. I needed to come up with something more interesting. While searching the fridge, I started collecting ingredients that would work for a hot dog. I started with some bacon... I added some horseradish sauce to each of the buns then placed a crisp slice of bacon onto each bun... and I sliced up a couple of dill pickle spears to add on top of the hot dogs. After I fried some shoestring fries in oil, I added two of the hot dogs to the oil and fried them until crisp (the only way to truly cook a hot dog)... then finished topping these hot dogs with the dill pickle slices. After my first bite, I added more horseradish sauce to the top of each hot dog.  This improvised hot dog was very good but, in hindsight, if I had a tomato and so

Sheila celebrated another birthday this weekend. Well... actually... Sheila's had about a month of birthday celebration since she started receiving her gifts almost a month ago!  We attended a nice little dinner party at Tom and Karen's on Saturday evening. It was a beautiful weekend so we spent some time out on Tom and Karen's big new deck... then we moved inside and had a really nice dinner. As is the case at every one of Tom's dinner parties, the food was delicious. It was a fun time... and, after months of being quite sick (Sheila, as well), it was nice to socialize and laugh a bit. Actually, we laughed a lot! It was a really fun time! On Sunday (which was Sheila's true birthdate), the weather was even more beautiful than the beautiful weather we had on Saturday... bright, sunny and temperatures hovering close to 70 degrees all day... so we got some yardwork and housework accomplished before Tom and Karen visited us with a present for Sheila. As we were pr

We've had a stench coming from our range and it has not been my cooking! Unfortunately, anytime we turned out the stovetop or the oven, we would get a strong smell of rodent and urine. Something needed to be done! I pulled out the range when this odor first presented itself a few weeks ago figuring that maybe some mice had taken up residence behind the range or under the range since it is a warm place... I found some mouse poop and urine stains but I didn't think this was the source of our problem. I was hoping, but I wasn't sure. While I had the range pulled out away from the cabinets, I vacuumed and then cleaned and then painted... I wanted to seal up any of the urine smell. Our problem was mostly minimized now but there were still some really stinky times especially when we used the broiler. Then we attended a dinner party at the house of some close friends. They have the same model range as we do... a Frigidaire Gallery line... with a full commercial quality coo

As I mentioned in a previous post, I shot approximately 2000 photos on our last trip to Dayton. Most of the places we visited were very unlike anything we can find in Vermont... a nice zoo, a large aquarium, a tremendous model railroad at a place called EnterTrainment, an historical Ohio village, the US Air Force Museum, the Wright brothers' family history including their homes and businesses, and an amazing airshow. It was nice for a younger Adam and a younger Liza to see what we saw on this trip.   I have a lot of beautiful photos from that long journey to Ohio and back but many of my favorites are from the US Air Force Museum. One in particular is pretty cool and worth mentioning... and is probably my favorite of the bunch... The Air Force Museum is broken down by "era" spread throughout four immense hangars... ie, the early years of aviation, WWI, barnstorming, WWII, etc. They even have a separate silo hangar dedicated to housing missiles nestled between two of th

While the grandchildren were with us on Sunday, they spent some time putting together a big puzzle of the United States (never to be erroneously referred to as "America"...  more on this pet peeve of mine in a future blog entry) with Gee.  As they searched for where to place each state, Gee would tell them about the state and what we have done there while visiting that state. When they came to Ohio and were trying to figure out where it belongs, Gee explained to them that this is where we brought Mommy and Uncle Adam... that we saw airplanes, animals in a zoo, an aquarium and a number of other places. They were animated and excited while hearing about the trip to Dayton so I thought it would be the perfect time to show them the photos from that trip, except... I quickly remembered that all those photos were on an old external hard drive and not in an album online. There was no way I could get at these photos quickly. I promised them that I would dig out these photos so t

Last summer, I shot a lot of loon photos. Most of them were shot in very low light... at dusk... with the sun low and usually behind the loons. This meant that I had a lot of photos that were a rather poor quality since my photography gear that I use for wildlife is quite old.  Every now and then, however, I dig back into the folders containing these photos to see if I may have missed a decent shot that is worthy of sharing. There is almost always one more decent photo to find and while I was digging through these old photos the other night was no exception. I found this photo, below, of a lone loon on the lake, at dusk, neck stretched, looking and searching... It was rather dark when I shot this photo... the sun had already dropped behind the mountains... the loon was in the long shadows stretched across the darkened lake... and the loon was a significant distance away... I had to use my longest lens which is definitely less-than-ideal for low light conditions... 600mm at I