Scattered Thoughts . . .

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry this past week or two, the lake house has been on our minds because now is the time of year for planning our summer and, since the lake house is on my mind, I've been sorting through old photos of our times at the lake house. A few photos have caught my eye while sifting through these old photos.  Okay... really... quite a few photos have caught my eye and I'm left wondering why I didn't do anything with them. In this case, two photos of Kenzie from last summer caught my eye that I wanted to share here. In this first one, Kenzie is fishing on our dock. I found her expression amusing... it appears as though she is saying, "What's on my line? WHAT's on my line???" Either that or the dock is too hot for her feet and she is wincing in pain! Either way, it is an amusing expression making for an interesting photo... I've shared this next one before but I never told the story behind it so it was worth sharin

Finally!  Our new washing machine arrived around lunchtime yesterday... after waiting almost four weeks (I think it was a day less)... not a moment too soon. We were about out of clothes to wear! In order to install the new washing machine, we needed to push the dryer aside to give us a little room to work. Well... the moment I pushed the dryer aside, I realized that we had a problem with our connection to the dryer vent ductwork. The entire back of the dryer was covered in lint and dust... not good at all.  After the installers left, I pulled the dryer out completely to see what problems I could find with the dryer.  It is a long story but I am left with a problem... sometime soon, I'll need to figure out how I'm going to fix this leaking ductwork that runs under our flooring. This is problematic because we have no basement nor is there even a crawl space in this area of the house.  So, I needed to figure out how I am going to connect to completely damaged ductwork. F

I somehow managed to have a couple of productive days... yesterday and today... which allowed me to install the new temporary flooring in our master bathroom and our new toilet! We've been without our master bathroom since mid-January so it was nice to finally feel well enough to be productive and get it up and running again.  We had a problem with our toilet way back in January. The toilet was falling through a rotting floor. We have bigger plans for this bathroom but, at this point, we're not ready to completely renovate this room so it needed a relatively easy and quick fix. A toilet falling through a collapsing floor moved this project ahead of all of our other projects. Emergencies like this really screw up a schedule! Being forced into this repair project meant making another 'clean spot' with some temporary upgrades and repairs.  I re-framed the floor... re-framed toilet support... added reinforced subflooring... painted the wall behind the toilet whil

I was talking with one of our lake house guests this morning about plans for this summer at the lake and that got me thinking about the last time they visited us. Naturally, I went back to a few of the folders on my hard drive that hold photos from that particular week.  One image caught my eye... when I looked at the date and time stamp embedded in the photo, I thought it was a bit amusing... I shot this photo at 6:20 am on 6/20! The morning fog was still well settled all across the lake but the sun had just broken through the fog illuminating some of the trees and a house directly across the lake from our house. I liked the way the sun lit up the fog and added depth, color and light to the trees on the opposite shore. Our side of the lake was still very much in the shade, hidden within the shadows and beneath the mountains behind the house. This 'first sun' of the day always seems to be the most dramatic... perhaps even more so than our daily sunsets.  Now that I think

I had already written about Sheila's little birthday celebration here at the house the other night... we had a very nice dinner together... but I hadn't shot any photos of the gifts that Liza and the grandkids had given Sheila that night for her birthday so I thought I should shoot a couple of photos and share them here...   Plus, shooting these photos gave me something to do so I can say I accomplished something today!

After the holidays and including our annual trek to the largest train show in the US every January, my health is always in need of a few months of recovery. My health crashes to crazy lows and it requires months...  yes, months... of recovery. This is what can be expected whenever I push through a couple of months and, in the process, wear my body down far lower than it should ever be pushed.  We are at the end of March now and I'm still struggling with exceptionally poor health. My days consist of personal hygiene (which alone is oftentimes enough to sap me of whatever little energy I have and to knock me down for the day) and cooking meals for myself. That is about all my health can handle each day during these monotonous periods of lousy health.  On relatively "better" days (just one step above 'lousy'), I do get some physical therapy accomplished first thing in the morning. My spine still needs daily physical therapy. I seem to be able to add this into my

I have so many photos from our years at the lake house that I don't have a clue what to do with them all! Whenever I go back to look through photos from previous years, I always find a few to share that haven't been shared before.  Lately, we've been talking about schedules at the lake house for this summer... who might want to visit,  who gets which timeframe,  when to schedule trips for resupplying food and drinks, etc. Needless to say, the lake house has been on our minds. It is this time of year when we are both ready for some time at the lake but it is also the time of year when I need to start getting ready for our summer.  I must ensure that all our lake house stuff is ready to go... chairs, canopies, the kayaks, the sailboat, radios, lights, life preservers, etc. Once the snow clears out, I need to get hopping on this stuff.  Of course, most years the snow doesn't clear out until late April or early May...  sometimes not until early June... this year, ho

That time of year came around and visited us yesterday... Sheila turned another year older yesterday!  Sheila had to work all day but we had a chance to celebrate a little bit when she arrived home from work. I had a nice dinner planned... some gifts... and Sheila was bringing home some cake...  While I was cooking a nice, tasty dinner of chicken parmesan, fettuccini, and some bread (I'm not a huge chicken fan but that meal was delicious!) , Liza and the kids stopped by to give Gee her birthday presents. They stuck around long enough to eat some tostada chips and help Gee open one of her presents. It was nice to see the kids even if it was a quick stopover before heading home to get ready for school in the morning.  Sheila stopped at La Brioche in Montpelier yesterday to choose two cakes for us to eat after dinner  (a large piece each) . These two "cakes" (although they don't deserve to be called "cakes") tasted as though they were really just dry, pla

I was notified this morning that Blogger had added some new templates providing some updated looks. Once I had a few minutes, I decided to take a look and see if any of these new templates looked appealing to me. The old templates in Blogger were not appealing to me at all. They were very dated and most of the templates reminded me of the horrendous designs provided by MySpace twenty years ago! I've been struggling with creating a look that I like for my blog for quite some time so hearing of new updated templates was a welcomed change! This morning, Blogger offered 15 new templates and two of these 15 templates looked like they had some potential.  Regardless of which of the two templates I chose, I would need to find a new header photo to use so that was my first task... find a header photo that would be appropriate for each of these two templates. Naturally, I chose a landscape since the aspect ratio of this header photo is 3x1.  For now, I decided to use a photo of a

My health has been quite lousy since January. Sheila and I seem to be passing a cold and a stomach bug back and forth between us, over and over. These types of 'common colds' always send my mast cells into a hyperactive tailspin so I'm having great difficulty focusing on anything because my thought processes are a muddled mess! I have a dozen different projects bouncing around in my head all at once. Most of these projects I actually want to accomplish... some I  need to accomplish as soon as I am feeling well enough... and all of these projects are occupying my thoughts at any given moment. If I'm not struggling with nausea and spending time in the bathroom, I'm struggling with pain and overwhelming fatigue. Sheila hasn't been much better lately. I feel as though I am spending all my time in bed, sleeping away the winter as projects keep backing up and my to-do list gets longer and longer. My spinal injuries are terribly inflamed. I assume much of t