Scattered Thoughts . . .

Gee showing Kenzie how it's done! Two weeks ago, we spent a long weekend with the grandkids. We traveled to a lot of places in a short period of time... a Lake Champlain Cruise (Nan and Pop joined us), Church Street, Burlington Mall, White River Junction train station, Montshire Museum of Science, Powerhouse Mall (in New Hampster), and all sorts of restaurants... and Lukey and Kenzie came away from the hectic weekend with a few little souvenirs. Even Gee came away from the weekend with over a pound of Lindt truffles which she shared with all of us.  (Hmmm... I don't think I bought myself anything though.) As we were heading to the Montshire Museum of Science on Saturday morning, the kids still didn't have a clue where we were headed. As one would expect in a situation such as this, during our long hour and a half drive, the kids kept asking, "Where are we going?" After a half hour of unsuccessfully trying to distract them from this repetitive and focused

Before I used the bathroom for the first time today, Sheila had already started laundry. Typically, that is no problem but as I was trying to wash my face and brush my teeth, the water pressure in my faucet diminished to a trickle. " Hmmm... that isn't right..."  I immediately knew it was time to change the whole-house water filter so I jumped right into that project. This is the first time I had to change the filter cartridge in this particular whole-house water filter since I installed it a few months ago. I've replaced many water filters in our old whole-house filter but this was the first time with this newer model so it required me to pull out the instructions. It took a little extra time to figure it all out but the filter change was painless. I removed the old, dirty filter cartridge that came with this filter and installed a better charcoal filter.  This set the ball in motion for today. I spent some time on our plumbing doing some regular maintenance. Thi

Bachmann, O scale, narrow gauge, 4-6-0 steam locomotive. I've been trying to get up to speed with Digital Command Control (DCC) for model trains for the past few months. Well... I started trying to educate myself a couple of years ago but have had difficulty grasping how to fully utilize DCC without having a locomotive to program or even a DCC controller. Over the past year or so, I've collected some DCC locomotives and a couple of different control systems. I'm learning more but it is a bit frustrating for a few reasons. First off, if you want to take a fairly easy route, you can just buy a DCC locomotive and use it in its default configuration with just about any DCC controller. This is certainly the easiest and quickest way to get up and running in DCC. That is not me though. I like to perfect things to my own preferences. I'd like to write a blog post about all the difficulties in programming... all the different DCC systems available today... compatibili

I'm taking it easy again today after another rather miserable night of poor health last night so I'm looking for things to do which won't worsen my health.  As I was looking at the photography gear on the shelves, I remembered that I wanted to try to use some extension tubes the next time I head outside with my camera... so, I evaluated the situation... I no longer felt miserable... the weather is nice although still slightly too warm for me for extended periods... and the camera gear was just sitting there doing nothing too. It was a good time to attempt to do some photography.  I grabbed a Sony camera body... a 70-200mm lens which wasn't long enough without the use of extension tubes the last time I attempted to shoot flowers with this lens... and I grabbed my extension tubes.  Every lens has a minimum distance you need to be from your subject in order for your lens to focus. If you get too close, it won't focus on your subject. I think the minimum distance

I had thought it was a pretty lousy night last night with all that nausea... tonight has been far worse being sick as a dog in the bathroom. I had some sudden anaphylactic-type symptoms as well as nausea and stomach cramps... then all the even worse miserable symptoms hit and I spent far too much time and energy being sick. I've now taken my nighttime medications, extra medications and emergency medications... and, right now, I feel rather poorly which is a significant improvement from my time in the bathroom... but, I feel as though I'll probably be back in the bathroom before long... I'd just like to sleep peacefully.... UPDATE:  It is the following morning and my biggest issue this morning is that I am worn out, generally feeling lousy and I am groggy from the emergency medications. Oh... and these emergency medications make me very hungry!  

I managed to get a little bit more work done on this hopper conversion project today. (As mentioned in previous blog entries, I'm converting four American Flyer S scale hoppers to O scale narrow gauge hoppers.)  Last weekend, I had previously cut two different sizes of bulkhead shims for shimming the coupler boxes to the correct height from the rail but I had not glued them in place. That was today's job.  Since I had already pre-cut all the shims, today's work was fairly easy. I had a little bit of trimming to do on the first of eight sets of shims but I today's task was to simply glue each shim in place with some super-glue gel.  Next, I can glue some brake wheels in place on one end of each hopper. Hopefully that will be quick and easy task too. Hmmm... I need to pick up more glue first... I just remembered that I also need to build or buy some stirrup steps for each of the four hoppers. Once these are installed then I can spray paint each of the cars...  L

Last night, I made some Korean ribs for dinner.   Well... I really should call it a "Korean-ish" dish since we lack some of the ingredients for true Korean food (and some of those ingredients should never be in any food). I replaced some ingredients with things we can get locally, yet, even that was difficult and required some driving around. The ribs were delicious as usual. I served them over white rice and garnished the plate with chopped green onions. We also added some Indian flavor in the form of Naan bread since we had some leftover from another dish we made the other night. This garlic Naan bread fit in well with this tasty dish. Unfortunately, my health does not agree all that well with meals such as this... even with me adapting some ingredients. Dinner was absolutely delicious but my health crashed which quickly turned the night into a night of nausea.  When the nausea got to unbearable levels, I took my bedtime dose of medications (it was only about 8:15pm

My health has been interfering with everything for the past week and even interfering with something as simple as putting together blog posts and sorting through photos so I haven't posted much lately.  I've been wanting to write about bringing the grandkids to the Montshire Museum of Science last weekend because it was a pleasant surprise for them and they had a great time... actually, Gee and I had a great time too! I shot a few dozen photographs and hope to put an album together to share but, for now, we'll just have to settle for one photo from that outing.  Here is one photo of Lukey that I really liked from that day...

I wrote previously about this past week being pretty lousy and brutal. Then, I added a quick update earlier this afternoon (maybe only an hour ago) claiming my health had improved slightly into the "mediocre" category. Suddenly, and unfortunately, things are pretty damn brutal again. I was moving something far too heavy (sarcasm...  it was really a small package of toilet paper) to under the bathroom vanity and was suddenly slammed with intense spinal pain that instantly put me on the floor of the bathroom. I was just a heap of tangled, inflamed nerves stuck on the floor... and I couldn't get up!  As I laid there, contemplating whether to call out to Sheila for help, I eventually caught my breath and managed to get up and make my way to the living room where Sheila instantly noticed something was not right.  Now, my weekend has suddenly moved into the brutal stage... again... as I lay here on the couch icing my spine. 

Plain and simple, this past week has been brutal. Whenever we have a busy weekend of activities, it affects my health for the next week... or month. Last weekend was exceptionally busy from Friday through Sunday. We had squeezed in about three activities and three different places each day... I skipped my daily two hour naps... I was on my feet throughout most of the weekend... and we were on the go all the time. This is a recipe for a long bout of miserable health in my foreseeable future. In preparation of the long, busy weekend, I rested up in the days leading up to the weekend (longer naps each day and did virtually nothing each day in an effort to preserve energy). I also squeezed in more medications in the days leading up to the weekend as well as all through the three day weekend. I can get away with this particular plan of attack if I don't do it too often. It allows for fairly decent health for a few days but there is a price to pay... the price is exceptionally