Scattered Thoughts . . .

S heila and I are in the process of changing our plans for our upcoming Christmas in Manhattan trip yet again.   Lukey broke his foot a few weeks ago and we were hoping he would be able to bear some weight on his foot by the time we hopped on the train to New York.  Unfortunately, is foot is broken a bit more seriously than we had expected so he'll be on crutches for another month which means he'll be hobbling around Manhattan on crutches.  Which also means we'll need to adapt some of our plans. We typically try to walk about 15-20 miles each day in Manhattan in order to see as many sites as possible.  We definitely won't be able to do that with Lukey hobbling around on crutches.  This means our previously scheduled itinerary is not even close to being accurate.  We needed to possibly cut some things while also stretching out the timetable to allow enough time to get from one place to another.  Additionally, this has caused us to need to add some flexibility to our itin

A s I was sitting on the couch this evening, looking out the living room window toward our trash shed, the color difference between the old incandescent Christmas lights and the new LED "warm white" Christmas lights was abundantly obvious.  I said to myself, "I'll have to get a photo of that soon..." but quickly decided that "soon" should be "immediately".   First, I grabbed my Sony a6000 camera body and shot a few photos but, honestly, I wasn't too impressed with the photo quality.  This was partially due to using a relatively slow lens at f4 in the dark so the camera used a very high ISO value making the image a bit too noisy and splotchy for my taste.  Usually, when using this camera, I would choose a faster lens in the f1.8-2.8 range but I had the f4 lens already mounted on the body so I figured I would use that one.  I was hoping that I could counter the relatively slow lens (slower lenses struggle more in low light) by using a feat

E very now and then, I have prints made of some of my photos.  I've been wanting to see how images shot with my little classic Fuji camera look in print so I had a few of those images printed as you can see in the photo, below.    Since my health has been exceptionally lousy this year and it was a consistently rainy and smoky summer, I haven't had much of a chance to shoot with this camera as often as I would like.  Actually, I haven't been able to do much beyond things I absolutely had to do, rain or not.  That being said, I have captured a few photos with this camera that I really like so I had these images printed professionally. The prints are looking nice!  I feel that the paper the printer used could be heavier but the prints do look nice.  This particular printer recently made some changes to how they print their high end prints so maybe I'll need to find a new printer. Having prints made of photos I view on a backlit monitor is tough.  The monitor must be calibr

The other day (the day after Thanksgiving), we started putting up all the Christmas decorations inside the house.  I put the tree up and then starting pulling out strings of Christmas lights.  I quickly realized that most of last year's lights were no longer lighting up. I spent too much time troubleshooting each string yet I was still unable to fix any of the faulty strings.  We decided that perhaps this is the year to start replacing our old incandescent Christmas lights with LED Christmas lights.   I've been putting off making this switch to LEDs for two reasons.  First, the first few years of LEDs were only available in cool white which emitted a color somewhere between blue and cool white.  Those were a sickly color of blue and I didn't want my Christmas lights looking like that.  The other reason for putting off this switch to LEDs was the ridiculously high price.  Those early strings of LEDs were far too expensive. This year, I had no problems finding more appropriat

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