Scattered Thoughts . . .

W e always have our first barbeque of the season on the weekend that falls around July 1st which happens to be my birthday.  This year, we had this barbeque on July 1st.  If anyone is wondering, I turned 61 years old this year.  Unfortunately, most days, I feel like I'm 81 and I have difficulty and a lot of pain trying to get around and I even look the part due to being hunched over and having difficulty standing.  Contrary to how I feel on these days, my birth certificate claims I am 61 years old this year.   We had a very dry spring to the point where everything in the yard was dying and turning brown but the past two weeks were filled with day after day of solid rain until the day before our scheduled barbeque.  The rain stopped just in time for me to mow the lawn, do some much needed landscaping and set up the backyard for our barbeque.  It was sunny, hot and humid with a bit of smoke from Canadian wildfires hanging in the air.  My health didn't fare so well and I ended up

L ittle by little, I've been working on building a custom homebuilt, non-commercial spectroheliograph for solar astronomy.  A spectroheliograph is a scientific instrument used for imaging/graphing the sun in one specific wavelength at a time.  It is not an instrument for visual observations though.  It is used to capture any single wavelength between 400-700nm at a very narrow 3 angstroms (0.3nm) in graphical waveform.  Then specialized software is used to transpose that waveform into an image.   This particular spectroheliograph was designed by Christian Buil in France.  He kept this particular design small and relatively simple for do-it-yourself amateur astronomers such as myself.  I believe he also has spectroheliograph designs that are research-grade and costing tens of thousands of dollars.  I opted for the dirt-cheap do-it-yourself and a-little-more-difficult route to build what is considered a beginner spectroheliograph.  It is still a scientific instrument but, in order to

After spending much of the day shopping and going out for a late lunch, we came home and spent the evening in the backyard with Lukey, Kenzie and Pop.  Pop joined us just as we were starting on dinner.   Earlier in the evening, we played quite a few games of Giant Jenga.  I had already written about that here .  There wasn't a whole lot of down time spent sitting around the fire.  We did do some of that but it was really only between games.  This was our first evening out in the backyard for the season so there were a lot of games we wanted to play.  It was fun but it definitely wore me out!  (Being so busy in the backyard also caused me to forget a dose of medications.  This caused significant problems for my health the following morning.) Although this photo, below, appears as though this is a perfect example of poorly applied makeup, this is really the result of eating cherries...   Before we headed out to do our shopping in the morning, I prepared dinner...  Shish-Ka-Bob.  When

A s I mentioned in a few previous blog entries, we did a bit of shopping with Lukey and Kenzie while they were staying with us last week.  This will be the blog entry with the photos of us shopping. Liza was in the hospital giving birth to Sophia and would be tied up with Sophia for a while when they arrived home so we felt it was best to get Lukey and Kenzie some things that they will need in the coming weeks so Liza wouldn't have to do it herself. Here, below, is the usual shot of us heading up to the Burlington area... We went to Dick's mostly because Kenzie needed running shoes specifically for running and Lukey needed sneakers.  Of course, we did some looking in some other departments too and, as a result, we found some life preservers for Lukey and Kenzie.  They outgrew their old ones.   Kenzie, the jumping string bean...  this is usually a pretty good sign that she is happy... We found some running shoes for Kenzie.  It was time consuming though and we sort of had to set

O n our day of shopping up in the Williston/Burlington area with Lukey and Kenzie, we stopped at Agave for lunch.  By the time lunchtime rolled around, we were all starving.  We briefly tossed around the idea of going to a sandwich shop but the kids wanted to go to Agave and I have no problems with going out for Mexican food so we went to Agave!  Sheila and I like Agave but I was a bit surprised that the kids wanted to go there.   I think Lukey and Kenzie wanted to play Table Shuffleboard but I know they like a few of the dishes there too.  While Lukey tends to stick to Americanized (rather boring) ground beef tacos, I opt for more authentic tacos.   I had a Carnita taco with Mojo pork, slaw, pickled fresnos (which added a nice depth of flavor) and chimichuri (which added some nice heat).  I think they must have a new chef because this was the first time any of our food had some authentic Mexican spices and heat.  In the past, I found the food to be rather bland.  It always tasted good