There are pics today.

At the Holiday Lights – Mark, Danita, Pat, Jul, Bryon, Liz

We (all six of us, Reeds and Eichenlaubs) started Tuesday with a trip to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum. Danita found a super-duper coupon that got us all in at half price. There were a huge number of amazing things to see, along with occasional surprises – an extra noise or a puff of air. Elizabeth got overloaded when she tried to climb through a tunnel, but otherwise it was a completely successful outing. That afternoon, Mark felt good enough to join us. We had some of Danita’s fabulous lasagna. We watched Kung Fu Panda 2 and did our gift exchange with Mark.

Trains in the park Greenhouse. (Click on this pic to see the greenhouse in the greenhouse.)

Wednesday the Reeds went to a children’s theater production of “Frog and Toad”. When they came back, we went to watch Kung Fu Panda 3. That’s when I learned that movie, which was promoted throughout the first two movies, will be released late in January. Amazon helped us save the day with Toy Story 3. In the evening, we went to a walk-through holiday lights exhibit at one of the county parks.

Moat Monster

We had all kinds of opportunities to play computer games in between adventures. Pat and I were talking about the old arcade games, which made me remember an old hand-held Frogger toy I got one year for Christmas. It still works, and it’s still fun to play. However, by Thursday all the adults were glad I didn’t find the game earlier. (The “splat” noise occurs frequently. It gets to be annoying after the first few thousand occurrences). All the games make noise. Frogger was just the most popular annoyance.

At the Train Garden (the kids are acting their age, again)

Wednesday was the “Second Christmas” celebration at Ed’s, with over 20 in attendance. But that wouldn’t be enough for us. We had planned to start the day by taking the kids to the theater to see “Good Dino”. This would give the Reed parents a couple of hours to go through the house, making sure all their stuff was packed up. Unfortunately, the movie flopped, and it couldn’t get even one screening when competing with Star Wars. “Alvin” was playing, but Danita really dislikes the chipmunks. So we went to the library and borrowed “Beethoven”, the old Disney classic about a St. Bernard dog. We took the kids over to our clubhouse theater for the screening. The movie was a great success.

For some reason, this model of the Baltimore Conservatory caught my eye. You can see the Bromo Seltzer tower on the left.

Our second adventure was a stop on the way to Ed’s house to see the Glen Ave firehouse train garden. Jul, Pat, and Mark chose to skip the train garden. We took the kids and left an hour earlier. There were few other people there, and we had a great time. They had a “Minecraft” area, where the kids tried to educate a hopelessly out-of-date older generation some of the fundamental “who’s who”. The Minion area was quite popular, in part because they had the Minion movie playing on an LCD panel representing an outdoor movie screen. To nobody’s surprise, Star Wars was back this year. They also had two building fires, a volcano, and much more.

Pat and Liz at Second Christmas

The Second Christmas at Ed’s was filled with people. Besides Bryon and Liz, there were 4 other children. Suzanne and Addie were there, and Toni’s sister brought her two kids. It took so long to do all the presents that we ended up taking an eating break in the middle. I think the star of the buffet was Danita’s 3-cheese macaroni casserole. Call me biased if you want. I noticed there wasn’t much left at the end of the evening. There was no way to get pictures of everybody. I’m just including a couple of shots.

Toni. In the background, you can see Toni’s parents. Bryon is on the far left with Suzanne and Addie looking on; Lynne is on the right.

Mark went home last night. The Reeds left about 5 AM this morning, Christmas is over. But the holidays aren’t. There’s plenty more to come …

There are plenty of pics this week.

Happy Meatballs

Christmas starts with preparation, and Danita is an expert at that. Here you see her making her special happy meatballs (which we will be eating tonight, as a matter of fact.) We’re enjoying a whole range of special foods for the holidays — ham, snacks, sweets. It’s a great part of the holidays. Christmas day was quiet for us. We went to Ed & Lynne’s for dinner. Bud was also there. It was just the five of us.

Opening Presents

The Reeds arrived yesterday. It didn’t take long to get around to opening presents. We finished the day off with “Kung Fu Panda”. That plus the drive up was plenty for the Reed kids on one day.

At the art museum

Sunday we played the parachute game. Then we played the Nerf gun game. Our special event was a visit to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where the kids made art inspired by the miniature rooms on display. After our happy meatball dinner, Jul and Pat will go off to visit Maribeth, while the kids stay home and watch Kung Fu Panda II.

Of course, some experiences are just better told in pictures than words. So here’s a bunch of extra pictures for your general entertainment.

Chocolate Toffee Muffins

More Presents

Checking out the Recepies

Jul

Danita’s Retirement Count-down Chain

The Parachute Game

The Nerf Gun Dance

Nerf Gun – Finer Points

There is one pic today.

Godiva Chocolates

Danita had a couple of nice things happen to her. She’s been at UMBC 15 years. That entitles her to go the awards ceremony, eat a free lunch, and get her 15-year gift. In addition to all that, she also won one of the door prizes — a large box of Godiva chocolates. We never buy Godiva chocolates because they are way too expensive. But if one gets a basket of them for free, they taste really good.

News of Danita’s retirement is still limited. It worked its way up to the VP of Research. (Danita’s boss’s boss.) Danita saw him while she was on campus. He was very supportive — much more than just “Congradulations”. He gave her a hug, told her she deserved this, thanked her for waiting until UMBC had the contract renewals, etc. There will be a meeting of the powers that be on Tuesday to start developing a plan to replace Danita. UMBC is closed 12/24 – 1/3. Most of the people in the office are taking vacation next week. The next time the entire office will be together will be 1/5. Danita will announce her retirement to the staff then. That will make her retirement public knowledge. And that will be a big relief to Danita.

Buried in the bowels of our new website is a “contact us” page that has an address for the webmaster. Those Emails go to me. There’s not exactly a lot of traffic. I’ve received less than half a dozen Emails in all so far. I got one of the strangest Emails ever on that address this week. Somebody claimed that truckers were entering our neighborhood before the gate closed and sleeping in their trucks overnight. Personally, I find this to be very unlikely. Our gate closes at 8. I doubt that truckers want to quit that early, especially as there is no place to shower. The closest restaurant is about 3/4 mile away. I don’t think many truckers would want to walk that far for dinner. (Remember, the gate will be locked when they get back from dinner.) And all our streets are just wide enough for traffic. There’s no place where a rig can park. I decided this had very little to do with our website and forwarded this urgent warning to our president.

We had strange event happened this week. One of our residents had a visitor from a family member the other evening. The visitor is on the “Frequent Visitors” list so the guard let her in. The resident didn’t open the door. The visitor became concerned that the resident might be in diabetic shock. She found the condo president. He called the police. The police came and said the fire department breaks down doors. They called the fire department. About the time the fire truck got to our gate, the resident finally woke up. She had slept through doorbell ringing, door pounding, numerous sirens, and flashing lights. Fortunately, she woke up about 2 minutes before the fire department broke through her front door. We have a list of emergency contacts. It’s on the computer (of course). One of the things the condo president did was call our Office Manager at home and had her walk him through how to get to this list. The resident had not provided any emergency contact information.

I went to a SOCA board workshop to discuss whether residents should log into our web site. And discussed, and discussed. 2 1/2 hours later, they said they would take a vote at the January meeting. A couple of days later, the president sent a very long and detailed Email which mostly asked the same questions we discussed at the meeting. I answered, providing the same answers I had already provided in the meeting. Then there was a whole round of questions and answers, with no new information. We’ll see how the vote goes next year. One of the things the proposal will do is make the emergency contacts available to the SOCA board members any time, just by logging into our web site.

I like toilets. They are one of the great conveniences of our lives. Until they don’t work. One of our toilets started leaking about a year ago. I put in an all-so-cool dual flush flusher. (Small flushes for #1, large flushes for #2.) Except it never worked right and I had to hold the flusher in for 2 seconds on a #1 flush. We joked about this at Men’s Club and came up with a bunch of remedies. My favorite was a page of instructions and warnings on the bathroom wall, with a second page in Spanish. This week the new dual-flusher stopped working. I decided to go back to a standard flusher. But that meant I had to replace everything down to the flush handle. I had the water tank disassembled from the toilet with rags, parts, and tools all over the floor. But it’s finally done. And it’s not leaking. Maybe this time it will last longer than a year.

We’re just about ready for Christmas. All we need is people — and maybe some toy parachutes for the kids to throw off the balcony. Ed and Lynne are having a Christmas party on the 25th and a second Christmas party on the 30th. We’re looking forward to having Mark and the Reeds stay with us several days of Christmas week.

Amazon offered me a bonus code to buy Kung Fu Panda for free. We would be able to stream it over the internet whenever we want. It’s just in time for Christmas, so I jumped right on the deal. Only the code didn’t work. I called Amazon and the offered me a $15 credit against my next Amazon purchase. That’s enough to buy 2 movies, and it’s a very nice gesture. But now I don’t know what I want to do with my credit. I started out with a free movie for the grandkids and ended up with way too many choices. We have so many first world problems …

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pics this week.

We are having unbelievably warm weather. The high today was 70. It’s more than 20 degrees warmer than usual. This isn’t a one-day fluke. We’re in the middle of a solid week of this. I’m riding my bike in shorts and with no jacket. In mid-December. Remarkable.

I’m not doing anything “special” this week. After all, I pretty much do whatever I want every day of the year. Houlihan’s offered me a free entree. So we went to Houlihan’s for our Thursday dinner out night, and I got free meatloaf. They put a lot of food on the plate. I always bring enough meatloaf home for a nice sandwich. It’s still in the fridge, patiently waiting for me.

Danita told both of her bosses she is retiring April 1. They’re trying to figure out what to do. This is the first time in many years that Danita hasn’t given them the answer. We also visited our financial guy. Danita’s UMBC savings plan is with TIAA-CREF. They offer free financial advice. Our guy is pretty good. Basically, we’re not likely to have financial troubles in retirement.

Friday we had a neighborhood party. Today Danita made sweet Italian sausage sandwiches for lunch. Then we went to hear a Christmas concert given by the Army’s Jazz Ambassador band. I’m not sure exactly what’s for dinner, but Danita’s cooking. I saw garlic and onions. What more does one need to know?

I’m looking forward to presenting a proposal to give everybody in our neighborhood the ability to sign into our web site. If we do that, we can have a neighborhood directory, and allow board members to search our resident data, and replace our silly pool book, and manage weekly and monthly Emails from our website. The demo is working. I don’t want to break it by changing things. So I decided to write a program that pulls data from our existing database. That will let us automatically populate the database in our website. It was a fun little project.

That’s it for this week. Dinner should be ready soon. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pics today.

We had a wine and snack party last night. Danita has two research groups and hence two bosses. She told one of her bosses that she will retire April 1. Retirement is a big deal for her because she worked at UMBC so long and because she has so much of herself invested in her job. She came home all worked up. So we had pizza for dinner and then drank a bottle of red wine and ate nuts while watching TV. She plans to tell her other boss Tuesday. We won’t be having a wine night Tuesday because that’s Yoga night. As good as we are at drinking wine, we can’t do it while doing “Downward Dog”.

After several days of rain, the weather turned nice. I enjoyed good rides Thursday and Friday. But the best day was today. Danita wasn’t sleeping. So when I got up at 5, Danita got up also. We went to IHOP for breakfast. We used our coupon for free pancakes and split an omelet. After breakfast we went to Toys R Us and bought our Toys for Tots. Then we went to Target and got a boy’s sweater for our church’s Advent Giving Tree.

I got a nice long ride in after that. When I got to Glenwood (my destination), I found long lines of cars, police out, shuttle busses running people back and forth to auxiliary parking — in short, a total mess. The place I usually buy lunch had long lines. I didn’t even try the other two restaurants nearby. Instead, I went to the library and got a pack of chips from their vending machine. But while there were long lines of traffic in the parking lot and while I had to wait my turn like everybody else, drivers were mostly calm and always at least sane. It was a very nice ride. It was a great day, and dinner is still to come. Danita’s cooking, so I know it will be good.

We have a special chore next week. One of our neighbors, Jeff, is going to Denver for a few days. They ordered a bunch of stuff on the Internet. But they have no idea what they ordered or when it’s coming it. Our job is to bring any packages in so they don’t disappear. I asked if there was anything coming that I would enjoy playing with. Jeff said yes, if I enjoy playing with toys for grandkids. I said that’s my favorite kind.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.