There are no pics this week.

The big news this week, as most of you already know, is Rick’s passing. It wasn’t really a surprise. Rick has been in very poor health for quite a while. His passing is a blessing in some ways.

It has taken a lot of phone calls and Emails, but everything seems to be settled. The funeral will be in West Palm Beach on July 2. Mom, Dani, and I are very glad that we were able to visit Rick so recently.

I won’t write more because this has consumed our attention for the last couple of days, and I don’t have a lot more to say about it.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are pics this week.

The last retirement balloon’s last hurrah

Before I get into our news, I have to announce the demise of Danita’s last balloon. Danita got a bouquet of balloons at her UMBC retirement party. The last balloon was dragging on the floor. Danita cut the ribbon last Saturday to let it have one last day or so on the ceiling. The balloon managed to drift over to our ceiling fan, where it got pushed into a continuous circle. I thought that was cool. We decided to leave the ceiling fan on continuously and see how long the balloon would travel in circles. It fell to the floor last night, which is an impressively long last hurrah. RIP, celebratory balloon!

Sctatch Kitchen Dinner

It  was another week of family activities.Tuesday afternoon Danita took Bud to the doctor to have some minor surgery done on his hand. He was unable to straighten one of his fingers. The doctors removed some material from one of his knuckle joints. The surgery must have gone pretty well, because Bud joined us for Ed’s birthday party that evening. It was a Schmaus family dinner at Gertrudes Restaurant, located at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Gertrudes has a fixed price dinner on Tuesdays. Unlike most fixed price dinners, they have a dozen choices. Their food is always excellent. I’m sure that if we lived closer to the BMA, we would be eating there regularly.

Morning walk ended at the Dothan Walmart, with a few things to cheer Rick up …

Back at home, we moved our dinner out night to Wednesday. Danita wanted to do something a little special and suggested we go to Bare Bones. Bare Bones is a favorite of ours because of their great ribs and many other good dishes. But their unique feature is their onion loaf, which is a big pile of onion rings formed into a loaf. We usually order the half loaf, which is far more onion rings than we need, but it’s very good and a lot of fun. Unfortunately, they stopped serving their half loaf. A full loaf was way too much to contemplate ordering. So our special night turned into a bit of a disappointment. But the rest of the dinner was still good.

… and a new sun hat

Danita wanted to have a nice dinner Wednesday because of the other big family activity. Dani and Gayle flew down to visit Mom Wednesday. Thursday, Dani Mom and I all converged in Atlanta. We drove to Dothan Alabama Thursday afternoon. That let us drive down to visit Rick in Graceville, Florida Friday morning. Then it was drive back to Atlanta Friday afternoon. Dani and Mom went back to West Palm Beach while I went back to Maryland.

Dani, Rick, Mom

Amazingly, all the transportation worked out perfectly. I arrived in Atlanta first, picked up a rental car, and went to the cell phone lot. 45 minutes after Dani and Mom’s plane landed, I hadn’t heard from them. I decided they might be having some undefined cell phone problem and decided to take a swing by the terminal to see if they were on the sidewalk waiting for me. Just as I got to door 6, they called me and announced they were at door 5. I was able to pull over and pick them up immediately. It turns out Mom decided to walk through the Atlanta airport instead of taking their passenger train. Way to go, Mom!

Rick’s dog won’t be able to travel to the nursing home

Our hotel in Dothan was a winner, with nice rooms, friendly staff, and a good breakfast. But the dinner was unexpectedly good. We found a restaurant just up the road called Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen. The food was amazing. We weren’t able to eat it all.

We had more or less 4 hours of driving each way. But we had no serious misadventures and encountered no heavy traffic. We went through an incredible cold front coming back to Atlanta. The outdoor temperature went from 102 to 73. Unsurprisingly, it was accompanied by a very heavy rainfall. But there was no lightening. The rain was brief enough that we didn’t have an opportunity to take an exit off the interstate to wait out the rest of the storm. Our only misadventure was that somebody keyed the rental car. Car inspection was not on the agenda for the somewhat harried agent that checked me in, so I decided to focus on getting through airport security. We’ll see if I get a phone call from Dollar Rent-a-Car.

Another pic near Walmart

Rick is not doing well. A couple of days before we went down, he was taken to the hospital. We weren’t sure where we would meet him. As it turns out, they took him back to his apartment. His stay there will be brief. He is moving to a nursing home Sunday. He elected to move to a nursing home near Rick, Jr.

Today I’m back in Maryland. I assume Dani and Mom are back in West Palm beach. (There were some flight delays due to weather.)

Tonight is Circle. Our Marriage Encounter Circle has morphed into a monthly dinner club. The Bertches are having serious health issues. Mike is not doing well, Rose has her own health issues, and taking care of Mike is becoming quite an issue for her. They weren’t up to traveling to circle last month or this month. So we’re taking everything needed for dinner, down to the paper plates, and meeting at the Bertches.

Dani and Mom having dinner at the Atlanta airport

That’s a lot of news for one week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pics this week.

We had the usual array of neighborhood parties and activities. And we did some unusual stuff.

Danita and I got so good at going to DC to get a Russian Visa, we decided to use our new-found skills to visit an exhibition at the National Geographic Museum. This museum is one metro stop before the one we used to get to the Russian Visa place. The exhibit is called “The Greeks”. It covered Greece from pre-history to Alexander the Great. They had an entire floor filled with artifacts, plus story-telling sign boards and videos. It was quite interesting. We had to buy timed admission tickets. We decided to get breakfast in DC and be at the museum at 10. We allowed for the slowest trip we had into DC, plus a little extra because we would be driving in the morning DC rush. We ended up with a little less traffic than we anticipated, plus the fastest trip into DC, so we had plenty of time for breakfast.We spent over 2 hours in the exhibit. When we got out, I was hungry so we also had lunch in DC. Adding up the costs of the trip — parking, Metro fare, breakfast, lunch, and tickets — the cost of the tickets was a minor part of the cost of the trip. I remembered my camera, but they didn’t allow any photography, so there’s no pics of what we saw.

My other big adventure this week was our walk-in shower. It turns out that when a walk-in showers start dripping, it makes a lot of noise. In addition, this drip was quickly getting worse. In the old days, one would turn the water off, replace a rubber washer, and that was it. Total cost: less than a buck. Now days we have fancy plumbing. Instead of a rubber washer, one installs a new cartridge, which costs about $85. I found a half-price cartridge at Lowe’s, but in place of “Delta”, there was a curiously Chinese-sounding name. I decided to spend the extra in the hopes this would be a life-time repair. The next step is to figure out which cartridge I needed. That turned out to be impossible without taking the faucet apart. Taking the faucet apart requires shutting the water off for the house. We’ve become accustomed to having running water. So I would have to turn the water off, disassemble the faucet and extract the cartridge, procure a new cartridge, and reassemble everything — hopefully all in one morning. I was becoming very interested in understanding exactly what I would have to do.

I found that Delta had posted a You-Tube video. The guy spent a lot of time talking about “before 1993” and “F-Series” and “T-Series” and offered a bewildering list of Delta part numbers. After I recovered from that shock, I watched a few more times. The disassembly and reassembly looked very easy. I watched a few more times. That “plumber” is wearing brand new boots. I never saw a real plumber wearing brand new boots before.

Monday I screwed up my courage. Disassembly had only a few surprises. Then it was off to the plumbing supply store. This was my second trip to the plumbing supply store. I like these guys a lot. They have everything a plumbing supply store should have. A cool name (Schumacher & Seiler). A counter with stools. Plumbers talking with employees. A big room filled with more plumbing stuff than I ever knew existed. A back room where employees go to find what you’re looking for. And a very friendly attitude towards homeowners that have no idea what they’re doing. Sure enough, they had exactly what I wanted. And sure enough, when I got home, it all fit in the hole. I put it together, turned the water on, and twisted the knob. There was no water in the shower. Everything else worked, but not a drop came out of the shower head.

That certainly fixed the shower drip. but I figured Danita wouldn’t be happy with this solution. Fortunately, on my second attempt, I figured out what I had done wrong. And it turns out I didn’t break anything and didn’t need to call a plumber. I didn’t even have to buy a second $85 cartridge.

So it’s all good news for this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pics this week.

This week was book ended by family events. Monday was Memorial Day, which means the Parkton Cup. It’s a day of family, food, and croquet. Ed sets up 3 croquet courses. We had all three courses full for the first set and two more for the second. Winners of the first round play for the championship. For the first time ever, I was actually in the lead in my game. It didn’t last long. Maybe I’ll get into the finals next year.

Mark didn’t make it to the Parkton Cup this year because he is coaching students for the Physics Olympics. I’m not certain I have the details down. My impression is that he was coaching the mid-atlantic qualifiers.

Danita’s Uncle Bill died this week. He was 83. The funeral was yesterday. The service was at the old Polish parish in Highlandtown. Bud was with us. I dropped Danita and Bud off and went to park the car. When I came back to the church, I spent a few minutes out front with the Hartka men. It was a humid day. It felt good to stand outside for a few minutes. I knew it was time to go inside and find my wife when the men started talking about shoulder injuries, and which side of the casket they had to be on.

The drive to the graveyard started by driving through town. Running red lights is not something one gets to do ever day. Eventually we ended up on I-95. I knew where the graveyard is, and knew which exit the GPS recommended to get there. But the hearse wasn’t switching lanes to exit. What route were they taking? They did finally exit, but by then there was a very large and very noisy truck to my right, followed by a very aggressive pickup with a lawn mower in the bed. The result was that for quite a while, I couldn’t see the front of the funeral procession. Plus the GPS seemed to be going nuts. It literally turned the route into a sideways figure 8. Or was it an infinity symbol? Everything ended well, but for a while there the only thing I knew for sure was that a lot of cars were following me.

The lunch was at Bowman’s on Harford Rd. We’ve had so many funeral lunches at Bowman’s that I refer to their dining room as the “Hartka Room”. The food was good. The conversation was better.

Danita and I like to watch TV for a hour or two before going to bed. There’s not a lot of new programs on TV this time of year. This summer I selected movies from Amazon to stream. My criteria were they had to be free (with Prime membership) and have a rating of 7 or better on Rotten Tomatoes. I din’t pay any attention to whether I thought we would enjoy the movie. We’ve had some real duds. Twice we stopped the movie after watching 10 or 15 minutes. We’ve had a couple of movies that one of us liked and the other didn’t. We’ve had some good movies, And we’ve had one sleeper. If you haven’t seen “Temple Grandin”, you should get it. A lot of things have to come together to make a great movie — the story, the way the story is told, acting, photography, music, script … This movie does everything well. The story is presented in a well-balanced manner with excellent pacing. Some of the story telling elements are highly innovative. The acting us superb. This is a movie worth watching.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

PS: Yes, we did get our Russian visas. We were even lucky enough that it rained only when we were on the metro or in the car, and not while we were traipsing around DC or the Metro parking lot!