Scattered Thoughts . . .

Today was a landscaping day.   Mostly, I was focused on the lawn and especially the new putting green.  The new grass in the putting green is filling in nicely.  The grassy area in front of the putting green is coming along but there are still a few bare spots as you can see in the second photo, below.  Some new grass should be popping up out of the bare spots in the next few days.   Mowing a putting green is something new to me.  I started with my usual mulching mower in the hope of picking up most of the debris that has already fallen from the surrounding trees.  We have all sorts of seeds that have fallen from nearby oaks and elms (I think).  After sort of vacuuming up the putting green using my usual mower, I then went at it with a reel mower.  This reel mower cuts much closer and it worked very well.  The putting green is looking very nice. The rest of the lawn around the house is looking nice too.  I spent extra time and effort on seeding bare spots and then fertilizing the lawn.

T his blog entry sat around in my drafts folder for a couple of weeks!   I guess I should finish it and publish it. My joints have been terribly and painfully inflamed for the past week or so...  knees, ankles, toes...  I spent a few days on the couch because I could not walk at all.  I was on crutches for a short while and then a cane.  Now I am just limping around.  My left elbow is beginning to get inflamed too.  Sheila already has elbow problems.  According to our doctors, these joint problems are likely related to long-COVID issues.  Sheila is dealing mostly with inflamed joints in her upper body while I am mostly dealing with inflamed joints in my lower body.  My elbow isn't feeling so great at the moment though.  We'll see how this develops. I did some work in the yard today and, by the time I finished for the day, my right foot felt was though it were broken.  I came inside, showered and then hit the couch again with an icepack.  It is feeling a bit better now...  rathe

I t has been about two weeks since I seeded the new putting green in our backyard.  The grass is coming up nicely but it is a slow and almost painful process watching new grass grow while hoping it would finally be mature enough to do some pitching and putting.   I've been watering all the new grass around the property every morning and every evening so I'm really not just sitting around waiting for the grass to grow.  I have a bajillion other springtime projects that are keeping me busy when my health allows too.  Waiting for this new grass to grow does seem like an awful lot of waiting though.   In the first photo, above right, we are looking at the putting green from our backyard.  The grassy field beyond the putting green in this photo is our neighbor's yard.  The putting green is in the farthest back part of our yard.  The photo below, at bottom, is looking at the putting green from the new area that I cleared out and also seeded.  This will be an area for pitching ont

T he additional bag of grass seed for our new putting green arrived in the mail this morning so I changed my plans and finished up preparing the putting green before lunch today.  It didn't take long to finish up that project although my spine wasn't too thrilled with this project this morning.  Walking is exceptionally painful again this evening. I loosened up the soil in the putting green first...  cleaned out a bucketful of small stones (for the third time), roots and debris...  then seeded the green with the new bag of grass seed.  I had already put down 2lbs of seed the other day but that bag only got me less than halfway across the putting green.  A 5lb bag arrived this morning which allowed me to finish the seeding job.  Since I had more than enough seed this time, I just re-seeded the entire putting green again today.   Things are starting to look good.  I put a Fescue mix down in the "rough" or "mini-pitching-fairway" adjacent to the putting green l

Wow...  it was impossible to get comfortable enough to sleep last night.  My spinal injuries were painfully and debilitatingly inflamed after all of yesterday's yardwork.  I'd say the pain was in the 8-10 range on the 10 point pain scale.  At times, the good times, the pain was only an 8.  Other times, like when I try to move, the pain was pegged at around 10 and would buckle me at the knees.   Sleeping was difficult, at best.  For a long while, I simply couldn't sleep.  I eventually found a position or two that allowed a few minutes of sleep before I would need to change positions to the other position.  This wasn't until the wee hours of the morning though.  I actually thought about just getting up out of bed around this time.  It was around 5am and, typically, I would have no problem with that.  This time, however, I was thinking that if I'm finding bed extremely painful, then the couch wouldn't be any better.  Actually, sitting on the couch before we went to

It was a productive day today...  my spinal injuries are screaming at me though and I am looking like one big question mark...  but, unfortunately, I didn't get to accomplish everything I had intended to accomplish.  It turns out that I grossly underestimated the amount of putting green grass seed that I would need.   This will set us back another week...  at least half a week...  since the seed won't arrive here until Tuesday.  I was only able to cover about 1/3 to just under 1/2 of the putting green with seed.  I guess I will finished up this project next week sometime.  I managed to change the oil in the lawn mower.  I cleaned the air filter in the lawn mower.  I cleaned under the deck of the lawn mower and noticed that the blade is cracked and actually broken.  It was a pretty even crack so I was still able to mow the lawn without any balance issues.  A new blade will arrive early next week.  I also ordered a new spark plug for the mower.   I managed to spot seed all the di

I t has been a pretty quiet week.  The weather has been lousy and my energy level has been depleted so I have mostly been resting and sleeping this week.   We had a leaking washing machine.  I quickly determined it was a leak out the front door of the washer due to gunk, grime and sliminess on the door boot seal.  I spent a day and a half resolving that problem.   First, I spent half a day manually cleaning the inside of the washing machine as well as inside all the folds of the door boot seal.  I didn't want to be too abrasive on the seal because I knew that would only cause more leaking so I carefully and methodically cleaned it up, little by little.   While I was doing that, I also ordered a new boot seal for the front door in case my efforts failed or in case this fix only lasts a short time.  Plus, I don't want to be without a washing machine for a week or two so I would prefer to have a part that I know I will need on hand for when we do need it.  That new boot seal arriv

S heila took a day of annual leave today, the weather was exceptional summertime weather, my health was better than average, and I had a surprisingly good night of sleep so Sheila and I had a very productive day today.  Everything came together, for a change, to make today a productive one! I actually had a relatively pain-free night of sleep which made for a restful night.  That is highly unusual since our first bout with COVID just over two years ago.  For some reason, my inflamed joints didn't bother me enough to keep me awake last night so that made for a better night of sleep.  I awoke this morning feeling well rested and feeling pretty good which almost never happens!   By mid-morning, we were on the road headed to Lowes to pick up some summertime landscaping and gardening items.  We picked up quite a few plants for our planters and window boxes at Lowes.  We also picked up potting soil, gravel and sand for various other landscaping projects.   We then headed to a nursery to

S heila and I spent much of the day yesterday doing some rather heavy landscaping work (heavy for us).  It was a productive day but all the work significantly impacted my health.  More on that later.  Yesterday's project was to remove grass from one area and move it to another area so we can have an extended putting green.  It is heavy physical work but it was well worth it in the end.  We want to add a better putting green in the yard, mostly for Lukey, but we also needed grass in the area in front of our trash shed at the front end of the property.  The logical answer was to remove the unneeded grass where we are making the putting green and lay it down in front of the trash shed.  I did the removing of sod while Sheila did all the laying of sod.  That worked out well.  Considering how this affected my health, it would have taken me days to accomplish this on my own.   Digging out the grass is tough work even if there are no complications.  Making this project even more difficult

When Lukey and I were using the microscope a week or so ago, I noticed a few nagging problems that needed to be resolved before I attempted another microscopy session and especially a session that included photography and/or videography.  I spent the past week or so trying to resolve these problems and thought it would be best to document it all here. My first problem was that what I was seeing on my camera (and on the 32" monitor connected to my camera) was not nearly as crisp as what I was seeing visually in the binocular eyepieces.  This was really frustrating.  I had been using my Sony a6000 camera in a prime focus configuration.  Prime focus imaging involves no additional lenses including eyepieces.  This type of imaging works very well in astronomy but I was not liking what I was getting in microscopy.  The images and video were very soft, sort of mushy, un-crisp.  They looked really terrible on the 32 inch monitor. The next problem was figuring out what I actually needed to