Scattered Thoughts . . .

Since the weather has not been all that conducive to working outdoors this morning (we actually got some snow in the mountains... yes, it is June and we got some snow!) , I decided to stay indoors and do some food prep for our next few weeks.   Homemade Italian salad dressing. Over the years, I've been adapting my own recipe for Italian salad dressing. This was first up this morning after a quick trip to our local grossly overpriced supermarket. I threw all the ingredients together... tasted it... added a little of this and a little more of that... tasted it again... now that is done for the next few weeks.  In the past, I always made my salsa in a big batch and put it in a big bowl. That is okay for parties when everyone is gathered around one big table but the big bowl doesn't work too well for smaller groups. We've found that in one single big bowl, the salsa gets "old" far too quickly. This time, we decided to give canning jars a whirl in an attempt to

Over the weekend, Sheila and I tackled getting the boats ready for our very short summer season. I ran into some issues with the sailboat... I left the sailboat sitting upright on a homemade dolly with the mast in place. The sleeve for the mast filled with water while the mast sat in this wet sleeve...  probably froze, thawed, froze, thawed, etc, over and over through the winter... and when I lifted out the mast the other day, it fell apart. I won't make that mistake again. The sailboat will be disassembled and put away for winter this year! I managed to make do with spare parts I have on hand but the mast will need to be replaced eventually. It should be okay for this season though. Everything else looked pretty good and functional. That being said, I still would not be surprised if I find a new problem when we put the boat in the water at the lake house. While I fixed, cleaned, waxed and re-rigged the sailboat (replaced some old, worn rope), Sheila cleaned up and waxed the

The grandchildren were with us again on Sunday. It was a rainy and rather uneventful day but, as always, it was very nice.  I gave Lukey a haircut... some playing with dolls, dollhouses, trains, airplanes... some baked ziti for dinner, hot Italian sausage on the side, and some bread... and ice cream for dessert.  The fairly typical shot of Lukey and some of his trains... EDIT:  The photo of Lukey playing with his trains (above) was the first photo I shot this day. I quickly realized it was far too dark in the house on this dark, rainy day. My auto exposure chose a very high ISO of 12,800. Typically, anything beyond 1600 is avoided by photographers because things tend to get noisy, grainy and ugly beyond 1600. This shot above had doubled that limit three times and the photo still looks pretty good! Once I realized the house was this dark, I grabbed my little Nissin i40 hotshoe flash and mounted it on my camera... set it to TTL and a negative 1.5 exposure (so I only added a smal

I don't know what it is about the State of Liberty... I've always been bothered by this French gift of art. Don't get me wrong, I love French art and architecture but the Statue of Liberty bothers me deeply for some reason... it creates conflict within me when it really should create welcoming warmth...  Perhaps it is the horrendously ugly and overbearing cyan color... perhaps what bothers me is the prison-like facilities on this tiny island and its sister island, Ellis Island, used to process our poor immigrants... perhaps it is a cluttered, poorly arranged harbor that has bothered me... perhaps the vision of a monstrous, overbearing "Lady Liberty" to greet our east coast immigrants bothered me... perhaps I agree with some movie-makers and think this piece of art is more aptly suited to be featured in movies like Planet of the Apes ... perhaps I just find this monstrous piece of "art" a bit unappealing or even hideous (of course, my own personal opini

So, since I am sitting around waiting for my spinal inflammation to subside, I thought I would sit here on my pillows and work on some old photos while sipping on some coffee.  I'm still sorting through the folder that holds photos from our 2013 trip to Manhattan. I was using an old, crappy Olympus camera back then so I often left whole folders of images left untouched because I was so frustrated by the images. This was one of those folders. After my experiences with two Olympus cameras, I don't ever want to use another Olympus camera for the rest of my life... the colors absolutely suck, white balance is always a problem, the noise is horrendous, the files are very shallow causing the image files to fall apart very quickly in post-processing... I just hate working with these files. I've found, however, that I can get some decent black and white images out of the files when color is my main problem as is the case with this particular folder of images. The Empire Sta

My health is on a roll again... absolutely miserable, poor, lousy, and exceptionally painful health which has been far too consistent lately. I couldn't sleep again last night... I have a million things I must get done and I can't do any of them right now.  Funny...  I had thought I was already in a lousy mood yesterday... compared to my mood today, my mood yesterday was quite pleasant.  It will be another long, brutal day today.  Maybe I'll look for some other photos from that 2013 trip to Manhattan...

I slept away much of the day since I didn't sleep at all last night. Fortunately, my spinal pain has subsided a bit... down into the 4-5 range, at rest.  I'm about to head to bed but wanted to post a photo here first. I worked on processing this image this evening... selective dodging and burning... luminosity masking... selective sharpening... etc.  I shot this photo during a trip to New York City in 2013. The RAW image remained on one of my hard drives untouched. I hadn't even sorted it into one of my "best" folders as I do with the best images in most of my daily folders! When I was searching through the folder looking to pull out this image this evening, I saw a few others which might make some decent photos as well. For now, however, it will be only this one image to add to my collection of finished photographs. I love the contrast of this image... the sun rays... the clouds... the sun reflecting off the buildings in the center of the frame... and I esp

What a crappy, lousy, miserable day due to intense spinal pain, inflammation, bone pain and some resulting Systemic Mastocytosis issues... that is about all I can say.

Although the weather is beautiful today for working outdoors, I am in 'recovery mode'. My spinal pain, at rest, is in the 7-8 range on the 10 point pain scale.  Yesterday, I dug and installed footings for the roof covering our grill/outdoor kitchen area. Then, I jacked up the adjoining playhouse to raise it four inches to match the roofline I need for this new roof over the grill/outdoor kitchen area. This work proved to be far too much for my spinal injuries.  Anything I do adds inflammation to my spinal injuries but I've been doing a lot of things lately which require a lot of bending over and that is never good for my spine. I don't think I slept more than a total of one hour last night! My spine was so inflamed that it was excruciating just lying in bed. I spent the night very carefully and very slowly tossing and turning trying to get comfortable enough to sleep. It didn't work. I simply could not sleep. So, today is a down day for my health.  As I s

I had a fairly good day yesterday... my health was relatively stable... I did some annual staining around the outside of the house... I assembled a hand pump station and stained it... I assembled the galvanized plumbing fittings... it was a productive day! This doesn't mean I didn't have moments of borderline lousy health yesterday... I did. A few times during the day, I needed to cool down... cold showers... cold water over my head until I cooled down... cold water on the insides of my wrists to cool down my blood... It was around 90 degrees all day so I had to work hard at keeping my body cool so my health would not fail. Around lunchtime yesterday, I wheeled our air conditioner to a window... set up the vent in the window... plugged it in... and we had air conditioning in our living room, kitchen and bedroom. I might need to resort to turning on the air conditioning today just to cut the edge on the humidity which is causing serious breathing issues for me today. Today