I set up a pool signup with Sign Up Genius for the board to review. I spent three days beating my head against the computer because Sign Up Genius doesn’t work the way I wanted it to work. Plus their documentation is terrible. It gives you examples of what to do, but doesn’t talk about what options actually do, how they work, or why. They have setup options that are not explained anywhere in their documentation. They don’t appear to do anything. Yet making a selection from the provided options is mandatory. Once I got over those hurdles, the rest was fairly straightforward.

We tried a WebX presentation of a “Conversation with General U. S. Grant”. That was pretty bad. The presenter kept on losing his connection. The moderator was simultaneously holding a staff meeting and had a baby somewhere nearby and sometimes forgot to mute her mic. We’re going to try a web concert this evening. I usually attend our condo board meeting via Zoom, but they had a conflict and moved it to our weekly party night. Sorry condo, you’re not ever going to supersede party night.

There’s not a lot else for this week. I hope you-all are doing well.

Times are so exciting … where do I start? Our washable face masks came in! Woo-hoo! The state opened up routine dental visits this week. Our normal 6 month appointments were this week. My 8:30 appointment was unchanged. Danita’s appointment was moved from 9:00 to 9:15, to reduce the number of people waiting in the lobby. Fortunately, she was able to re-arrange her schedule.

The forecast for this week was 7 straight days of rain. I told Danita that if the forecast held, we would have to go to the Silver Diner to get milkshakes. The forecast was entirely wrong. The weather was OK for outdoor activities every day except Friday. We were glad to be able to get outdoors. I missed the milkshakes. We decided to get Wegman’s muffins for Sunday breakfast. Their muffins are tasty and very large. It was an experience. We arrived at 7 just as the store was opening. There was a huge line of people waiting to get in, not quite 6 feet apart. We made it in the store before they reached their capacity limit. The muffins were good.

We talked with Pella about replacing the sliding doors going out to the deck. We’ll talk to Anderson this week. It appears our doors aren’t water damaged enough to be replaced by the condo association, and that they will not have to repair the ledger board holding our deck against the house. The final determination is months away. But getting permission to replace the doors through the architectural committee and three condos can take a while. We’re positioning ourselves to move forward when the time comes. We’re also considering other interior decoration changes. Danita is looking at having the ugly bush in our front yard removed and putting in some Tiger Lillies. (I’m told I’m using the wrong name, but that’s what I call them). That will require permission of the landscaping committee.

The big news is that the community is looking at what they will have to do to open the pool and gym when the time comes. Admission will be limited. There will likely be 1-hour or 2-hour timed slots. Given our population, using paper signups in the clubhouse is quite popular. But that involves touching pens and paper, and people gathering around the signup sheet. The board is looking at electronic signup. But that would require residents to give the community their Email address. I’m surprised at how many people don’t want to do this. I looked at some options and decided that if we use E-signup, SignupGenius is probably as good as any. I might set up a test system next week so the board can see what it’s like.

The drama at Riderwood continues unabated. Danita’s back hurts from the constant stress.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I’ve never before been the first to find a bug in Microsoft software. But I did it this week. Actually, it was the office manager that found the bug. She couldn’t open our Residents Database. I figured out what was not working. There was nothing on the boards. I reported it to the Microsoft community. They reported it to Microsoft. Microsoft reported a work-around. Woo-hoo! My name in lights. The bug involves a depreciated feature in Microsoft’s Access database called “Switchboard”. This was a way to show the user all the data entry and report options available. A user can click on the option they want and watch Access announce a “202” error. Before Microsoft could publish a work-around, I came up with my own solution. I got rid of the Switchboard and wrote a home page. But I very much appreciate the response from Microsoft. Access isn’t a popular product. It’s nice to know they’re still supporting it.

Our community uses a door security system to control the clubhouse doors. It’s like hotel doors that guests open with by touching a plastic card to the doorknob. It’s an old system. Parts are no longer available. I presented options. The board asked me to come back next month. This is rather frustrating, because it has been going on since January. I must admit, it’s harder to discuss these things with Zoom than it was when we were all in the same room.

Our condo had a significant Zoom meeting this week. As I have mentioned, there were several builder errors in our condo. The most significant was that some buildings had the flashing installed incorrectly and have significant water damage. There’s also less urgent issues, such as decks that can fall down and exterior stone veneer that’s falling off the walls. (I exaggerate, but not by a lot.) We won a lawsuit. The repair project was divided into seven phases. The board announced phase 2, where the seven units with the worst water damage will be rebuilt. There was a lot of interest in the meeting. The meeting itself had so many attendees that there wasn’t room on the screen to show everybody. Some residents had trouble starting Zoom on their computers, but Zoom itself never glitched.

The day before the meeting, our board president had her computer fail. I don’t know how old the computer is, but I know it was running Windows 7, so 10 years is a reasonable guess. She needed the computer for the Zoom meeting. I lent her my travel computer and downloaded the files she needed from her backup. She had to adapt to a small computer running Windows 10. She was up to the wee hours. The board meeting was a great success. The board seems to be taking a very logical and measured approach.

After the meeting, I was talking to our president and learned several things about my unit. A person the next building over replaced the doors onto his deck. The contractor examined his flashing while installing the new doors and determined it was installed correctly. As part of phase 2, our engineering company is developing a testing methodology that will let us know whether there is internal water damage without taking the walls down. Every unit will be tested. The expectation is that there is no significant damage to my unit. That is consistent with what I observe.

Our neighbors the Jones had two separate “emergencies”. A light was flashing on and off. I replaced the light switch for them. Their laptop camera stopped working. (That means there’s no Zoom video.) It took me half an hour to convince her the camera doesn’t work, even though it worked last week.

Bud is not doing well. Danita finds this to be very upsetting, especially since she can’t go on campus and visit him.

So, all in all, it was an action packed week for me, not an easy week for Danita. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

It was a quiet week for me. Not so much for Danita. Her dad lost his pill container and created a pretty big stink. Riderwood has doctors that hold office hours on site, but Bud’s insurance doesn’t cover the service because they are “out of network”. Bud decided he would visit the Riderwood doctors to get his pills. Fortunately, when he got to the medical suite there were no doctors there. That’s a good thing. A cardiologist visit and a couple of prescriptions runs into some serious money when they are not insured. Then he went down the hall to his buddy and asked his buddy to give him a ride to a cardiologist. The buddy was pretty upset because residents are supposed to stay in their rooms to avoid spreading COVID.

Our virtual concert was quite nice. The concert was at 5:30, so we took a pizza downstairs and ate while we listened. The pianist was excellent and we enjoyed his selections. The video was funny. There were three cameras. One of them was a close-up on the keyboard. When the music was slow, I could clearly see the fingers creating the notes. When the music was fast, the fingers were indistinct. Finger motion was behind the music. Sometimes fingers jumped or became somewhat translucent and blurry.

Danita made us a treat for Cynco de Myao. We had chicken mole and Mexican brownies. They were mmmm – mmmm good. Then we watched The Mask of Zorro. I think we should celebrate Cynco de Myao several times a year. We get mole left overs for dinner tonight.

Our neighborhood office manager was having problems with our resident database. I wondered over to the clubhouse this morning to look at it. I found a way to work around the problem, but I haven’t found a solution. I am able to reproduce the problem on my computer. There’s nothing in the boards. I think I found a Windows bug. It’s not entirely unbelievable. This bug involves a little-used feature in Microsoft Access Database. It’s triggered only when opening the database in one specific sequence. I wrote my first ever query to the Microsoft support site. It’s the most interesting bug I’ve seen in at least 5 years. Woo-hoo.

The last piece of news is that Danita got a new computer. Hers is getting on the old side. The warranty on both of our computers is expiring. She relies on her computer a lot, especially during Covid. My computer is a little older than hers, but I have my Surface Go travel computer, so I can safely run my computer until I get a serious case of computer envy, or the computer breaks. The computer came in much earlier than we expected. It wasn’t scheduled to arrive until June 1. I was able to get her computer up and running in less than a day. So far, we haven’t found any missing files or programs.

Dinner’s almost ready. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

What a silly idea I had. That I could ever fly a drone. Even if it’s stabilized with a 3-axis gyro. Even if it’s stabilized with GPS. Flying outside or in the garage. It makes no difference. I can fly it for a while, then it gets away from me. If I do the least little thing wrong, I correct the wrong way and off it goes, into the tree, or the bike rack, or just off into the wilderness. At the moment, it has banged up propellers. Again. I have spare propellers. And I’m pretty good a replacing them. This time I’m leaving them bent-up. Bleh!

For our Sunday order-out breakfast, Danita and I decided we would like a Mexican breakfast. Maybe an omelet with chorizo sausage. There’s a Mexican restaurant in our area that does this. We waited until they were open and gave them a call. No answer for 10 rings. Rats. We ended up with Panera bagels. Very nice bagels. No chorizo.

The day wasn’t all bad. Instead of heavy rain, T-storms, and flooding we got 75 degrees and clouds. I have been hearing a scraping sound when riding my bike. Just sometimes. Bikes aren’t supposed to make scraping sounds. I put the bike on the stand. I found a possible source, hypothesized a solution, and got out the wrenches. A short test rid confirms. The noise is gone.

Have you heard about oximeters? Those are the little gizmos the doctor puts on your finger. It tells you how oxygenated your blood is. It turns out they can actually be helpful. If you get Covid, the disease can start clogging up your lungs. Your oxygenation goes down. Your body adapts. You don’t notice. Until it goes way down. With a oximeter, you can have earlier detection of Covid, start treatment earlier, have a better outcome. Anyway, that’s theory. I’m usually the last to learn about these things. Danita and I were shocked to find that these little gadgets are still available. Ours is on order. We’ll see how it works. At least it’s easier than flying a drone.

I think I mentioned that we found face masks. The disposable masks are in. The reusable masks are on the way. Now the latest Covid shortage is cleaning supplies. I don’t mean just cleaning supplies that contain alcohol. Or supplies that contain bleach. I’m talking about all cleaning supplies. Liquid dishwasher soap? MIA. Spray stuff for the bathroom sink? Not to be found. I’m cutting back on bathroom cleaning to stretch out the supplies we have on hand. It’s a crazy, crazy world we’re in.

We’re looking forward to attending a concert at 5:30 today. And I will attend our community’s security committee meeting tomorrow. The internet is a wonderful place. But all this crazy Covid stuff won’t last forever. We should have a vaccine in 2021. Crazy, crazy world.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.