There are no pics this week.

You might have heard we had quite a rain early this week. We weren’t affected very much. Danita went through some heavy traffic. We never lost power and we weren’t flooded. I was able to ride the day after the rain stopped. Of course, I stayed away from River Road and other low-lying areas.

An ingrown toenail has been bothering me for over a year. I finally went to the podiatrist Thursday and got it clipped. He claims to have a magic substance that keeps the nail from growing back, so it shouldn’t bother me again. So far, it’s healing very nicely. The doc said I could ride Friday, but it was cold and windy, so I used my “medical condition” as an excuse to stay home. The low last night was near 20.I plan to go out tomorrow, when the high will be 60. That’s an improvement of 40 degrees in about 30 hours. Unfortunately, it won’t last long. It promises to stay warm for several days, then drop below freezing for at least a week. We might even get a little more snow.

I finished my website training class today. I had two participants. The woman passed. The man is pending getting his homework done. The guy is behind. Why am I not surprised? I have one more session starting Thursday, March 3. This session will also have one man and one woman. Will history repeat itself?

We only have two special activities this week. We went to a jazz concert at UMBC last night. Tomorrow we have a neighborhood party.

I get a general interest magazine from my professional society, IEEE. They had a particularly good magazine this month. There are three articles some of you may be interested in looking up. All three are written for laymen. All three discuss points that have not been discussed in the general press. Here are some links, if you are interested …

If you are interested in cars that drive themselves, you may be interested in this:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/advanced-cars/selfdriving-cars-will-be-ready-before-our-laws-are

If all-electric cars are your thing, here’s something you should know:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/advanced-cars/a-tesla-in-every-garage-not-so-fast

Last but best of all, if you think computers might get smart, check this out. Or if you aren’t interested in Artificial Intelligence, you will probably at least enjoy the beginning of the article, about beer reviews.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-neural-network-that-remembers

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are a couple of pics this week.

Our big news is the trip to Acorn. Kathryn got a grant to take a trip from Eastwind to help Acorn with their butchering. Acorn is an intentional community and is not far from Charlotsville, VA. So we went down to visit. It was both a lot of fun and quite an adventure.

Ever Popular Tulip Poplar Log

Saturday morning, I went out to enter points in the GPS, and the car didn’t start. I charged the battery and Danita drove the car to the dealer to have them check it out. I gave Danita a ride back home and went off to teach my web posting class. We were having lunch when the dealer called and said the car is OK. We are puzzled as to why the battery discharged overnight, but so far, the car is fine. We left a half hour later than planned, picked Mark up, and ran into agonizingly bad traffic in DC. We arrived so late we decided to go to dinner before checking into the hotel. It’s a good thing we were delayed, because Kathryn was just finishing her work for the day when we arrived.

Waterfall with ‘Not Potable’ sign, making this a Foul Water Fall

When we finally got to our hotel, there were two Scrabble games. Danita and Kathryn teamed up on Mark. After two games, they were exactly tied. Sunday we decided to walk the 2 mile Saunders-Monticello Trail. It’s an easy trail, and we enjoyed walking the two miles. About the time we turned around and walk back, it started raining. It stopped raining shortly after we got back to the hotel. Fortunately, we had time to grab a shower and a change of clothes before we had to check out. We spent some time hanging at the hotel, then we took Kathryn back to Acorn and drove home through some more agonizingly slow traffic.

At the second-best Peace and Meditation Bench

We had an excellent food this weekend. Everybody had a different dinner Saturday, and everybody enjoyed their food immensely. Our hotel offered a very nice free breakfast, with donuts, bagels, eggs, bacon, and more. For lunch, we went to a diner and had  club sandwiches. The chips were mediocre, but the sandwiches were sublime.

And that’s the end of this week’s story. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Thomas

When Jul was a senior at Parkville HS, we had Daniella Vilche from Chile live with us. Daniella just had a baby boy, Thomas. I pulled this picture from Daniella’s Facebook page.

We did it. We went to a restaurant on Valentine’s day. Right after Church we went to Mimi’s for breakfast. We should have known they wouldn’t accept the coupon. Fortunately, we were early enough that the place wasn’t crowded. We were able to sit and enjoy an extra cup of coffee. There were still plenty of empty tables when we left.

We haven’t eaten at home much this week. Thursday was dinner out night at “On the Border”. Friday was a Chinese New Year party at the clubhouse. Saturday we went to the Bauman’s for a Circle dinner. Today we’ll have dinner at home because we have to. We’re going to a BSO concert this afternoon. Then we have a Jazz Band concert at the clubhouse this evening. We just have time to come home and have a bite to eat between the two.

I’ve started a new training session for a couple of people who volunteered to post on our web site. One of the trainees, Charlie, said his wife ordered Chinese take-out for dinner Saturday. He would have preferred to spend $10 at the clubhouse rather than $22 for the carry-out. Plus, he and his wife would have had neighbors to eat with. I kind of agree with Charlie.

We’ve had a spate of cold weather. I was out riding last week in 25 degree weather because that was a respite of warm temperatures before the coming cold. The low last night was 8. It’s coming up on lunch time, and it’s still not up to 20 yet. Tomorrow we’re due for some precipitation and some warmer air. This is where it gets a little dicey. One forecast has snow Monday, with temperatures getting above freezing about midnight and the precip turning to rain Tuesday. The trick in the forecast is exactly when the temperature will get above freezing. If the cold weather takes hold, we could be in for a very sloppy week. At least the cold temps are good for insect control.

Fortunately, even pessimistic forecasts say we’ll be all cleared up by the end of the week. That’s a good thing for us, because Ryn is at the Acorn Community Farm in Virginia this week, helping them process their meat. We plan to pick Mark up, then drive down to Charlottesville. We’ll link up with Ryn for dinner Saturday and have a day of family fun Sunday.

I got the new website security system installed Saturday morning. I had a couple of little glitches, but it went pretty much as planned. I had written to all our website posters to let them know what changes to expect. Primarily, instead of seeing only the pages they could edit, they would see all 83 pages. They would have to do a search or scroll through the page list to get to the pages they can edit. Two of them wrote back and said they couldn’t find their pages. Sigh.

Well, I would write more, but there’s not much more to say. And we do have to get ready for the BSO. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pics this week.

We had decent weather this week. The roads were clear, and I was on them. That’s not to say the rides were uneventful.

I checked the forecast early Monday morning and saw rain would start about 1. I planned to leave about 10 for a 2-hour hill loop. I checked the weather again close to 10, and saw the rain had been delayed an hour. I decided to start my normal 4-hour Monday ride, with a weather update at a McDonald’s about half way out. When I stopped at the McDonald’s, the rain had been delayed another hour, so I went on to my normal Monday destination in Glenarm. I looked at the weather while eating lunch. Rain was forecasted to start about 6, and certainly no earlier than 4. That’s how I knew the stuff I ended up riding home in wasn’t rain.

Tuesday was a much nicer day — a little cooler, but sunny. It was a perfect day for my normal Tuesday 4-hour hill loop. Unfortunately, I got a flat. It was caused by one of those little glass shards that are the byproduct of all those fender-benders occurring when roads are snowy. I considered myself lucky for two reasons. First, I got the flat just as I was pulling into my lunch place. They have a wonderfully large and sunny parking lot with plenty of out-of-the-way space for flat fixing. Plus, as a bonus, I didn’t get the flat Monday in the middle of heavy showers.

Another reason I was lucky Tuesday was because my bike pump almost stopped working. Air was leaking out of the top of the pump. But if I angled the pump a different way, the air didn’t leak and I could inflate the tire. So I got my flat fixed, plus I got a new pump within two days. Thank-you, Amazon. Bike rides for the rest of the week were blissfully boring.

I have been working for many weeks on software for our website directory. I settled on a program called Ultimate Member. I’ve been working on it in a test website on my laptop. I finished working on Ultimate Member, and did a test install on our production website. Our production website has separate pages for each of our 6 condo boards. It uses a security program called “UAM” to prevent somebody in one condo from accidentally changing information for another condo. That’s when I saw that Ultimate Member conflicts with UAM, allowing anybody to change information anywhere on the website. I either had to change the directory software or the security program. I turned to a different security program called “AAM”. UAM is much easier to configure, but ease of configuration doesn’t count for much if the security doesn’t work.

I installed AAM and spent several tedious hours configuring it for our website. That’s when I realized I did it wrong. So I spent several more tedious hours un-configuring it, so I could spend still more tedious hours configuring it correctly. Fortunately, everything looks good. I moved my biggest ally over to AAM to make sure everything works as expected. If everything looks good, I’ll move the rest of our folks over to AAM in the next week or so.

Well, retirement isn’t all work you know. Sometimes retired folks get to have fun. We went to a modern dance performance at UMBC last night. It was interesting and quite different than what we normally do. We’ll be watching the game tonight (and also the ads). We have a neighborhood Superbowl party every year, but we can’t really show video to a large audience. I like to actually watch, so Danita and I have our own private Superbowl party. We’ll be rooting for the Panthers, in solidarity with Jul & Pat.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.