Scattered Thoughts . . .

I 'm still feeling mediocre...  not great, not terrible, sometimes feeling "fair", sometimes feeling lousy, from one to the other in waves...  overall, however, I'm feeling a bit better than yesterday so that is good.   My throat is still a bit sore and my stomach isn't the best.  I don't have much of an appetite.  My eyelids are puffy interfering with my peripheral vision which is a symptom I experienced my first time with COVID in 2020.   My headache seems to be gone and fever is mostly gone but  I'm still taking full doses of cold meds though and they have heavy doses of acetaminophen in them so that is likely taking care of any mild discomfort and fever.  I assume the cold meds are minimizing my runny nose too.   Even though I am feeling better than yesterday, I'm still not well though. Sheila, on the other hand, is getting worse even though she is still testing negative for COVID.  I suspect she does have the virus.  She never left the couch today

S ince Lukey and Kenzie are totally engrossed in the television series, "Only Murders in the Building" by Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez, I surprised them by sneakily guiding them to the doorstep of this famous architectural landmark while we were visiting Manhattan.   In the show, this large apartment building is called "The Arconia" but its real name is "The Belnord". We took the subway uptown on the premise that we would walk back through Central Park and taking the subway uptown would save us half the walking.  That actually was part of the plan because there were many things I wanted to show them in Central Park but I specifically chose this spot to start our walk southward because I knew they would enjoy seeing "The Arconia". I think they enjoyed riding the subway but they definitely stood out as tourists due to their incessant questions that made them stand out as not being at all familiar with the subway, the stops or even th

A s the evening wore on tonight, I starting feeling worse and worse again which does not please me in the least.  It reminds me that my previous bouts of COVID also went in waves.  Sometimes those waves were by the hour, sometimes by the day, sometimes by the week. When I grabbed my bag of medicines so I could take my nighttime dose of medications, I remembered that I only took half doses of cold medications at lunchtime and dinnertime.  By mid-evening, I was feeling quite lousy again. My throat was approaching the intolerable level of soreness again.  A bit of a headache is back again.  I'm still in and out of the bathroom too.  This evening, I noticed that my voice was getting hoarse and, at this point, I am losing my voice.  I just checked my temperature and my fever is back again...   I'm at 100.1 degrees. I guess I need to go back to full doses of cold medications in addition to all my usual medications and the newest anti-viral medication.   Still...  at the risk of jinxi

A lthough we are stuck in COVID isolation and missing out on all the Christmas festivities this week, Sheila and I still managed to make our usual Christmas dinner for Christmas Eve.  We have plenty of leftovers for dinner on Christmas night too.   I was feeling well enough to do some cooking so we chose to celebrate Christmas with a nice quiet dinner together.  There is no one else I would rather be with in this situation or any situation so being stuck with her in isolation is no problem whatsoever.  Fortunately, we enjoy each other's company! I'm still feeling a bit lousy however I am feeling a bit better than yesterday so that is good.   My fever has broken and my O2 saturation levels are still in a good place in the upper 90s.  My throat still hurts even with all the cold medications I am taking and I just don't feel "right".  I suspect the cold medications are helping to keep my fever down as well as dampening some of the throat soreness. I think that if I h

S heila picked up Lukey and Kenzie the night before our trip to Manhattan was to begin.  Kenzie had a figure skating lesson at a rink about a half hour from our house so Sheila picked them up at the rink while I stayed at home and cooked dinner.   I often seem to be cooking dinner when the grandkids arrive and hear the same comments as they walk in the door...  "It smells so good in here!", followed by "It always smells good at Gee and Papa's house!"  This night was no different.  I was baking a smoked and glazed ham, garlic mashed potatoes and maple glazed carrots.  Dinner was pretty good. We packed, watched an episode of "Only Murders in the Building" (Lukey and Kenzie's favorite at the moment...  and, one of Gee and Papa's favorites too), and then went to bed.   In the morning we packed up the car in the pouring rain and headed down to the train station a few minutes earlier than planned so we could eat breakfast at the cafe in the train sta

W e spent four days in Manhattan this past week and it was a really nice trip but not without its problems.   This Christmas trip to Manhattan was really for our two oldest grandchildren, Lukey and Kenzie, but Sheila and I enjoyed it too.  Christmastime is a great time to be in Manhattan because it seems like every window and every building is decorated very well. As I mentioned above, though, this relatively short trip was not without its little problems and even some big problems.   We had made two changes to our hotel accommodations in the weeks even before leaving the house.  In the end, we settled on staying at the Hilton Midtown and that was a good choice.  One problem was trying to find a hotel with vacancies when we needed a hotel.  Amtrak availability and hotel availability had to coincide.  Another problem is that we definitely wanted to be in midtown Manhattan where all the major sites are located.  We planned this two months in advance yet we still had some scheduling issue

W hen Sheila went to pick up Lukey and Kenzie at the rink last night, there was talk of Lukey needing a haircut.  He has been growing his hair long for a few years now and it definitely needed to be cleaned up a bit.  Honestly, I had intended to give him a quick trim to clean up his hair last night anyway before our trip this morning.  It turns out that both his mom and his dad were talking about a fade for Lukey so that is what I did last night. We cut off a lot of hair!  I had only planned to clean up his hair a bit with a quick trim but a fade would require a big change by cutting off a lot of hair.  Needless to say, this took a little bit of time and Lukey was beginning to get a little impatient so I didn't get as picky as I normally would.  Regardless, his hair looks pretty good now...  clean...  neat...  and, best of all, Lukey likes it.   Before we started on his hair, he chose a photo of a boy with a fade.  I definitely wanted to make sure that we were both thinking about t

L ukey and Kenzie stayed with us a month or two ago so we could do some shopping with them.  While Lukey and I were waiting for Gee and Kenzie, I shot a few photos of Lukey as he watched a Christmas movie.   I had a bunch of prints professionally printed in early December and this photo of Lukey was one of the prints.  I put it in an extra frame I had lying around for the next time Lukey was here at our house.  I wanted to see how long it took him to notice that he is an elf in the photo. Lukey and Kenzie arrived at our house last night and the framed print was propped up on the kitchen table.  It took him about ten minutes to even notice that there was a new photo of him but he did not notice the elf ears.   Kenzie was laughing...  Gee was laughing...   Lukey still didn't notice anything odd about the photo and exclaimed, "WHAT?" in reference to all the laughing.  Another few minutes passed as he more carefully looked at the photo and he still saw nothing askew with the

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