There are no pics this week. I am writing this on Tuesday, August 27.

This was a very busy week and weekend. I spent a lot of time at Nick’s house, getting all their computers set up. Saturday (!) I went down to move their financial computer to the Executive Director’s residence and get that working with her laptop. Just as I was finishing up, I found that I had somehow downloaded a bad printer driver for two computers. This driver was worse than bad — it prevents all printing activities on these two computers. The Executive Director is on vacation this week, and I am on vacation next. We decided to solve this problem in September.

In addition to that, we had a neighborhood “Chill & Grill” Friday, followed by the movie “42” (about Jackie Robinson). Saturday, we had the Sabiston’s over for dinner. (I got home just in time to clean up from Danita’s cooking before the Sabiston’s came.) And Danita and I went down to Bud’s house Sunday. Danita is still sorting through stuff with her Dad. My job was to power wash the front porch and sidewalk. The front porch is a small cement pad, but it hasn’t been cleaned in many years, and it is slightly concave so it holds water after it rains. In addition, the porch, sidewalk, and top of the driveway don’t get much sun so black nasties grow in the cement. The porch was so bad I scrubbed it with “Krud Remover” 3 times before I even turned the power washer on. It was quite a job getting it cleaned up. Bud wanted me to wash his deck, but Danita helped me decline. Power washing a deck is harder than power washing cement. His deck is in such bad shape that cleaning it would result in it needing a paint job. And some of the boards really need to be replaced. If I opened that bag of worms, the job is big enough that I don’t feel qualified to finish it. And besides all that we have the James Bond movies! We ended up having “Breakfast with Bond” Saturday morning, because that was the only time we had available.

We’re gearing up for the big Denali trip. I’ve printed out Google instructions for the drives we have to take, in case the GPS has problems. We went out last night to get me some hiking socks and Danita some outdoor all-weather pants. Tonight I’m meeting Danita at UMBC at 5:00. We’ll go to a local bar for dinner. (They have pretty good hamburgers.) Then we will go to a member’s-only opening of the Black Reef exhibit at the National Aquarium. That’s the last big activity before traveling. We will have several days to make sure we have all the details of our vacation covered and fret about the forecast up there, which so far indicates temperatures in the 40s and 50s and showers every single day. After spending all that money to get to Alaska, you can bet we’ll be hiking around in the rain.

I kind of enjoyed the way I posted daily on my two bike trips. I plan to do the same for our Alaska trip. That lets me post a few pics and describe some highlights each day and prevents one huge, overwhelming post, which would never be finished. I can’t post on Crazy Guy on a Bike, because this isn’t a bike tour. So I will post on this blog, starting the evening of Monday, Sept 2 or maybe the morning of Tuesday, Sept 3. Of course, that assumes that the WiFi works where we’re staying. If it doesn’t, I’ll be posting to my laptop, and download the posts to the blog when I get WiFi access. You can wait for the Email to be delivered, or you can just check out this blog once a day, or you can wait and read a week’s worth of blogs all at once, or you can ignore it all together. That’s the beauty of the web.

Here’s the itinerary and contact info. I’m including hotel phone numbers because I don’t know how good the phone coverage is up there. Unless otherwise stated, all times are AK time zone.

Sept 1: UA 453 to Denver, US 1107 to Anchorage. Arrives 10:30 PM. Staying at

Quality Suites Anchorage Near Convention Center
325 W 8TH AVE
Anchorage, AK 99501
1.888.872.8356

Sept 2 – 6: Staying at

Talkeetna Roadhouse
Trisha Costello, Owner
P. O. Box 604 Talkeetna, AK 99676
13550 E. Main Street in “beautiful Downtown Talkeetna”
phone: 907.733.1351

Sept 7: Staying at

Camai B & B
3838 Westminster Way
Anchorage, Alaska 99508-4834
(907)333-2219

Sept 8: UA 1129 to Houston, UA 1717 to Baltimore, arriving 11:47 AM Eastern time on Sept 9 (overnight flight).

That’s all for now. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I am writing this on Sunday, August 18. There are no pics this week.

This week I read an article about the moose in New Hampshire. It seems the winters aren’t cold enough to kill off the ticks. This leaves a lot of hungry ticks in the summer time. Ticks like to feed off the moose, leaving the moose emaciated. According to the article, moose in Maine aren’t affected because the winters are still cold enough. This very same week, we had several days of delightfully cool and dry weather. Lows were near 50 at night. Riding early in the morning required a jacket. In the middle of August. Amazing. Very nice, but amazing.

Speaking of riding, I had the entire day to myself Friday, so I took an all-day bike ride. I haven’t ridden very much since I got back from the BRP trip. This was partly due to some rainy weather and partly due to other commitments. I decided that if I didn’t do my old training ride soon, I would lose the ability to do it, and have to work back up to it again. I completed the ride. It was hard, I was tired, it felt great. The best part of the ride was the worst part of the road. The entire route is excellent biking except for the last mile or so in Howard county. That stretch has very bumpy pavement, a steep down-hill section, and heavy morning commuter traffic early in the day. The bottom of the hill has very rough railroad tracks, followed by a narrow bridge and an additional short section of road until I go one way and most of the traffic goes another. The pavement is so bad I am forced to ride slowly down the hill. It isn’t as bad as I make it sound, because the road is so bad that many drivers go slower than me down that hill. Friday, a road construction project had sprouted up on that section of road. The pavement on my side was beautifully smooth. The other side was finishing up. And the rail road tracks were very nicely smoothed out. Thank you, Howard County. You have moved the worst part of the ride to Carroll County!

I spent three days at Nick’s place. When I worked for CASA, I developed a shortcut for upgrading Windows 8 to Windows 8 Pro. It worked great and saved a lot of time. Unfortunately, my little shortcut did now work when converting Windows 7, 32-bit to Windows 8 Pro, 64-bit. As a result, I didn’t bring everything I needed when I came on Monday. It took half a day to fix that. Oh, well, that’s why I build flexible schedules. I should finish most of the work at Nick’s Place this week. I’m also working on a project to connect the ReStores to the central office for Habitat.The project is approved, but the company that does computer support for Habitat added a new requirement that adds $1000 to the cost of the project. This is a lot of money to Habitat. We’ll see what they decide.

Wednesday we had the “August Party” at Ed’s place. Ed said it was easier if he didn’t have to put everybody in a car to come to our place. That is eminently understandable. We had plenty of people there. Bud came up from Potomac, driven by Danita’s brother Rick, who was visiting from Texas. Joe was also there. There were hamburgers, potato salad, chips, and sweets a plenty.

Our other big party this week was Bill Bauman’s 70th birthday celebration. It was a typical Bauman party. Lots of people. Lots of conversation. Lots of “BJ’s” food. We had a good time.

We have launched a James Bond marathon. It’s fun watching movies from an earlier era. We’re watching them in sequence so we can see how the movies developed. The free 007 movies I found on Amazon are available only through the end of August. The timing is perfect. It ends when we leave on vacation, and corresponds to TV’s summer doldrums. But it leaves us with a mad dash to watch 20 movies in less than a month — plus attend all the parties, classes, dinners out, etc. Life is hard, sometimes.

Danita’s doing a cooking countdown to our Alaska / Denali vacation.  Between now and when we leave on September 1, she will be at the university retreat two days, we have a SOCA party, and we have an evening at the Aquarium. That means there are a maximum of 10 dinners at home before vacation.

I don’t often write about politics, but it’s hard to ignore how our president, the NSA, and other agencies have worked at hiding the scope of their data collection from the public. (And that’s being very generous to our government.) Those who are “in the business” were not surprised by recent revelations, but this knowledge gained relevance when it was finally proved. I personally think there are more activities that have not yet been revealed. Certainly, other countries are doing as much as they think they can get away with along these lines. And none of this begins to touch on the “cyber-war” activities that the US and other governments are conducting. I read a blog that suggested that Eisenhower’s farewell address is particularly applicable to us today. It’s short. You can read it and decide for yourself by visiting http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html. I found a couple of places where one can watch the original TV broadcast. Unfortunately, every site I could find ruined the speech by breaking it up with commentary.

That’s it for this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Note: there are no pictures this week. I am writing this on Sunday, August 11.

There isn’t much that could compare to all the excitement of the last few weeks. It’s good to have things calm down a little bit.

Our neighbors watch their 2-year old grandson. For some reason, they are very concerned that I will hear noises from their house. (They aren’t concerned that Danita will hear noises. She goes to work!) I keep on assuring them that I don’t hear a thing, and that if I did it wouldn’t bother me at all, so long as I don’t have to change the diaper. I saw them outside Monday. They had traded the 2-year old for a 4- and 6-year old last week. They immediately asked if I heard noises. I told them yes, I heard a lot of noise last week, but from my grand kids, not theirs.

We’ve had a lot of rain this week. In keeping with my new philosophy of making sure I’m inside when it rains, I haven’t done much bike riding. I read a very interesting book. If you like spy fiction but find it unbelievable, you will find the truth much more unbelievable. Never the less, everything in “Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal” by Ben Macintyre is absolutely true. It’s about a British rogue who ended up working as a double-spy for MI-5 during WW II. I had read some of the story of Britain’s war-time spy network, but I had never come across this story before. Perhaps the most unbelievable part — the spy was run by MI-5 (internal intelligence), when by rights he should have been by MI-6 (foreign intelligence). It was a fascinating read but I still don’t understand those British intelligence departments. What ever happened to MI-1 through MI-4, anyway?

I did some work for Habitat this week. They were still having intermittent trouble with their VPN phones at one of their ReStores. (VPN phones use the internet instead of phone lines). I kept on swapping things around, trying to isolate the problem. Finally I did a swap that made everything stop working. That pretty much proved the problem was with the internet connection. I patched things up to work somewhat and they called the provider. With a “hard failure”, the provider quickly found and fixed the problem. Now we’re just waiting to make sure the issue doesn’t occur again.

My other gig is with Nick’s Place. They purchased everything they need to upgrade their computers. I’ll be going down Monday to set up the first 3 computers, then again Tuesday to do a little training. There will be several more visits after that.

Thursday was Danita’s birthday. We went out to one of our favorite restaurants, Baldwin Station. I had a perfect steak: better than Chris – Ruth’s at half their price. Unfortunately, Danita didn’t have as good a time. Fortunately, we had a neighborhood crab feast Saturday evening. That went quite well. They kept on bringing crabs to our table, and we kept on eating them. I only had one crab, but there was plenty of other great food available. We were sitting on the deck. The weather was perfect. We stayed and chatted until the mosquitoes were out in force.

On the medical front, I had a 24-hour EEG. I went in at 2 PM Friday. They glued wires to my head, hooked them up to a small box, and gave me strict instructions to act like a slug until late Saturday. I was just about all hooked up when a mother stopped at the checkout window across the hallway with her 5-year old daughter. The poor girl saw me and was all freaked out. I tried to make her feel a little more comfortable. Unfortunately, her mother was making things worse by hissing “don’t stare” under her breath. As if that would make a 5-year old stop staring. I took the hint and went straight home, calling Danita to ask her to pick up some milk. I spent most of the day Saturday watching old James Bond movies, streamed from Amazon for free, while Danita was down at her Dad’s. And I spent *all* of the day in our house behind closed and locked doors. Getting the wires off my head was almost like a spy operation. I had to go to the locked medical building at 4 and call the EEG tech on his cell phone, so he would know to come down and let me in. Fortunately everything worked out in a timely manner, and I had plenty of time to shower before the crab feast. It turned out to be more like a 48-hour test. I’m still finding buggers in my hair. I can’t imagine what people with long hair do.

Today we had a special breakfast. We had a loyalty reward for a free coffee at Panera — and Danita got a bonus of a free pastry for her birthday. So we went to Panera after church and had the cheapest breakfast ever.

That’s it for this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Elizabeth

I’m writing this on Sunday,

We had fun visiting at Reed Manor. Here’s a pic of Elizabeth clowning around in the living room Thursday.

Bryon

And here’s Bryon clowning around in the men’s room at the library Friday. (He liked the color of the stall walls.) They had an “Arthur” exhibit. We played around there for a while, then the library had a science hour. They had songs and stories. Then they sifted through ocean dirt to find small shells, bits of coral and fossilized poop. The best time was lunch. We went to Chick Fil A, which was OK. The good part was the play room afterwards. It got really good when a day care mom brought several kids and everybody started running around as screaming.

Carolina Raptor Center

Saturday we included Jul and went to a nature center that houses the Carolina Raptor Center. The kids weren’t very interested in the birds. But they managed to have a good time running around and looking at everything except the birds.

The drive home was easier than normal, because it was Sunday. When taking I-81, the routing programs always suggest taking I-66 East to the DC beltway and around to I-95. Normally, this is a very bad idea and we take some back roads up to Frederick. It can take hours to move a few miles in the DC area. But since it was Sunday, we took the suggested route and got home a few minutes early.

We’re going to stay home the rest of the month. I hope this finds everybody doing well.