I should tell you about bike rides and the lawyer and my cardiologist appointment and the neighborhood Octoberfest party and the clubhouse WiFi I’m trying to fix. But all that is old hat, ancient history, and quite boring next to what is happening starting tomorrow. This is Grandkids weekend! And it’s also community meetings weekend. Tomorrow morning, I will participate in a security review of our office computers. The meeting should be over about Noon. Danita and I will jump i the car an drive to Staunton, VA. We have a hotel room, we’ve picked out our dinner restaurant, and we have tickets to a play (“The Willard Suitcases”). Friday we’ll jump out of bed and drive to Monroe to be with the grandkids this weekend. We’ll leave Monroe after dinner Sunday and drive to Tuggles Gap in Virginia, stay overnight, then drive home. When we get home, I have a community meeting with a vendor that wants to sell us *something*. I’m not even sure what the something is, but I’m told it’s important.

We’re expecting a very rainy ride to Staunton, but the rest of the weekend should be beautiful weather. We’re hyped for fun!

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

It’s been one of those weekends that just turned out differently than we thought. It’s too unimportant and boring to go into all the details, and everything turned out fine. But it was just not … what … we … expected. Still, it was a good weekend and lots of good things happened. The best was that we’ve started planning a birthday party for Mom. We’ll have the party in West Palm Beach on the first weekend in April. So far, planning is a lot of fun and everything is going very well. Of course, that’s to be expected when you get the “3 Ds” on your Dream Team — Dani, Danita, and Dennis.

One of the weekend highlights came to pass. We had a neighborhood “Country and Blues” concert last night. The band has been here a couple of times before. They put on a good concert. In the past, they’ve been here in the summer when we have the deck available. This time it was way too cool to use the deck, so we were all inside. Attendance wasn’t that large, so there was enough room for everybody. But they had 5 musicians with speakers and amplifiers. It was a little loud for the venu. The concert included crackers, cheese, beer and wine, plus deserts at the break. There was way too much food. It was a good time.

I was hoping for a bike ride Sunday, but the weather forecast changed to an all-day rain, which put that out of the question. I managed to get an unexpected ride in Saturday. I might have overdone it a little. This morning, I started feeling some discomfort in one of my biking muscles. A ride would have been out of the question even without the rain. Tomorrow will be nice. Maybe I’ll try an easy ride. We’ll see how I feel.

I had several proposals for our neighborhood board. I suggested we replace a WiFi access point that needs to be reset way too often. That was accepted. For some reason, the new unit isn’t in yet. I’ll be following up on that. The installation will be a little involved because the configuration has to be done on the office computer, and it will take some time for me to remember exactly what I’m supposed to do. My second proposal was that we do a security review. Not only are ransomware attacks becoming more likely, hackers are starting to attack online backups. We also have some other security concerns we’ll be discussing. A neighbor agreed to contact an expert and set up the review. That should be an interesting exercise. The third proposal was a “computer assistance” offer for residents. Getting board approval is essential because board-sanctioned activities put me under the board’s liability insurance. That was also approved, but no residents have requested assistance. While I’m waiting around, I thought it would be fun to put together a little database application to generate invoices and track activity. Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten more than I realized. My first attempt crashed and burned. I’ll be starting a second attempt this week.

We have so many activities next week that we actually have a conflict. Both our church and our neighborhood have Octoberfest dinners next Saturday (the 26th). Normally we would serve food for the church dinner, but we didn’t want to miss the neighborhood dinner. We decided to help set up at the church dinner, then come home to eat at the neighborhood dinner. They say idle hands are the devil’s workshop. The devil isn’t getting much of an opportunity for us right now.

That’s the news for this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Danita and I are excited and pleased to hear that Mark and Jiajia are engaged. We wish them the best and look forward to the wedding.

We only had one party this weekend. It was the last Chill ‘n Grill for the season. (AKA hamburgers and hotdogs on the grill). After dinner we had a trivia game. It was a little slow. It took 90 minutes to get through 20 questions. But it was fun. One of the men at our table put his phone is “answer a question” mode and held it out so it could provide the answer as a joke. The phone heard and understood the question, and provided the answer. He made a big show of trying to muffle the phone, but he didn’t do the most obvious thing of turning it off. This guy is super competitive. Was it a joke or was he putting on a show so he wasn’t accused of cheating? I don’t know for sure, but I did her the phone give the correct answer. It didn’t make any difference. Our table wasn’t going to win in any event.

Saturday morning we had already completed all of our weekend entertainment. So we decided to go to hear the Columbia Symphony Orchestra perform their “Russian Dreams” concert. The first piece was contemporary classical, which I generally don’t like. But last night I was pleasantly surprised. Sofia Gubaidulina’s “Concerto for Orchestra and Jazz Band ” was definitely very contemporary, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. This afternoon we’re going to the community college to see a play titled ” Mr. Burns”.

We don’t have much other news this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

If you want to come to our house, Feb 19 – March 18, you are welcome to do so. But you will have to eat out, because we won’t be here to cook. (Not that I do a lot of the cooking.) We’re flying down to visit Mom, then driving to Ft. Lauderdale to take a cruise through the Panama Canal. The cruise line will drop us off in San Diego. From there, we’ll take Amtrak to Oxnard, CA. Then rent a car and spend several days driving up the coastal highway to San Francisco. We’ll spend a few days in San Francisco, then fly home.

The cruise doesn’t take any planning, but the rest of the vacation does, and we’ve had a lot of fun planning it. We have the coastal drive mapped out. Obviously there will be hikes, views, and coastal towns, but there’s also much more. We’ll spend a night in Old Town San Diego. To maintain its authenticity, the hotel doesn’t have any TVs. That’s not a problem because we’ll walk down the street and see a production of La Cage aux Folles at the Cygnet Theatre. The next day we’ll take a train to Oxnard, CA to get through the LA traffic, then rent a car. We’ll be stopping at the Hearst Castle and spending a night at the Hearst Hacienda. And of course we will visit the fabulous aquarium in Monterey. It promises to be an amazing drive.

Otherwise, life here is more mundane but still plenty of fun. We had a condo party Friday at a local German restaurant. (Great party, mediocre food.) Last night we accepted an invitation to the neighborhood volunteer dinner, which was another great evening. (I volunteer to run the neighborhood web site.)

I hope this finds everybody doing well.