There are no pics this week.

I had a most unusual computer week. After our normal Church / breakfast / money counting last Sunday, I sat down to look at Mom’s computer. Mom has been complaining that her computer was acting funny. In the old days, that would be hard to do, with me in MD and Mom in FL. But these days, remote connect makes it a cinch. I finally had to quit so we could go to Danita’s office so I could hook up her computer. Then it was off to a BSO concert. The concert was fine. Mom’s computer was unsatisfying because I couldn’t find anything definitive. Hooking up Danita’s computer was more productive. She got Dell to replace her disk drive on Tuesday. Then my lappy failed to start up Wednesday morning. The symptoms looked like a disk crash. I bought a service policy with 24 x 7 tech support, but they didn’t answer the phone at 6 AM. So I went on my ride convinced I had a bad disk drive. After my ride, I called again. Surprisingly, they were able to fix it over the phone. It seems they were having problems with a driver. I wasn’t the first to call with this problem. Fortunately, their fix got me up and running right away. By the end of the week, all the computers in our household were working. That’s not supposed to be news, but some weeks are just like that. I rounded out my very strange computer week with Facebook. I have an empty Facebook page. Sometimes if somebody in the family posts on Facebook, I can see it. Yesterday, the real estate agent who helped our sell our house posted on my “timeline” (whatever that is). Now I’m getting tons of Facebook Emails, congratulating me on joining the 20th century. Please be assured, I intend to remain a Facebook curmudgeon. (Or is that Luddite?)

We enjoyed perfect bike riding weather Wed, Thur, and Fri. I was feeling good and decided to try to do three significant rides in a row. I was kind of tired during the last part of Friday’s ride, but other than that everything went well. I was quite pleased.

Unfortunately, I had an appointment for a blood draw Friday morning. I was so focused on the rides that I forgot the appointment. I remembered just as I was starting my ride, but it was a fasting draw and I had already eaten breakfast. I had to get this done in time for my next doctor’s appointment. And we have two parties this weekend. (A bull roast Saturday and a Bingo / Ice Cream Social Sunday. I’ll go the the Ice Cream Social and leave the Bingo to Danita.) I wanted to have a good time at the parties. And I wanted good lab results so my doctor doesn’t scold me. The only option was to walk in to the lab this morning. On a Saturday. Without an appointment. I got to the lab a few minutes before they opened, to find the hallway filled with people. I was number 21. The experience was much better than I anticipated. I was out in less than 45 minutes.

The excitement is building here in Columbia. Kathryn is coming this week. Plus, the IT Committee is presenting our web page proposal to the board. We expect the board to approve our proposal. Then the company has to put up a skeleton web site for us. After that, it’s up to me to post content before we go to Alaska so the community will have a month to comment on our proposed new design.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pics this week.

Danita had some stress at work this week. Margo was out with her mother’s funeral. She was covering for some of Margo’s time-sensitive work. In addition, her desktop and laptop computers both stopped working. Se took up an old laptop to use for a while, and it does a lot of things, but Microsoft Office programs don’t work on it. The IT department told her that the desktop has a bad disk, and Dell will replace it. But they didn’t put the computer back together. Danita was on the phone, talking with somebody from Dell who was half way around the world, and had a terrible accent, over a bad phone connection, and couldn’t make any progress at all. She finally hung up in total frustration.

Our neighborhood IT committee decided to recommend a WordPress web site. I’m busy working away. The board meets the last week of July. We’re putting a proposal together for their review. If they approve the proposal, I want to put up a test site before Danita and I leave for Alaska, which is followed by my bike & hike in NY. Our existing site has lots of content. I’m working hard getting all that stuff organized and formatted so I can build the test site quickly.

Here’s an example of a problem. The condos each have an organizational document. This is about 10 pages of dense text, complete with county stamps, folio numbers, lawyer signatures, etc. These documents all need to be put on the web site. That’s not too much of a problem, except that they were printed out and put in a scanner (to capture all the stamps and signatures). The files are huge. Modern practice is to keep posted files under 2 MBytes. One of the files was 100 MBytes. The free compression tools couldn’t make the file small enough to fit. The gold standard for PDF file compression is Adobe Acrobat, which is a ridiculously expensive program. I found out I could use it on a trial basis for 30 days, free. No credit card required. I’m sure I’ll get a ton of Email from Adobe later. But for now, it did what we need it to do. One condo printed the documents on colored paper. I couldn’t get them below 3 MB. The rest all are under 2 MB.

Here’s another hair puller. A lot of the board minutes were put on our old web site in Word format. They need to be converted to Adobe PDF format. That’s very easy to do. Of course, we have 6 boards with monthly minutes for the last 4 years. So there’s plenty of files to fix up. But the process is easy enough. Unfortunately, I couldn’t open one of the files. Word said the file was corrupt. I finally found somebody with an old version of Word that would open the file. They reformatted it and sent it to me, so I can include it in the new web site. Of course, this kind of thing is never supposed to happen. I’m just lucky, I guess.

And on it goes. In the mean time, before I take my NY bike & hike, I want to be able to ride 60 miles in hilly country. Then do it again the next day. So far, my body has had a succinct reply to that idea — “you’re nuts”. I decided that I tried to train too much too quickly. Now I’m focusing on doing 60 mile rides in not-very-hilly country, with occasional shorter hilly rides. I’m hoping that I can get that down, then start working on the longer hilly rides. I have four training weeks left. (I won’t be training while Kathryn is visiting, because I would rather spend time with her than argue with my body about riding the bike.) One good thing, all this hard work should give me wonderful blood chemistry. That’s important, because my next blood work is Friday. I don’t know how I got my doctor’s appointment just before our cruise, with all it’s sitting around and eating rich foods. But I’m glad I did. I figure I’ll have 6 months to wring all those fats and sugars out of my body before my next doctor appointment.

We have no SOCA parties this week. (That will also help my blood test results.) But we have a beef roast next Saturday, followed by an ice cream social on Sunday. Yummy. And great timing, just one day after my blood work. Too bad Kathryn didn’t come a little earlier.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pics this week.

It’s been a full week for both of us. Margo is one of the people who work for Danita. Margo and Danita are quite close. We attended Margo’s wedding. Margo’s mother has been very ill. Margo has had to take a lot of time off work lately to support her parents. Margo’s mom died Friday. Her mother lives a day’s drive from here, and the funeral will be private, so Danita won’t attend. It’s been an emotional time.

I am trying to condition myself for another bike tour. So far, I haven’t made enough progress to feel comfortable going on my Adirondacks bike & hike. In spite of the slow progress, I still have 6 weeks. I haven’t given up yet.

Our neighborhood IT committee had webinar presentations from three companies to help us with our web site. We rejected one company because their product doesn’t meet our needs. The other two have viable products. One of them helps communities build websites with WordPress, which would let me customize the site for our needs. It would be a lot of fun. We expect to make a recommendation this month.

Danita and I are working on our Alaska cruise. We are looking at the activities we want to do at the various ports of call. We’ve decided not to take any of the excursions offered by the cruise line. They tend to be quite expensive. We can do any of the activities we are interested in just by walking into town. In one case, we’ll have to take bus. We think we can manage that on our own. If one wants to ride the world’s longest Zip line (for example), the only way to do that is to take an excursion. But we aren’t all that interested in Zip lines, or helicopter rides, or special whale watching boat trips. We’ll settle for the whales we see from the side of our cruise ship.

We’re also getting excited about Kathryn’s visit. She said she plans to arrive July 28 and leave August 2. It should be a lot of fun having her around.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are lots of pics this week.

The Good Cheese

Our big news was a visit with the grandkids last weekend. The drive down was a breeze. Danita took US Route 29 from the south side of DC all the way to Greensboro. The road goes down along the eastern side of the Blue Ridge mountains. It’s half-way between I-81 and I-95. Most of the way it was nearly as good as Interstate, but with much less traffic and especially fewer trucks.

We ate extremely well — I gained plenty of weight, unfortunately. But it was all good food. Jul and Pat spared no effort, even getting especially good parmesan cheese.

Rock Scrambling

We left Saturday, arriving Saturday afternoon, and returned Tuesday. The somewhat unusual schedule allowed us to provide one day of day-care. Of course, visiting kids means going on adventures. Our first adventure was after dinner Saturday. Bryon asked how we could have enough time for an adventure, but this was a trip to the neighborhood ice cream place. This was an adventure that all 6 of us could enjoy. We barely had time to pull it off. There is no indoor seating, T-storms were rolling in, and there is definitely, absolutely, no possibility of eating ice cream in the car. But E finished hers just as the T-storm started rolling in, and Bryon chose a slurpy, which could be safely transported in the front seat cup holder.

Flying Minion

While in China, I saw an inexpensive and very cool toy. They were small characters with two propellers coming out of their heads. A sensor in the feet tells the toy whether there is something underneath. When the toy is close to something, it goes into high speed and climbs. When there is nothing, it goes into low speed and slowly falls. It’s a blast to play with. Holding your hand out, you can make it climb all the way to the ceiling without touching it. Or you can step back and let it gently touch the floor, then it will climb slightly and hover a few inches above the floor. If it hits something (like a wall), it shuts down to keep the propellers from damaging anything. Best of all, the batteries are rechargeable. Knowing Chinese quality, I made sure the propellers and sensors worked on both toys. Unfortunately, E’s toy wouldn’t hover. Instead, it took off across the room at a very high speed, hit a wall, and shut down.

Bryon

Sunday afternoon we went to a local park. Bryon got into a snit and decided not to go, so it was just the 3 of us. This park has a lake, and we did normal park stuff — playground, hiking, and paddle boats. Monday we started with breakfast out. Mr. Google and I found a very nice breakfast place. Danita and I had traditional eggs – meat – potatoes. B had a blueberry waffle, and E had a chocolate chip waffle. All the food was good, but the waffles were a real stand-out. (There was too much waffle for the kids, so Danita and I helped them out a little bit.)

Feeding Competition

Then we went to a drive-through animal park. The park offers feed buckets ( we got one for each child), which is a great way to train the animals to come up to the car. The animals had no problems poking their heads inside the car to get to the feed bucket — sometimes two or 3 at a time trying to eat from the same bucket. It was all great fun, until the bucket fell to the ground outside the car. Judging from the number of buckets we saw on the ground, this was an experience that was not unique to B & E. What surprised me the most is the animals were quite used to closing electric car windows, pulling their heads outside as soon as somebody started closing the window. It was a great way to spend a few hours.

The Real Bootleg

We rounded out the trip with a couple of DVD movies (“Despicable Me” and “Despicable Me 2” in honor of the flying minion.) It was a great trip. We even had the opportunity to try some real NC bootleg. Pat swears it is great stuff, but Danita and I declined.

Zebra

The drive back home was great until we got near DC. Road construction in Northern VA cost us an extra hour. By the time we got to the DC beltway, it was rush hour. That cost us another hour. We got home 2 hours later than planned, and quite frazzled from all the traffic. But we were safe and sound.

Goat

This is Independence Day weekend. Danita enjoyed a day off of work Friday. We’re taking it easy and catching up on chores. There’s a big fireworks display in Columbia as usual, but it’s beginning to look like the rain won’t clear up until late today. If it clears up by 6, we’ll go. Otherwise, we’ll watch a library DVD.

Water Buffalo

There are a few other things going on. Yesterday, I survived my first “big guhana” ride of the season (barely). I’m having a much harder time getting into shape for a bike tour than I had last year. We’re looking into the ports we will visit on our Alaska cruise. So far as we can see, we don’t need to take the expensive cruise tours of the ports. We can walk from the ship to points of interest in most ports. In others, we can get there through a tourist shuttle bus or plublic transit.

Critter

Our neighborhood has a web site run by one of the residents. He’s getting tired of doing the work, and the site is tied into his personal Email, so he doesn’t want to share the password. The technology is cheap, but not very flexible. There is no good way to permit multiple people to update the web site. I did a survey and found 3 companies that do web sites for community associations. I also found that Word Press has made tremendous improvements over the last 2 years and is fully capable of being used as a first-class web site. I built up a demonstration Word Press site on my laptop in an afternoon that has all the features we want. We had a meeting of our technology committee and decided to use one of the companies. It would have been great fun to put a Word Press site together. But it will be less work for me. As usual, it’s hard to get everybody together. We’re hoping to get demos from the 3 companies soon, make a choice, and move forward. We queried the board, and each member expressed support for the cost before we made a formal proposal. This is quite unusual, and shows strong support from the board.

Llama

Emu and chicks

Long Horns

Bryon

I hope this finds everybody doing well.