Scattered Thoughts . . .

Even though I had great difficulty breathing again today (it is my 'new normal', I suspect) , I managed to start working on a new project this morning. I didn't get a whole lot done but it was nice to have a fairly productive morning, for a nice change of pace. Our old bedroom has been relegated as a temporary storage facility rather than a nice bedroom since we moved into our new bedroom just before Christmas. This morning, I started moving things out of this room so we could begin renovating.  I needed to take a lot of breaks to catch my breath... used my inhaler about three times... got a little dizzy a few times... but, slowly, I managed to make a slightly noticeable dent in clearing this room of clutter.  After lunch, I went outside and started excavating for a small foundation for a small three window alcove we plan to add to this bedroom.  The good news is I did not encounter any buried utilities. I started this digging by hand with a plastic shovel just in

We've had a very busy weekend!  We started our weekend by spending Saturday in Burlington with Liza and John and then Frank and Christine joined us later in the afternoon. As are all our visits to Church Street in Burlington, we had a really nice time... Ri Ra's was comfortable, fun and the food was delicious... we ate far too much... and we had some really tasty drinks and desserts! On Sunday, we celebrated Lukey and Kenzie's fourth birthday at Nan and Pop's house. As I wrote in my previous blog entry, everyone had a great time at this little party.  My health held up through the weekend thanks to plenty of rest beforehand and a lot of extra medications but I'm left worn out... I slept a solid 12 hours last night and I'm looking forward to sleeping through this afternoon.  I already posted a short video from the kids' birthday party... now, here are some photos too... well, far too many photos for a single blog post but here they are anyway!

Yesterday, we went to Nan and Pop's house to celebrate Lukey and Kenzie's fourth birthday! The weather was great and e veryone had a good time, especially the birthday kids. Here is a very quick edit of a very short video I threw together... some photos will follow soon... PS... Kenzie's CBA has been repaired and is now operational (Candle-Blowing Actuator).

Today was one of those rather lousy days. It wasn't "miserable" nor "grueling" but it was quite lousy. Systemic Mastocytosis causes all sort of transient symptoms, problems, difficulties and obstacles. One day can be vastly different from another. One moment can be vastly different from the next! Today, however, was fairly consistent... quite lousy. This all started late last night with some flushing. Sheila had noticed a splotchy, deep red rash on my face and neck. I felt "okay" at the time so I just let this first sign of impending trouble just slip by with no countermeasures. By the time I laid down in bed last night, I was experiencing palpitations and mild tachycardia (120-130 bpm). This is a sign that my blood pressure was dropping too low... my body would respond naturally by jumping into overdrive to counter the loss in blood pressure (which is a very good thing)... then my blood pressure would drop again... body would respond.... etc. Co

My two newly procured Atlas F9 O scale diesel locomotives arrived in the mail today. (Thank you to our friend and mail-carrier, Christine! By the way, we all need to get together for a few drinks soon!) These two fairly large locomotives were packaged very nicely. When I finally unwrapped all of the protective wrapping, they were in much nicer condition than I had imagined. They actually look significantly less used than my previously procured Atlas F9 diesel. This was great news! Next was to set up a test track so I could see how well they run... I pulled out some 2 rail, O scale track... I assembled about a dozen straight pieces to make a 12 foot test track... grabbed my old trusty power pack (these are old analog DC locomotives)... I quickly dug out a couple of power leads with alligator clips... connected the clips to the track... plugged in the power... and placed the first locomotive on the track... The lights came on and it runs very nicely! It runs smoothly at slo

Our next scheduled trip is to the lake house this summer and we need to start gearing up for that as soon as the weather allows us. We might also try to squeeze in a short weekend trip to someplace outside of Vermont to do some much needed shopping but that will be more of a spur of the moment thing. We are, however, planning to make a quick trip out to Dayton in the coming months. This next Dayton trip is finally on our schedule and we are asking around to see if anyone might want to join us. National Museum of the US Air Force We're way overdue for a trip to the Dayton area and the National Museum of the US Air Force. Since we were there last, I've been honored on the "Wall of Honor" and missed an official dedication ceremony due to my poor health so we'd really like to see this new "Wall of Honor".  Although we've been wanting to visit Dayton again for years, this particular trip was put on hold over and over due to other commitments using

Back a couple of years ago, I happened to win an O scale (the old Lionel size) diesel locomotive on eBay for about $25. It runs on traditional 2 rails rather than 3 rails and can even run well on the tight curves necessary in a relatively small room (I have no room for large sweeping curves). I wanted to find a few more of these EMD F9 locomotives. About a week ago, someone advertised three of these locomotives up for auction on eBay. Finally! Long story short... I won the first one... was quickly outbidded for the second one... and then won the third one! The two diesels I won are still in the hands of the US Post Office but I'm already putting together a plan for this small fleet of locomotives. First, I needed to come up with a numbering scheme. There is a big "853" on the side of each of these diesels. Repainting is too much work so I decided to just add a suffix to each number...  853A, 853B, and 853C. This morning, I set out to create backlit numberboards for

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