There are no pics this week.

This is a time of year when I can’t do much riding. Outdoor projects are not very enticing. And taxes have to be done. I don’t like doing taxes. I don’t like ithem so much that Danita forbids me from doing them while she’s home. I spent a couple of days this week fooling around with computer issues. Then I bought Turbo Tax. I put all my papers in order. And in general I played around until it was Friday afternoon. There was no sense to start when Danita would be home in just a few hours. Now I’m off the hook until Tuesday. (They are forecasting snow Sunday night / Monday morning. If UMBC opens, Danita will likely work from home to avoid the joy of skittering around the roads.)

The snow storm early this week that hit New England so hard left us largely untouched. We got less than 2″. We got another dusting mid-week, and we’re looking forward to 1 to 3″ Sunday. So far, we’ve been lucky with the snow. We’ve had just enough to have plenty of snow emergency evenings.

I went to see my dermatologist Tuesday, for a “full body scan”. Apparently I wasn’t good enough last year. I was back in the office Thursday for a blue light treatment for my arms. One has to avoid sun exposure for 2 days after a blue light treatment. That’s not very hard to do in this weather. Before going outside, I’m generally wearing a long sleeve shirt, a sweater, and a jacket — plus gloves and hat. I don’t think much sun gets through all that.

We saw the completion of a project this week. We have our powers of attorney signed, notarized, and witnessed. All papers are filed in the appropriate places. The financial transfers for my investments are all done. Danita has one financial transfer in process and one more yet to do. Our goal was to get all this stuff done before we went to China. It looks like we won’t have any problem meeting that goal.

Speaking of going to China, we’re starting to gear up for the trip. We paid the balance of the tour. We received our 40+ page brochure of instructions. I am starting to investigate how we will stay in communication during our trip. Our visa applications are in. We’re making a list of what we will take. This last point is going to take some effort. The travel company warns that there are places where baggage portage is not practical, and we should be prepared to tote our own luggage up and down hills and steps. In other words, we should travel light. The challenge isn’t figuring out what we want to take, so much as it is figuring out what we can leave home.

My class in Chinese Culture has started. I’ve completed the first two modules, getting an “A” on both. It’s fun but kind of strange taking an E-class, because I don’t have any idea what the other students are doing or thinking. The instructor has a nice array of supplemental material (videos, documents, and power point presentations), but there is no lecture. Doing the work is pretty easy so far, but there’s one assignment that’s giving me grief. I have to select “a topic” and lead a one day on-line discussion on that topic. How does one lead a topic on which no participants know anything? I can’t even imagine the objective of such an exercise. The instructor isn’t into doing any extra work. Her response to my query was most unsatisfactory.

The neighborhood activity this weekend is a Superbowl party. We won’t be attending. We have a theater room that will have the game on. It has seating for 20 (including folding chairs), with food and drink prohibited. We have a large, comfortable party room with seating for lots. But we don’t have a screen or projector for that room. So you can go, eat, drink, and talk. Or you can watch the game. (Or the commercials, if you prefer.) We want to do both at the same time, so we’ll be staying home. We’ve had so many snow emergencies that we’re thinking of a slightly more nutritious evening — sweet Italian sausages with grilled onions and peppers on rolls. Yummy.

Well, Danita’s home. I think I’ll wander down and see if the grocery store had shrimp salad. That would make a tasty lunch. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pics this week.

We had an unusual day Tuesday. Just by coincidence, Danita and I both had doctors appointments early in the morning. Danita was off to see her dermatologist. I had lab work done. We met up at the house and went out to a big breakfast at Bob Evans. Then we drove up to Towson. It was way past time to move our wills from Baltimore to Howard County. It’s a good thing we were well fed. It took over an hour to retrieve the wills from Baltimore County. It took almost all day before we got home again. But the end result is we effectively had a 4-day weekend (since Monday was a holiday). Thanks to the internet, I already got my lab work back. Everything was in the “normal” column. Yea!

There’s both some progress and a setback on the computer front. I received a replacement WiFi board. The technician was supposed to come by and install it in my computer today. It looks like he wimped out due to sloppy weather. I guess I’ll have to get the installation rescheduled. I downloaded the service manual and decided I don’t have the skills to open the computer. The days of removing a few screws to open the case are long gone. And now for the setback. Unfortunately, I spilled a glass of water. Some water got into the computer and now my keyboard doesn’t work. Fortunately, Mark bought me a very nice keyboard with Cherry key switches. I’ll be using that until the WiFi board is replaced, so I can get the keyboard fixed. (The warranty doesn’t cover water spills.) It’s not so good that I have to go through the pain of carrying around an extra keyboard with my laptop, But I must say, it’s a very nice keyboard to type on.

We’ve had a consistent weather pattern lately. One sloppy weather day followed by one or two nice days, followed by another sloppy weather day … There were only two days when the roads were good enough to ride this week. One was Tuesday, which we spent driving around the area. The other was Friday. Given that I was only getting one ride in this week, I had a choose carefully. Should I ride to the grocery store, pick up a few things, and bring home a salad for lunch? Or ride out to Glenwood and have a healthy sandwich? Or ride by Woodstock and stop in for a pepperoni kolache and a cup of Hershey’s hand-dipped ice cream? It’s a good thing I remembered my lactate pill.

Sunday should be fun. It’s our neighborhood’s annual chili dinner. Danita had a very good chili recipe, but she tried a new recipe and it was even better. But by the time we signed up, there were already plenty of people bringing chili. So Danita is making a green bean and roasted onion salad. It sounds yummy, and as I say, “onions are good for your heart.” The Knights of Columbus at our church have a unique fund raiser. After church services they will be taking payments for Maryland crab soup, to be delivered after church on Superbowl weekend. I asked around while we were counting money last week. I heard the soup is very good, but needs some more Old Bay seasoning. Our check is written, and we’ve verified our stock of Old Bay.

I read an interesting book — Atul Gawande’s “Being Mortal”. The author started out with a romanticized story about his grandfather’s life in rural India. I thought he was going to be a “back to nature” nut, proposing we all go back to life as it never was in 1800. But I hung in there and he surprised me by becoming much more realistic. Then he started writing about the evils of nursing homes. It’s hard to disagree with him, but it’s irrelevant for most of us because there’s not much we can do about it. I thought the rest of the book was going to be “the world is awful”. But I hung in there again and he surprised me again. This is an excellent book covering all major end of life issues we face today. There’s a reason this is rated as a #1 best seller by Amazon. And why there’s such a long waiting list at our public library.

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

There are no pics this week.

My big news is that I planned a trip to Mom’s. I’ll be in W. Palm Beach March 24 – 27. Danita’s not coming this year. She’ll be writing the proposal to renew the research contract with NASA.

Wednesday was my busy day this week. I had lunch with Tony Chaprnka. We went to the Sunshine Grill in Kingsville and spent a very pleasant 2 hours talking about geek stuff. That evening, Danita and I took our first Tai Chi class. I’m not sure it’s going to take for me. We learned the first 4 moves of the Yong Short Method. We are supposed to practice them daily, but so far I haven’t.

Another thing I’ve spent time on this week is my computer. The WiFi keeps on disconnecting. It seemed to be happening more frequently. I decided to do something about it when it disconnected just as I clicked the button to by my air line ticket to W. Palm Beach. Stupid computers. And stupid computer companies. HP tried to tell me the extended warranty I bought for my computer didn’t apply. After a vigorous and frank discussion, they decided to connect me to tech support. Of course they had to check the drivers and generally  waste a bunch of everybody’s time. But at the end of the call Friday (with the “supervisor”), they asked to confirm my address. I take it this means they might send somebody to replace my WiFi board after the next call Monday morning.

I wish I could say that was the only bureaucratic hassle I had to overcome. I got a new windshield on my car. We have EZ Pass transponders to make going through toll lanes easy. The glue on my windshield stick-um was all gooey and disgusting. One can get new stick-ums for free, but only if one is an authorized person on the account. I set up our EZ Pass account. When we moved, I changed Danita’s transponder from “tunnel commuter” to “standard”. But somehow, only Danita is an authorized person on our account. Grrrrrrr.

The SOCA party this week is Bingo tonight. Danita will be attending this activity unescorted.

Late tomorrow morning I have my first monthly counting session at Church. We’ll see how effective my formal training was. We’re having a pot-luck dinner with Circle Sunday evening.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pics this week.

Here’s something that was yucky this week. I took the car out Tuesday to open a new account at our bank. It was cold and snowy. I turned on the defroster. The windshield cracked. It went across the bottom of the windshield, all the way across the car. I can’t complain. I picked up a stone divit years ago. The crack was overdue. I ended up spending a lot of time Thursday getting it fixed. The bike ride to pick up the car was bracing. The temperature was 12 degrees. But the roads were clear and there was little traffic. I couldn’t even declare a snow emergency Tuesday evening, because we had Yoga.

Danita and I went out to dinner Thursday. We tried a new place. The food was good and the prices very reasonable. Unfortunately, parking is a mess and the music was very loud. I don’t think this will become a regular place. Friday, we had a neighborhood party. The food was good and we had a good time. But both of us woke up in the wee hours feeling extremely thirsty and had trouble getting back to sleep. Spoo-oooky.

Danita went down to visit Bud last weekend. They decided Bud needed a larger safe deposit box at the bank. Bud was getting tired and decided to get the new safe deposit box later. When he went to get the box, he learned that Danita had to sign a new signature card. The signature card on the old box could not be used for the new box. That’s why Danita is at Riderwood as I write this, for the sole purpose of signing that stupid card.

I finished Gleick’s “The Information”. He mentioned that the Rand Corporation published a book with 1 million random digits in 1955, and that the book is still on sale at Amazon. I was amazed. In 1955, this book was essential to some geeks, but today it has little if any value. There are many programs that will generate random numbers that are better than Rand’s book. I went to Amazon and found the book is indeed still for sale. The reviews were hilarious. I must have spent half an hour laughing myself out of my chair. One person put the book on his wish list so he could easily go to the page and read a few more reviews. His wife thought he actually wanted the book, and bought him a copy. This is a very expensive book.

When I needed random numbers in school, I used a short table that was in my CRC handbook. This handy tomb had every mathematical thing an engineer or undergraduate math major could want. My copy was well used by the time a graduated, and I bought a new copy as a kind of graduation present to myself. I actually had a job where I needed random numbers. I was building a radiation monitor system for Westhingouse’s nuclear power plants. It was the first system to use a microprocessor to do the measurement. Radiation measurements are very random. The trick was to find a way to accurately estimate the radiation level while also reacting quickly if the level changed. And to make it work with a ridiculously under-powered microprocessor. And make the measurements for 8 detectors. (Microprocessors were so expensive, not even a nuclear power plant could afford a separate one for each detector.) The project was grand fun. Unfortunately, tables of random numbers have a normal distribution. I needed a Poisson distribution. There were no canned ways to generate the numbers I needed. I was concerned that if I had some kind of fundamental misunderstanding, I wouldn’t necessarily detect it if I wrote the program to do the radiation measurement and also wrote the program to generate the random numbers I would use for testing. Just then, a woman majoring in engineering physics at Loyola College applied for a summer job at Westinghouse. Everybody wanted to give her a hand, but nobody had anything for her to do. Finally, in desperation, my boss asked me if I could use her. And that’s how one young lady ended up spending her summer reading radiation measurements and typing them into a computer. It had to be a tedious summer for her, but the pay was a lot better than she could get anywhere else. She never complained.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pics this week.

The world’s gone mad

I don’t like hand cream. But as I got older and my fingers started cracking in the dryness of winter, it became the lesser evil. I finally found one that was less obnoxious than most and got two large jars, one for work and one for home. It came to pass that I used the last of this cream lately. Fortunately, I knew what to buy — Gold Bond. When I got to the store,  found 8 types of Gold Bond, with no idea which was the one that might be similar to what I had been using.

Books

I had terrible luck queuing books from the library. If I wanted to finish the book I had without incurring a fine, I had to read 400 pages in 2 days. That’s hardly an impossible task, but it’s not how I prefer to enjoy books. I finally worked through all the backlog and turned to one I got as a gift — James Gleik’s “The Information”. The book is about as strange as the title. The the author climaxes the preface with the idea that the “bit” (the smallest unit of information) is the fundamental unit of the universe. I decided to try the first chapter before giving up. I found an amazing discussion of African talking drums, among other things. Gleik jumps all over the place. He creates causality from the weakest evidence. And he presents some totally amazing ideas. when I agree and when I disagree, this is an incredible read.

Movies

There isn’t much on TV this time of year. There is the Rose Bowl Parade, but that’s only 2 hours. It’s a good time to look for movies using our Amazon Prime account. One evening we watched “Coherence”. It reminded me of a Twilight Zone episode, without Rod Sterling. I loved it. Danita hated it.

Holiday activities

Having a financial plan for retirement is one thing. Actually executing it is another. That first action was emotionally difficult. It marks a transition. No matter how much we look forward, we know that having started on the next leg of our journey, there’s no turning back. Our timing was not prompted by the holiday. It is total coincidence that the time to start executing our plan was the week before the new year. But it is a symbolic coincidence.

New Year: It’s silliest of ideas, that one day out of the year is more important than all the others. But it can be a fun way to acknowledge the passing of time. How would you like to celebrate the end of an old year and the start of a new? Would you like to stay up until midnight and then make some noise? What’s the point? Are we trying to scare off evil demons that might sneak in on the start of the year? How silly. Perhaps it would it be better to have a killer breakfast at Miss Shirley’s in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor! How about if the breakfast included validated parking and a dawn walk across the 7th floor sky bridge?

Our new parish has family dinners more or less monthly. Everybody is invited. There is no fee. There’s a donation box, but nobody seems to be overly worried about it. The only purpose of the dinner is to promote interaction among the parishioners. Those who wish to, bring their own libations. Some might call it a party. Danita and I volunteered as servers. In truth, there wasn’t much work. One of the groups at one of my tables brought the libations but forgot a bottle opener. Fortunately, I have a cool pocket multi-tool. I love to play with it, and it can open bottles. I wasn’t willing to lend them my tool, but we had some fun opening bottles as their dinner progressed. It was a lot of fun watching all those people talk and eat and have a good time. This dinner was last night. It is possible to have a dinner this time of the year with nobody mentioning the New Year.

Danita is enjoying 2 weeks at home, largely by cooking. She cooked dinners ahead until the freezer was full. Then she started cooking for church. She made brownies for the dinner. Today she plans to make a casserole for St. Vincent’s Place. Unfortunately the casserole is supposed to be frozen. After over a week of very cold 20 degree evenings, temperatures have climbed 20 degrees. It won’t be possible to freeze the casserole by setting it outside overnight. And the freezer is packed. Fortunately, Danita is a clever and resourceful person. I have no doubt we will deliver a frozen casserole Sunday morning.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.