Scattered Thoughts . . .

One morning while Lukey and Kenzie were with us last week, Lukey and I decided to spend some time with my microscope.  Kenzie popped in and out of the room a few times but spent most of the morning in Gee's office playing with her dollhouse as Gee worked.  Kenzie and I had a few microscopy sessions together in the past but today was Lukey's turn.  Kenzie was welcome to join us but she preferred to stick close to Gee and her dollhouse.  My desk is set up with all sorts of monitors for different tasks sort of resembling my own little Command Center and one of these monitors would be used to display what was under the microscope.  On this morning, we had one of my Sony cameras mounted on the trinocular of the microscope.  I used the binocular eyepieces for setting up each specimen.  Lukey viewed what the camera was seeing on a 32 inch monitor over my desk.  The view through the binocular eyepieces is far crisper than what is seen on the big monitor but this arrangement allowed us

L ukey and Kenzie spent a few days with us last week during their break from school.  We had a good time with them and stayed pretty busy.  Gee had to work but I spent time doing activities with them each day.   Every now and then, Lukey and I will sit at the piano for a bit to do some improvisation and we did that again last week.  There is an audio clip, below, of our spur-of-the-moment ballad duet if you prefer to skip down to that so you can listen while you read the rest of this blog entry.   Lukey is now 10 years old and, although he has never had any true structured and regular lessons, he has an interest in the piano and sits at the piano to play at our house whenever possible.  Whenever I sit at the piano to play, he is quick to come over to the armchair right next to the piano so he can watch and listen.  In this way, he kind of reminds me of my cousin William.  William always sat right next to the piano whenever I played and he was a good page-turner for me since he read mus

I t was a very rare beautiful day yesterday.  Lukey and Kenzie were with us for the day too.  The moment I saw how clear the sky was on this morning, I knew I should be setting up for some solar astronomy at some point during the day.   Because of trees around our house, I have only a relatively short window of opportunity the first thing in the morning and then a relatively short window of opportunity in the early afternoon for solar astronomy.  Two short windows of opportunity are better than no windows of opportunity though.  The sun would be behind trees all the rest of the time.  I chose to set up for solar astronomy first thing in the morning before Lukey and Kenzie even arrived at the house.   I knew that if I waited for early afternoon, then I'd likely have to contend with wind.  When it comes to astronomy, wind can be as limiting as clouds so I knew that my chances of a good session were during that early morning window of opportunity.  The wind usually picks up by late mo

E arlier this past week, we went out to dinner for Lukey and Kenzie's birthday.  Gee wanted to treat them to a dinner on their birthday so we headed to Sarducci's.  The kids had chosen a different restaurant but that restaurant was closed.  Gee and Papa preferred to go to Sarducci's anyway so we treated everyone to a nice meal at one of our favorite restaurants. Due to the ongoing pandemic, it was a bit on a quiet side at Sarducci's which was fine by us.  Going out into public is something Gee and I have been avoiding at all cost for the past two years but we all very recently had the virus so, at the moment, our immunity is likely on the high end which allowed us to feel a bit more comfortable visiting a restaurant during an ongoing pandemic.  If we all hadn't just gotten over the virus, Gee and I probably would not have gone out into the infected world.   As always, I had a couple of cameras with me.  This time around, I even had a Fuji Instant photo printer with

Two weeks ago, Liza and the kids came to our house to celebrate Gee's birthday.  Yesterday, all the grandkids came to our house to celebrate birthdays for Lukey, Kenzie and Ellie. Gee started baking two dozen cupcakes first thing in the morning and by the time the kids arrived around noon Gee was about to frost the cupcakes... Kenzie is already picking out more new clothes from a catalog...   Ellie has an empty dollhouse at home so we gave her a dollhouse family of posable dolls as well as enough furniture to furnish her dollhouse... After all the gifts were opened, Lukey and I assembled his new train station.  Well, actually, Lukey did the assembling while I guided him along.  He received a Polar Express train set for Christmas so this new train station will fit in well with his Polar Express passenger train.  The Burlington F9 diesel locomotive is one of mine that we placed next to the new train station for Lukey to see the scale... After this little birthday celebration at our h

I made two solar filters relatively recently.  One was made a little over a year ago (pictured at right) and the other was made a little over two years ago (next picture, below).  I was happy with these two filters but rarely used them because I have far better types of solar filters to use.  I think my primary reason for this exercise in making these filters was simply for the experience more than any other reason although there were a couple of other reasons (which I'll address below).  But let me start this blog entry by saying that I will never again use one of these piece-of-garbage, flimsy, and consequently, dangerous Baader film solar filters! I haven't used either filter more than three or four times each in this two year period and they have been handled exceptionally carefully ( never touching the filter material) and stored in protective zip-lock bags and these bags placed inside protective boxes for storage until the next use.  Even though these two filters were

S heila's birthday was last weekend.  I've been a bit too distracted with other things to write here in the blog for the past couple of weeks so I'm just adding some photos from Sheila's birthday now.   Sheila received her birthday gifts before her birthday even arrived this year.  I bought her an updated Samsung Smart/Fitness Watch (updated two versions from her old watch) which arrived a week before her birthday.  She opened that gift when it arrived in case it needed to be returned.   I also gave her some jewelry for her birthday and she opened that a couple of evenings early while she was video chatting with Lukey and Kenzie.  I gave her the gift while the kids were chatting with her so they could see her open at least one gift.   It turns out that Liza and the kids stopped by the house for a short while on Sheila's birthday too so I shot a few photos and we had a birthday cake for Gee.   It was nice spending a little time with the kids again.  We haven't re