Scattered Thoughts . . .

A fter a few mistakes made this past weekend which delayed our traditional Thanksgiving dinner and resulted in some ruined alternate meals throughout the weekend, we managed to have a very-well prepared but rather belated Thanksgiving dinner this evening.  My favorite dish of this dinner was and always is the homemade cranberry sauce.  I added some diced apples and diced pears to the cranberry sauce this time around and that really worked out well.  I think I'll be doing that again in the future (if I remember).  It was delicious.  I had prepared the cranberry sauce on Wednesday so all we had to do this evening was open a jar where we had stored it.   I normally totally despise green bean casserole because most people make it with a can of soup and a can of fried onions.  I don't do it this way.  Actually, if I had my way, canned soup would never be in my house and especially not to be used as an ingredient to another dish.  For this green bean casserole, I made a white bechame

W e ended up changing plans for our Thanksgiving day for various reasons all more than likely related to my history of bad luck on past Thanksgivings.  This day has always been my least favorite day of the year and today was a great example of why I feel this way. First, at some point when I started to prep for our Thanksgiving dinner, I realized that I forgot to set a calendar alarm to remind me to remove the turkey breast from the freezer on Tuesday.  That meant that our turkey breast was still in the freezer and frozen solid.  After a few choice words flew from my mouth, I moved the turkey breast to the fridge and quickly accepted the fact that our traditional Thanksgiving dinner was now moved to Saturday.  I don't even like turkey so I'm not sure why I continue to make this particular meal.   Then, we received a weather alert...  A snowstorm was approaching and would begin sometime Thanksgiving night.  This meant that I would need to head outside to prepare for significant

W e started our Thanksgiving weekend yesterday with some food prep, Florida and Dayton NCAA Tournament basketball games ( never, never, never  lunkhead football in this house), and a nice Thanksgiving Eve dinner.   Yesterday, I started my morning making some sweet mint tea and homemade blackberry syrup.  Then I got started on making homemade cranberry sauce.  I made very small batches this year since we will again be home alone due to the lingering and once again flaring pandemic.   Sheila and I both had this virus before testing was even available last year (not that I have any faith in our lame testing and almost non-existent standard guidelines for testing) and it was an absolutely miserable experience so we are avoiding all chances of getting this virus again.  I am actually still struggling with debilitating inflammation and swelling so I have no desire to prolong this any longer than necessary.  So, we'll be home alone again for this holiday.  We do, however, have our Alexa S

T he moon was shining brightly through our living room window as we headed to the bedroom so I figured I would take a quick view through that new little Orion 102mm Mak-Cassegrain telescope I evaluated recently.   Sheila was in the bathroom getting ready for bed so I had a few minutes to kill.  I went to retrieve a lightweight mount and the telescope and set it up at the window to take a quick look...  I easily found the bright moon in the sky and saw nothing but out-of-focus mush.  I again repeated what I had been saying all along about this little Mak-Cass telescope...  "what a piece of junk." This prompted me to go retrieve my Skywatcher 72mm refractor which is equally as small but with a much short focal length.  I brought that out to the living room and I was immediately treated to a stunningly sharp view of the moon.   Viewing through a window with optics is a no-no because glass will cause all sorts of problems.  Heat escaping the house through an open window is often

In the past few days, I had some hands-on experience with a new Lionel train set.  When I was a child, I used Lionel trains exclusively in my model railroading hobby.  I actually had a large model railroad in our attic.  By high school, I had progressed into more realistic trains in N scale (realistic track, realistic slow speeds, realistic direction control, realistic and detailed trains, etc) but I continued using my large Lionel model railroad on the other side of the attic space.   Sometime in the 1970s, Lionel started producing more toy-like plastic trains including their locomotives.  I'm sure they still had some of their higher end, highly detailed metal trains but I only had access to my friends' lower end new Lionel trains.  Unfortunately, my experience just the other day was with very low end, almost what I would consider junk, toy-like plastic Lionel trains.  This train set is very toy-like and, worse yet, likely to prove to be easily broken by a child.   This train

I am all set up to do some solar imaging but I am now waiting for the sun to clear the trees.  This time of year, the sun travels very low across the sky so I only have a relatively short window of opportunity to observe or view the sun.   I plan to start with some white light observing and imaging of the sun's photosphere.  My solar wedge solar filter includes a Continuum filter as well as the usual IR/UV Cut, Neutral Density and Polarizing filters which has always worked fairly well for me.  I've observed and imaged this way before so there is nothing new with this configuration.  I plan to do something new today too though.  I now have a narrowband 3nm Calcium K filter inside a different solar wedge filter that I have yet to try so that will be part of today's plan.  This should produce nicer results.   The one "different" thing about this filter is that this Calcium K filter is not an observing filter.  Actually, my eyes should see nothing through this filter.

A fter a mostly sleepless night the night before last with some health issues that kept me in the bathroom and seriously cut into my sleep, I managed to get some sleep yesterday afternoon for about three or four hours in preparation of a clear night last night.  Clear nights around here are few and far between any time of year but especially in the November through March timeframe so I don't like to waste these rare nights, if possible.  This meant a relatively rare opportunity for viewing some objects in our solar system.   As the sky darkened to a deep dark blue, I set up a new telescope of mine that I have been evaluating as an option for beginners.  I had three eyepieces on hand;  a low power wide eyepiece, a medium power eyepiece, and a high power eyepiece.  I also had my Sony a6000 camera ready to go with a nosepiece on it so I could slide the camera into the diagonal in place of an eyepiece when I felt the view was worthy of recording.  Facing the back end of our backyard in

S heila was featured on the evening news this evening!  I took the easy route and just recorded it with one of my cameras while standing in front of the television.  

I was notified today that my Oncologist wants to discuss something with me again on Monday.  I'm not sure what she feels the need to discuss though since we just had a long discussion and exam at the hospital just yesterday.  I hope I'm not losing another specialist requiring me to search for a new one yet again. Sheila and I discussed a few possibilities...  like prompting me to go see my Primary Care doctor about my joint issues...  or seeing an Orthopedic specialist...  or maybe some additional bloodwork...  or maybe another bone marrow biopsy...  or maybe adding another medication to my long list of medications...   Naturally, I'll be wondering about this all weekend long.   UPDATE:  Nov 1st, 2021 - As I mentioned, above, I was notified that my Oncologist wanted to do a Televideo chat today, Nov 1st.  So, I called the office this morning to find out how they wanted to connect in Zoom.  The receptionist thought it was strange that I didn't get an email with a link

S heila and I had to run to the hospital unexpectedly at the last minute the other day to visit the lab in preparation of today's scheduled visit.  I figured I would be heading to the lab after my appointment that was scheduled for today but my oncologist wanted the lab tests done beforehand.  I got a phone call from Oncology requesting I head to the hospital two days earlier than planned.  Then, this morning, we headed up to UVM Oncology again for my scheduled appointment.   My usual lab results had no changes which is good news, I suppose.  The same things that have always been wrong with my lab results indicating Systemic Mastocytosis are unchanged.  The good news part of this equation is that the numbers aren't worse. My oncologist was a bit concerned about two things...  1) She seemed shocked by how low my oxygen saturation is getting at least once every week.  She was visibly surprised hearing that my O2 levels are getting down into the 80s (%) and sometimes even lower.