Scattered Thoughts . . .

Since Sheila's latest bout with cancer, I've been doing all I can to keep her happy and keep her mind off the cancer as best as I can. She had already received a few gifts to lift her spirits throughout treatment but she also expressed that she would like to visit Manhattan for Christmas. Needless to say, we headed down to Manhattan earlier this week to spend some time there while the city is decorated for Christmas.  As usual, we traveled on Amtrak so we didn't need to worry about staying awake while driving nor did we need to worry about where to park the car once we arrived in Manhattan. Amtrak has proven to be a mostly trouble-free way to travel for us. I'll write more about our journey on Amtrak soon.  I picked out an historic hotel and we reserved a good-sized suite by Manhattan standards. The location of this hotel was perfect for our plans... mid-town Manhattan, near all the animated storefront windows decorated for Christmas, near the Empire State Building

Every year, we kick off our Christmas season with a dinner with friends at a restaurant in Stowe. This is what we did yesterday and, as always, we had a great time. Thank you, Frank, for arranging this little get-together each year! The food was delicious! Actually, over the course of the day and between Adam, Sheila and I, we went through seven entrees... two orders of Maine Crab Cakes, Maple Buffalo Wings, an Artisanal Cheese Plate, and then three dinners at our table. Oh yeah... and we had a few desserts as well which were equally as good. Every plate was delicious! We had a really great time and this annual event with friends always proves to be a great way to kick off our Christmas season!

As everyone probably knows already, we spent a long weekend at Jay Peak Resort for Liza and John's wedding. I plan to write a long review of Jay Peak but, for now, I wanted to write about the elevators at the resort because the thought of every elevator on that property is still aggravating me today. Maybe if I write about it I can let go of some of this frustration. Let's start with the elevator in our hotel, The Tramside Hotel.  Lukey, in the elevator in the Tramside Hotel. When we stepped into this elevator for the first time to go up to our suite (which was beautiful, by the way... I'll write more about it later) , we noticed an issue which made us nervous. As the doors were closing, the elevator would drop a couple of inches. It would drop a couple of inches every single time the doors opened too! Naturally, this made us a bit nervous.  Additionally, the elevator was brutally sloowwww. We could walk the stairs up the four floors to our suite in the same amou

The wedding weekend is now behind us but we're still trying to catch up on sleep!  I managed to sort through the photos I shot over the weekend. I didn't shoot all that many photos compared to how much I usually shoot. Actually, relatively speaking, I shot very few photos. There are a few reasons for this... I was exhausted, Sheila was exhausted and feeling quite miserable, my spinal injuries were screaming, there was a photographer present anyway, and I was there to enjoy Liza's wedding not shoot photos all weekend. At one point shortly after the wedding ceremony, I insisted that I was done shooting photos so I could spend all my time with Sheila at the wedding rather than being distracted by photography. Sheila is still recovering from her radiation treatment so that already had her worn out and hurting a bit. That certainly played into how she felt over the weekend. Her immune system is seriously compromised so she's been fighting off every cold and infection flo

Last night, Sheila and I had to head toward Burlington in the middle of the night for a fun little event. Adam's flights from overseas had, as usual, changed at the last minute from what was planned which delayed things by a few hours. As a result, we found ourselves up in Burlington in the middle of the night last night. On the positive side, there was absolutely no traffic and we didn't hit a single traffic light on the way to the airport! The airport is decorated for Christmas... We spent a little bit of time in the tower watching air traffic... well, Sheila spent our time in the tower tracking Adam's flight on her cellphone while I watched air traffic... After we picked up some checked baggage, we made our way back home. Now I need to get to ironing for the wedding weekend...

We had the grandkids again this past Sunday while Liza dealt with last minute arrangements for her wedding this coming weekend. It's nice to be getting back into our normal routine! The kids arrived at our house thinking we were going on some sort of "field trip". We explained that while field trips are a nice break from school that are related to school, we're not going on a field trip... we're going on a winter adventure! Since Lukey arrived in only some sweat pants, a tee shirt and a lightweight fleece while it was snowing outside, I decided to tease them a bit by asking if Lukey thought he was coming to our house just to go to bed. He didn't have much of a response so I continued, saying that our adventure will take us to some snowy mountaintop... they immediately thought we were going to the lake house and that we were going to climb Owl's Head Mountain again... I asked Lukey why he wasn't dressed for our winter adventure but, again, he didn&#