Scattered Thoughts . . .

Since the beginning of the pandemic, we've been doing the Thanksgiving thing at home with no guests.  We did the same this year but when I think back to my decades of Thanksgivings, I can honestly say that this is a highly unusual way for me, and even for Sheila and I  since she has come into my life , to celebrate Thanksgiving.  This Thanksgiving, however, we continued the pandemic tradition of celebrating alone. Throughout my entire adult life, I've always been the one to arrange a Thanksgiving dinner with everyone who had no other place to go.  I've arranged and hosted some rather quiet dinners for four to eight people and I've arranged and hosted many more festive Thanksgiving dinners for upwards of dozens of people.  On a rare occasion, I go to someone else's home but that really is rare.   Thanksgiving is my least favorite holiday for various reasons...  reasons I don't care to get into here or now...  and I think I cover up those horrendous memories by cr

S heila and I were talking about hotels along the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade route this morning as we watched the parade on television.  We were agreeing that if we ever did venture to Manhattan for the parade, for a few very good reasons, we would want to have a hotel with a room overlooking the parade route.  So, out of curiosity, we opened up Google Maps to see what hotels would be preferable.  We found that there are actually a few options that look quite good and which were reasonably priced.  That got us talking about checking the prices of these hotels for our upcoming Christmas trip to Manhattan with Lukey and Kenzie.  We already have a hotel booked for this trip but it never hurts to check options and check for a better deal. This parade route location where a few nice hotels are located was still a good central location for what we were planning to do on our Christmas trip with the kids.  First we looked into the Warwick Hotel, however and unfortunately, that hotel w

W e had a slightly different dinner last night.  I often make beef but we haven't had much luck in finding nice roasts so we haven't had a nice roast in years.  I've been sticking with small steaks instead and that is getting a bit boring at this point so I'm always searching for something different to try.   I saw a video showing some sort of beef filet dish that I thought might be interesting to try.  I made a couple of small top sirloins instead of filets since our supplier has been short on filets recently.  I inserted fresh garlic into the steaks.  In hindsight, I should have marinated these steaks for a bit too so they would be more tender but I didn't take them out of the freezer soon enough.  What made this dish interesting is that the beef is covered with fried carrots.  I never thought about frying carrots but this sounded as though it would be an interesting thing to try especially since Sheila and I like carrots.   I used a peeler to get thin strips of c

I had another visit to Oncology at the University of Vermont Medical Center last week.  I had been up there a couple of weeks prior for some labwork which we discussed in this most recent appointment.   In the photo at right, it appears as though the hospital is empty but we found that the hallways being seemingly dark and empty was a bit misleading.  It was about 8am and my appointment was one of the first of the day so we expected the hospital to be rather quiet.  Most of the people we saw in the hallways were hospital employees.  I'm not much of a fan of waiting in lines so seeing the hospital being so quiet was good news.  I like being able to show up, check in immediately, and then quickly get called into the examining room. When we stepped into Oncology from the quiet and empty hallway, the waiting room was filled with patients waiting to be called in for their morning chemo. On the positive side, even though my health has been miserable this year, seeing all these chemo pati

I n preparation of ice skating with Lukey and Kenzie at Rockefeller Center and Bryant Park in about a month, Sheila purchased a new pair of figure skates.   We went to an ice rink on Sunday for Sheila's first practice session in about two decades or so.  She did fairly well during that first session.  She was a bit stiff-legged but she did well.  During that first session, she noticed that one of her skates wasn't sharpened properly so we had them sharpened again today at lunchtime.  This evening, we headed to the rink again so Sheila could practice. She was doing very well this evening and it was obvious she was feeling more comfortable on skates.  She was making more progress than in her first session, that is, until she had a bit of a slow motion fall.  While trying to ease her fall to the ice, she did something to her right leg.  Her right leg sort of twisted and collapsed under her. As she limped off the ice, it was pretty obvious that she could barely walk on it so I drov

F or most of this calendar year, my primary health problem has been related to breathing.  For better or worse, that seems to be changing a bit lately. Throughout this calendar year, it seemed like my mast cells were not all that active in most of my organs (which had been typical for a couple of decades) but were now active/over-active in my lungs.   In some ways, it seemed like I traded nausea, gastro-intestinal problems, abdominal pain and even kidney and liver pain for the consistent breathing difficulties I had been experiencing this year.   This change was not necessarily a good change nor a bad change.  It was just something different.   Healthy people tend to take breathing for granted but, as one might expect, even the slightest breathing difficulties affect everything .  My breathing problems this year have landed me in the hospital and I've had O2 levels in the low 80s far too often (below 95 is a problem).   All those other problems that I explained above (organ involv

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