I am writing this on Saturday, 8/23. There is one pic.

After a week of really nice weather, we had a week of continuous high humidity and rain. Temperatures weren’t that hot, with highs below 90. But it was either raining or threatening rain all week. To air out the house, we open the doors to the deck. We can’t do that when it rains, because it’s so easy for rain to soak the floor. After several days of this, I got tired of the humidity and turned on the A/C. The rain should end tonight. Then we’ll be able to turn the A/C off and open the house.

Life sure is easy these days. Our toaster died this morning. I went upstairs and turned on the computer. Danita chose “2 slice” over “4 slice”, and “silver” over “red” or “black”. I clicked the button, and the toaster will arrive on our doorstep no later than Tuesday. No sales tax, no shipping, huge selection, and a price that’s competitive with any store in town. How did we ever get by back in the day?

School’s starting. Danita had 4 days of meetings this week. UMBC has a 2-day retreat at the beginning of each school year. Danita has worked herself into a position of status and respect, and has been invited for the last several years. It’s nice to be invited, but it took up much of Tuesday and all of Wednesday. Thursday was the UMBC opening meeting. Friday was interviews for a new position on campus. When UMBC wants to hire a new professional, they form a search committee. As a highly respected member of the UMBC community, Danita is often invited to be on the committee. Interviews for this position took most of her day Friday. She’s going to work Monday, her desk piled high with work, and she didn’t even get a vacation! Just to show how much influence Danita has at UMBC, she helped hire all but one of the people on this search committee.

Off To School

“Back to School” even impacted me this year. I took a ride Friday and met three high school BFFs who were leaving to attend college in two days. They were out for a little last-minute fun together, and asked me to take their picture. I was surprised to find they had a Polaroid camera. I thought the technology was dead. But here I was, taking this picture while they thought they had to explain this rad new technology for me. Polaroids are both the same and different than they were back in the day. The camera is much smaller and support lots of LED lights. But it’s still dead-simple to take a pic. Look through the little square hole and push a button. The film ejects and starts developing. Polaroid pictures are a lot smaller than they used to be. They’re a little larger than the wallet size snapshots we got from our school photos as kids.

I was quite impressed by these young ladies. They were going to 3 different colleges to study 3 different areas of technology — mechanical engineering, computer science, and computer engineering. The young lady on the right is attending UMBC. Into hands such as these we place our future. I must have appeared quite old to these young people. They kept calling me “sir”, and were surprised to find that I had my phone with me, and knew how to use it to take a picture.

It’s a quiet week. Bud’s coming over for dinner and we’re going to watch a DVD somebody lent him. We have a neighborhood party tomorrow.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.