Scattered Thoughts . . .

I've been collecting all the photography-related things I'll need to pack for our Christmas trip to Manhattan.  I'm trying to stay as small and as lightweight as possible while still bringing enough high quality gear to get excellent photos and video.  It has been a bit of a struggle but I think I've narrowed down my photography gear making for perhaps the lightest travel photography bag I've ever had on any trip.   I usually pack my small Microsoft Surface tablet for storing photos at the end of each day and for some quick blog updates with photos.  My Surface is getting very old and the keyboard is actually falling apart now because of its age and the amount of use it has gotten over the past ten years so I'm packing a newer and, unfortunately, larger laptop that I use exclusively for astronomy.  This laptop has a touchpad but I'm not too fond of touchpads so I planned to bring along my old Microsoft Arc portable mouse from my Surface. I dug out this littl

O ver the past couple of weeks, I purchased some better art supplies.  The brushes I had weren't all that great, the paper was kind of lousy when using it for painting with watercolors, and I quickly realized that I could use a few different sizes of drawing boards. I had been doing my sketching and painting on a table which wasn't ideal.  Sometimes I kept the paper loose so I could turn it and angle it but then it seemed to buckle and warp more.  Other times I taped the paper down to the table which helped with the buckling and warping but I lost some control in positioning the paper just right.  There are advantages and disadvantages to each method but I decided to purchase a couple of pieces of acrylic to use as drawing boards. This way I can still mount loose sheets of paper for sketching or painting while still allowing full control over positioning and angling the paper as needed. I purchased two 16" x 20" pieces of 1/4" thick acrylic to use as drawing boar

A lmost all the hotels in mid-town Manhattan are a bit beyond our budget so we always stay in the area just south of the Empire State Building which happens to be Koreatown.  The prices seem to be the lowest in this area but, regardless of the budget prices, some of the hotels are quite nice.  For this next trip to Manhattan this coming Christmas with Lukey and Kenzie, we had already made reservations to stay at the Life Hotel on 31st Street just a block or two from the Empire State Building. The Life Hotel was just recently reopened and is actually quite nice.  This building used to be the headquarters for Life magazine but it more recently had been converted to a hotel.  We were really excited to be staying in a hotel that used to be the headquarters for Life magazine. Since I will be our tour guide and this is Lukey and Kenzie's first trip to Manhattan, I was familiarizing myself with Grand Central Terminal late last night in preparation of this upcoming Christmas visit to Manha

T his evening, we headed up to Burlington to purchase a new pair of figure skates for Gee.  She plans to skate before some of Kenzie's figure skating lessons in preparation of skating with Lukey and Kenzie at Rockefeller Center and Bryant Park at Christmastime.   Sheila hasn't skated in decades so this will be interesting.  I would like to join them but I know my spinal injuries could not handle skating and a fall would be, at a minimum, painful for my spinal injuries or, at worst, devastating.  Instead, I'll be trying to shoot some photos and maybe some video of them skating.  And, honestly, I really don't need another TBI by falling on the ice either.   Sheila wasn't sure what size skate she needed so she grabbed a generic brand skate that was easily accessible to us just to try for size.  She laced the skate up but, when she stood on the one foot with the skate, she didn't seem all that stable.  The blade on this particular brand of skate was cheap too.  As I

W e usually start all the Christmas festivities immediately after the holiday I despise, Thanksgiving.  There are one or two other holidays that bother me a bit but I truly despise Thanksgiving.  I always make the best of that holiday anyway and, by the end of that long holiday weekend, all of our Christmas decorations are up and the tree is decorated.  This year, however, Christmas came a little earlier.  We started our Christmas gift-giving on Halloween night! Those who read this blog regularly probably already know that this year has been absolutely miserable when it comes to my health but I'll add a little background here anyway.  This year started out with an ambulance ride to the hospital and I've had about a dozen visits since then for follow-ups and tests.  I had a more extensive bone marrow biopsy not long after my ambulance ride to the hospital.  Shortly after that biopsy, I fell on the biopsy site.  We've had to cancel about a half dozen weekend out-of-town   tri

I was sitting on the couch in the living room yesterday evening before starting on cooking dinner and picked up my notebook.  I write thoughts and ideas in this notebook everyday (I now have a whole library of notebooks tucked in all sorts of places around the house) and, quite often, add some sketches of some of my ideas or thoughts.  Yesterday, I was thinking about Christmas and the lake house. Every year of my life, in the few months preceding Christmas, my mind always drifts to spending Christmas in an Adirondack lodge-type of home or lake house setting.  I have not had the opportunity to do this just yet but I do plan to do this at least once before I have no Christmases left.   The closest I have come to living this annual dream of spending Christmas in an Adirondack-type lodge or lake house has been a few Christmases spent on various air bases.  Back in my earlier years of my Air Force career, the Airman's Club was typically the hub of social life on every base.  For variou

O ver the long holiday weekend a couple of weeks ago when we had Lukey and Kenzie staying with us, Kenzie had a couple of days of soccer tournaments so we spent quite a bit of time at soccer games.  One of the days was rainy and we left soaked but the next day was quite a nice autumn day which was a very welcomed change after the rainy and chilly day. Kenzie is doing quite well in soccer now.  Actually...  I believe she is the leading scorer for her team this year and she has a few assists!  She is certainly one of the fastest on the field and she is able to put quite a bit of power into her kicks.  Occasionally, she plays on the defensive line and does well there as well stealing balls, blocking shots and passes, and disrupting the opposing team's offense but I feel she is far more useful on the offensive line.  It is really fun watching her excel in soccer now. On the way to the soccer tournament, below...  I think she is trying to get her head in the right frame of mind for socc

E very year, between August and October, we venture up to Shelburne to visit The Chritsmas Loft with Lukey and Kenzie.  We invited Pop, Ellie and Whitney this year but they could not make it on this day so it was just me, Gee, Lukey and Kenzie again.  We had Lukey and Kenzie for about four days over the Columbus Day weekend and this was one of our activities that weekend.   I included a lot of photos in this blog entry so I'll let the photos do most of the talking rather than write a lot... A Santa and Mrs Claus display greets you as you enter the store... I don't know what had Kenzie so upset in this window display but she surely looks upset... Kenzie brought her Fuji Instax camera on this day so she shot a few photos... Sheila is showing me the Airman Nutcracker she found... I found another Airman but, looking at the photo today, I don't think this one is actually a nutcracker although I could be wrong... We found a few "Baby's First Christmas" items and we