Scattered Thoughts . . .

S ometime last night, I realized that I had not yet captured any photographs of our Christmas tree and ornaments this year.  I figured I should jump on that since I won't have any time between now and Christmas so, if I don't do it now, then Christmas will have passed by the time I can get to it again. We (mostly "I") feel like the tree is missing something and I actually feel the same way every year with every Christmas tree even after adding a little more to it each year but I've had difficulty figuring out what still might be missing.  I'm not a fan of most types of garland and I definitely hate tinsel so I know it is not missing these things.  It is possible it needs more ornaments in the way of more styles of decorative glass ornaments.  Our Christmas tree will most definitely never have items/characters from movies so that is out.  I'm not a fan of 'crafty' or 'country' type stuff either.  Maybe I'll figure out what is missing one

W e decorated the house for Christmas, inside and out, on Thanksgiving weekend as we usually do.  Hmmm...  well, sometimes we do the outside of the house the weekend before Thanksgiving especially if the weather is unseasonably warm but this year we decorated both inside and outside on Thanksgiving weekend so everything was done over the long Thanksgiving weekend. We usually have a few downed fir branches around the house by the time we decorate so that provides plenty of boughs available to make a large wreath for our front door.  This year, however, we didn't have a single downed branch nor did we have any that needed pruning so we purchased a small wreath instead.  We lose so many branches due to storms that I didn't want to unnecessarily cut down additional branches and especially not for one wreath. We hang small wreaths on all the windows as well as the kids' playhouse and our trash shed and that always looks nice but we like to put a large three foot wreath on the f

A s I've mentioned a few times in this blog previously, Sheila has been practicing her figure skating in an effort to be as prepared as possible for our trip to Manhattan with Lukey and Kenzie.  Until a couple of months ago, she hadn't skated in decades so she knew she needed to get on skates again before we were at Rockefeller Center and Bryant Park.  Lukey and Kenzie want to skate as much as Sheila has wanted to skate at these two popular rinks so this has been the plan since we started talking about a Christmas trip to Manhattan with the kids quite a few years ago. We've been heading to a couple of different rinks a couple of times a week so Sheila can practice.  Sometimes Sheila skates with Kenzie before Kenzie's skating lessons but most times she is out there alone while I practice my video and photography skills.    Sheila has improved quite a bit over the past few weeks but she is now done practicing.   She took a bad fall the other night and has been left badly

W e're getting some snow today...  and some rain...  and some ice...  and a lot of slush.  The temperatures are hovering in the 32-34° range and have been like this since yesterday.  This is a terrible temperature range in the winter because it makes for terrible driving conditions.  Sometimes the roads are wet, sometimes the roads are icy, sometimes the roads are clear but any of these conditions can change in a matter of seconds.   Naturally this would be a day to stay home like almost all of the school districts have already decided.   Most of the schools are closed but, ironically (or perhaps moronically) although Sheila has been working from home consistently everyday since Montpelier was flooded about five months ago, she was told that she must go to Montpelier today of all days.   Why must she dig out the car?  Why must we rush to clear the driveway and the end of the driveway of heavy, wet snow?  Why must she risk driving on roads that could be dangerous and which promise t

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