Labor Day Weekend

I am writing this on Sunday, August 31. There are several pics.

Deer

Deer

After the contractor finished working on our deck, the new deck looked great. And the porch below the deck looked rather ragged by comparison. At least I was able to predict the outcome this time. I went to buy the same paint I used last time I painted the porch, only to find they don’t sell that paint any more. So I went to Sherwin-Williams and got a paint that would work well. It took the better part of Monday to get it done. At the end of the day, I had unwittingly worn a pretty good sore spot in my right knee, which is still covered by an ugly looking scab. And the porch still feels tacky when we walk on it. I have no idea how long it will be before the paint is truly dry. But it must look pretty good. It attracted another deer.

Rabbit Den

Rabbit Den

That isn’t the only wildlife we’ve been attracting. I noticed a hole in the ground near our driveway. A little investigation revealed a sizable rabbit den. The pests have been literally undermining our driveway. I decided to fill the holes with pea gravel and finish it off with a generous layer of rabbit repellent. So far, I’ve put down 3 bags of pea gravel. The holes aren’t filled yet. I feel like Elmer Fudd. Wascally wabbits! (Click the triangle below for a short trip down memory lane.)

 

 

 

 

Patuxent Refuge

Patuxent Refuge

Last week was more delightful weather, with highs in the 80s and low humidity. Our normal hot, humid summer weather rolled in today. We took advantage of the good weather to finish our Howard County walks. We were rewarded with another Wegman’s coupon and 2 more water bottles. Yesterday we visited the Patuxent Wildlife Refuge. They have over 10,000 acres of undeveloped land, much of it wetlands and small lakes; mostly along the Patuxent River. It’s a beautiful area, and we enjoyed walking around one of the trails. We saw a small frog on the trail. You can see it below in the lower right corner, but you have to look closely. We had an easier time, because we could see it move.

Here's a small frog we saw at Pax Refuge

Here’s a small frog we saw at Pax Refuge (lower right corner).

This morning, we visited a church in Baltimore then took Mark out to breakfast. We drove from JHU Homewood campus, in the center of Baltimore, down to the Blue Moon Cafe near the harbor. There was a huge crowd waiting to get into the cafe, so we drove back up to the Homewood area and got breakfast at one of the local cafes. Mark worked pretty hard teaching the CTY class that finished recently. He’s trying to figure out whether he wants to stay at Hopkins or transfer to College Park. Things should get settled for him pretty soon.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

School Days

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

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.

 

Travel

I am writing this on Sunday, Aug 17. There is one picture.

This week’s theme is travel. We spent the week working on two trips. The first is a conference Danita will attend in Coronado, an island right outside San Diego. I’m tagging along. The trip will be Oct 19 – 25. The conference reserved rooms in several hotels, all upper-class resorts. The kind where it’s such a bargain to get a room for $300/night that nobody should mind paying the extra $50/night fee that adds such amenities as parking and WiFi. (But not breakfast. The brunch is about $30/person plus tip and tax.) UMBC is paying for the conference days, but we’re paying for the extra days. And even if UMBC were picking up the entire tab, I would have trouble sleeping comfortably in a bed that costs that much. The issue was resolved when Danita found all the conference rooms were already taken. We got a room in a Best Western hotel about a mile away. It’s close enough that if I get hung up in San Diego one day, Danita can easily walk to the hotel from the conference. As a bonus, UMBC will pay for the rental car on conference days. Both we and UMBC will save significantly, compared to what we would have paid for an official conference room. And the breakfast, parking, and WiFi are free.

The other travel we’ve been working on is next year’s vacation. I’ve long wanted to visit Greece. Danita is willing, but she only wants to go once. She advised me to make a list of all the things I want to see while we are there. I did. Key items on the list are at the end of this post. We found a cruise that covers all but one the important locations on my list. Then we found that they are running that cruise this year, but not next year. No other cruise or tour we can find comes close. We are not willing to do a “roll your own” trip to Greece because we think English is not very well known in Greece, and there’s not much chance we can figure things out by recognizing a few key words of Greek. So we decided to put Greece on hold for a year and go to China instead. For China, we looked at the tours and picked the one we like best. It turns out there’s not really all that much choice. The core of all China tours is pretty much the same. Once outside the major cities, there’s not a lot of choice of accommodations and restaurants. The tour we’ve pretty much settled on includes a visit to Tibet. I like that because not many people can start a sentence with “When I was in Tibet …”. Helpfully, the hotel in Tibet sells oxygen for those who need it. The tour we picked out has several possible dates. The next step is for Danita to talk with her boss about when we will be gone. Next year is an important year for Danita because UMBC will apply for an extension of their research contract with NASA. Danita has a pretty good idea of what’s required to write the proposal, but this is a big enough issue that she should get approval from her boss first.

Deer - taken from our back porch yesterday

Deer – taken from our back porch yesterday

That’s plenty of excitement, but wait — there’s more! My body was advising me to make major adjustments to my bike riding. Last week I felt better and started building back up. I am pleased with my progress. We had a neighborhood crab feast yesterday. I’m not big on crabs, and the party was kind of expensive. Danita went to the crab feast and I got a hamburger. We enjoyed very unusual weather for August. We had a huge amount of rain Tuesday — over 6″ in one day. This was a record for that day of the year. The most amazing thing was that as late as Monday afternoon, the forecast was for 1 to 2 inches. The drainage system in our neighborhood held up pretty well. So far as I know, nobody got flooded out, although most everybody’s sump pump got a good workout that day. I spent most of Tuesday sitting on the porch under our recently renovated deck, totally dry and enjoying the view. Other than Tuesday, it was cool, sunny, and dry all week. It was so cool that I had to wear a sweatshirt in the mornings and didn’t go barefoot until after lunch. We also completed several of our walks. We’re just one walk away from finishing the set.

That’s certainly a lot of excitement for one week. I hope this finds everybody doing well. My “Greek list” is below.

Things to see while visiting Greece

Athens, the Parthenon, and the Parthenon Museum. This is pretty obvious, be there are tours that do not include Athens, or do not give it enough time.

Constantinople (also called Istanbul). Capital city of the Eastern Roman Empire (also called Byzantium), which lasted for 1100 years. Hagia Sophia, built by Justinian 1400 years ago, has a dome that was the largest in the world for 1000 years. Also has the Topkapi Palace and Hippodrome.  Believe it or not, there are tours that skip Constantinople entirely. One needs at least three days to see this city.

Delos is one of the most important mythological, historical and archaeological sites in Greece. 1000 years before Greek mythology, Delos was the birthplace of Apollo.

Rethimnon, Crete contains an amazing restoration of an important palace. While modern archaeologists heartily condemn the restoration, it is the only site where one can walk around and get a true feel of what the palace was like and how it functioned.

Volos contains the famous Byzantine monasteries built atop the rock towers of Meteora. These monasteries were an essential part of the Eastern Christian Church, and would be well worth visiting even without the amazing surviving frescoes and icons.

Çanakkale, Turkey contains an archaeology site that holds 9 civilizations, including Troy.

Delphi, site of the prehistoric Oracle, a major temple to Apollo, and site of the Pythian Games. Apollo talked to mortals through the Delphic Oracle, which exerted considerable influence throughout the Greek world. Sadly, we cannot find a tour that includes this site that was so important to the early Greeks. This is the one site I will not see.

Happy Birthday, Danita

I am writing this on Sunday, 8/10. There are 2 pics.

Friday was Danita’s birthday. She’s not been one to be upset about birthdays, but having her 60th birthday, combined with the retirement planing we’ve started, made this one a little traumatic for her. We had a 3-part celebration. Thursday, we went to the Highland Inn, an upscale restaurant. It was a bit of a drive, but the food was fabulous and the price was quite reasonable for what we got. Friday we had a neighborhood “Chill and Grill”. I picked up a birthday cake as our contribution to the desert table. Lots of people stopped by to wish Danita a happy birthday. There were lots of jokes about how hard I worked on Danita’s birthday cake. It took me all week! (I ordered it Monday, picked it up Friday.) It was like inviting 150 people to a birthday party, but a whole lot cheaper. Today after Church, we drove up to Baltimore and had breakfast at First Watch Cafe. This is a breakfast-and-lunch only place with the specialty of using only fresh ingredients. It’s a bit of a drive, but the breakfast is fabulous and we had a great time.

Rouse Rock

Rouse Rock

We continued our Columbia walks. We visited a wetlands area. It was one of the shortest walks, but it was a nice one. Much of it was boardwalk, which let us get up-close-and-personal to the wetlands. It was very nice except for one short section. There was a gazebo in the middle of a small pond connected to the trail by a section of boardwalk. It was very pretty, but impossible to reach. A couple of geese had taken up residence on the connecting boardwalk. This was their territory and they weren’t budging for anybody. One would have to be quite determined in any event, given the quantity of bird poop on that section of the boardwalk. Our other walk was in the most popular recreational park of the area. It’s called Centennial Lake. The trail is a little over 2 1/2 miles. The park is always jammed with walkers, runners, cyclists, kids, boaters, and fishermen. The highlight of this walk was two more “Rouse Rocks”. These were much smaller, and “in memory of” instead of a “gift to”. I continue to be amazed.

I consider the “Rouse Rocks” to be one of my Columbia stories. These are stories about things that are a little off beat, humorous, and illustrate how life in Columbia is different than life anywhere else in the known universe. From our unique street names, to the amazing obsession about the street sign format, to the commercial underbelly, to the complete lack of straight roads, to see-saws; they make quite a collection of stories. But I have lost my favorite Columbia story. You might remember that the bus routes in Columbia are denoted by colors, the buses are painted green, and the bus route is displayed by a yellow electronic sign. This gave me my my story about the green bus with the yellow sign that says red. But I can’t use that story any more. Columbia, Howard County, and parts of Arundel County regionalized their buses. They changed the bus route names from memorable colors like “red” to bland numbers like “407”. And the buses aren’t necessarily green. And they don’t all use yellow electronic signs anyway. The world just keeps on changing. Uniqueness keeps on disappearing. We keep moving from the interesting to the bland bourgeois. What is an old grouch to do but observe and complain?

Power Up 3

Power Up 3

I invested in a Kickstarter project! These are companies that use the internet to find the funds to develop interesting things. This project is a remote-control paper airplane, controlled by your smart phone. It sounds like a great idea that would be a lot of fun. It’s called Power Up 3. For my $30, I got an electronic module that looks like a high-tech cockpit, a piece of carbon-fiber rod, and a propeller / rudder assembly. (the propeller goes behind the rudder at the back of the plane.) Just fold a piece of paper into an airplane (the template is on the web), clip on the Power Up 3, download the app, and have fun. It turned out to be more funny than fun, and the joke was on me. On my very first flight, the plane nosed down towards the ground, then flew towards my neighbor’s deck, climbing sharply to an altitude of about 25 feet. After almost literally hitting the deck, it staled, rolled, and headed back towards the ground. It recovered briefly then nose-planted into the grass. The  propeller quickly began chewing its way into the grass. What made the flight so funny was the pilot, because about the time the propeller started buzzing along the ground, I finally realized that the plane was climbing too steeply and would soon stall if I didn’t do *something* to my smart phone to correct the flight. The abrupt landing must have misaligned the plane in a way I couldn’t detect, because that was by far the best and most interesting flight I ever had. Although the time it rolled and flew upside-down for 30 feet before crashing was kind of interesting also. And to think my main concern is that it would fly out of range of my smart phone and I would lose control. Ha! I never once was able to provide any correction, either good or bad, while the plane was still in the air. Having exhausted my patience, I went back to the you-tube video of the plane in flight. This time I noticed how unstable the plane is, and how it needs frequent and timely corrections just to keep in the air. Oh, well. Live and learn.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Quiet Week

I am writing this on Sunday, 8/3. There are no pics.

We had a quiet week. Danita worked. I took some short bike rides.

Wednesday evening we went to another retirement financial management seminar. This one was at one of the local restaurants. It included a free dinner — appetizer, entree, and desert. The dinner was quite nice, but the presentation wasn’t. The guy wouldn’t accept questions. Most of what he said was designed to scare us into setting up an appointment with him. Many of the things he discussed we heard at the seminar last week. The difference is, last week we heard actual information. This week, there was so little information that if we hadn’t attended the first seminar, we wouldn’t have known what this guy was talking about.

Saturday evening, we went to the community college in Essex to see the musical “Legally Blond”. They did a nice job. The female lead was perfectly cast. The UPS man was hilarious.

We also got a couple of walks in. We completed all the walks from the Columbia Association. I picked up our prizes – $2 off any fresh produce at Wegmans, and a water bottle. We have five more walks for Howard County Parks Then we can enter a drawing for $100 worth of free groceries for Wegmans. We’re enjoying the walks, seeing parts of Howard County we haven’t seen, and the prizes are kind of fun.

It’s coming up on dinner time. I hope this finds everybody doing well.