There’s been a lot of activity on Endless Ocean Way this week. The new storm door is installed. The contractor did a great job, but I’m pretty sure they lost money on the deal. When they measured for the door size, they decided a 36″ door would work fine. Actually, the trim on our house was a little smaller than they thought. The installer had to saw 1/4″ off the trim for the entire height of the door. It took two men 4 1/2 hours to do what is normally a 2 hour job. The end result is wonderful. We really like the new door.

Speaking of doors, the condo association finally decided to order the new sliding doors to go out to our decks. We had 3 days to get our order in. That wasn’t much of a problem for us.

We had a plumber replace our old sump pump. In the process, he broke the backup pump. We use a water-powered backup pump. Very reliable. Needs no electricity. Has one moving part (the on/off float/valve). The plumbing company said they don’t install water powered backup pumps. What? A plumber won’t work on a water powered pump? We got another plumber in to install a new backup pump. There’s a switch that sends a message to my phone when the backup pump kicks on. It doesn’t send the message. Hopefully I’ll get everything working before something else breaks.

Danita is a genius at finding Zoom presentations. Of course we’re still taking our Fitzgerald/Hemingway class. We’re also watching a several-week series about music in Maryland. Danita is watching a series about tools for care givers. We have seen several presentations about various interesting topics, and we have 4 more coming up this week.

Our community decided to keep the pool open another week, so Danita will be able to use the pool next week.

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

The week started off wonderfully. Our neighborhood had three food trucks Sunday evening (BBQ, Mediterranean, and Gelato). The food was good. The weather was perfect. A few neighbors joined us in our driveway. It was an extremely pleasant evening. This is the last social activity for our neighborhood this year.

We had our first class Monday. We covered a brief biography of Fitzgerald and Hemmingway, followed by a discussion of the first half of “The Great Gatsby”. There are over 80 people registered for class. 72 showed up for the first class. The Zoom servers seemed to choke. Things got better after most students turned off their video. The instructor encouraged comments from the class, but of course with such a large class, only a small number could offer comments. The instructor has an interesting way of handling comments. He puts on a thoughtful face and lets the student have their full say. Then he generally says something like “I agree” or “That’s insightful”. Immediately after that, he extends the comment to include other points. Sometimes he says something like “That’s an interesting reading”, following that with a viewpoint that is more plausible. We learned quite a bit.

We found two presentations from the Walters Art Museum. One was about Islamic metal work. The other was about ancient glass. Both were quite interesting. Unfortunately, the ancient glass was immediately after lunch. We used our very comfortable setup in the TV room with our reclining chairs. I had a predictable reaction. I still managed to catch enough that I knew the answers to the questions the audience asked. The presenters faced quite a challenge because until a few days ago, the building was closed. They had to do their presentation from photos that were taken pre-COVID.

Danita started a virtual class for people who are care givers for parents.

I did my fall cleaning of the deck, porch, and garage. That’s a 3-day job for me these days.

Thursday Bluetooth stopped working on my Dell laptop. It was particularly irritating because I had just cleaned my desk and removed all nonessential wiring. I had to go back to a wired mouse. This happened precisely 17 days after my extended warranty expired. How do they time these things so precisely?

Mark asked us what our plans are for Thanksgiving this year. That triggered a discussion we had been putting off. We finally decided to celebrate at home without visitors. Usually Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It certainly won’t be a traditional Thanksgiving.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We had a little more activity this week, but it still felt quiet. We attended a Zoom orientation for our upcoming classes at Osher. The maximum number of attendees for a Zoom meeting is 300. They filled the session to capacity. I was surprised how hard it was for the presenters to get attendees to mute their microphones. Who can attend a 300-person Zoom meeting and not realize that their background noises and side-bar conversations bother other attendees? The presenters talked for 45 minutes. We will get Zoom links for the class one business day before the class. We will get a link for the class syllabus and other handouts. They could have sent a two-paragraph Email. But we got to check out our new setup for watching Zoom on our TV. It worked fairly well. We can’t read the chat messages on the TV because the print is too small. I noticed the video occasionally froze on the TV when it was not frozen on the computer. But the audio was very good. The Bluetooth speaker worked very well. Class starts tomorrow.

(I held my small laptop in my lap for the camera and connected video the TV through what Microsoft calls Miracast. This is a WiFi-direct technology. I used WiFi to get the Zoom video, then Miracast to forward the video over WiFi to the TV. I used WiFi channel 165 in the 5 GHz band because I can pretty much guarantee none of my neighbors use it. Routers bind 4 channels together to get faster data rates. There are 9 channels. That’s two groups of 4, plus one left over. I used the one left over.)

We had a plumber come in to take care of several small things. The biggest was to replace the 10-year old sump pump. Unfortunately, we’re not done with the plumber. He broke the backup sump pump. It’s probably just as well. The sump water was quite dirty. The backup pump is simple. (It’s powered by water pressure.) But it still has valves and seals that probably would need replacing soon. The plumber will have to come back.

We had a condo board meeting. There was lots of talk about sliding doors to the deck, and people who have decks that need repairs, and houses with a leaky balcony. It sounds like we won’t get our new doors this year. We’ll see.

I got a shingles shot. I felt under the weather for one day. The next day I did a 45-mile bike ride. We had an evening with the Jonses.

This evening our neighborhood is sponsoring food trucks. We will have three trucks — BBQ, Mediterranean wraps/salads, and Gelato.

Next week the pace will pick up even more. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There’s not a lot going on here in Columbia. In honor of the holiday, we’ll be eating hamburgers and chips. Grandma Utz’s hand dipped potato chips, of course. There is simply no reason to eat mediocre chips.

We got approval from the condo to change our screen door. That took 5 weeks. Our existing door is a “full view door”. The new door will still be full view, but it we will be able to switch between screen and glass simply by pulling a handle. On our existing door, I have a lot of trouble managing the heavy glass and removing the snap-in inserts that hold it in place. The new door was controversial because it has a thin horizontal bar across the center of the door. Never mind that several other house have done the same. It had to be thoroughly discussed.

Danita and I are going back to school. We have signed up for a class at Osher. This is a program from Johns Hopkins targeted to retired people. I think the entertainment aspect is probably as important as the academic content. We will start with Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby”. We’ve already started to prepare. There are two movies. We watched them both. We wanted to attend the 2-hour class in the comfort of our TV room. When I tried it, I could get the picture on the TV, but the sound came from the laptop. That is very sub-optimal. So I bought a Bluetooth speaker. I was planning to test it all out on the Men’s Club Zoom this morning, but I forgot until Men’s club was half over. Oh, well. I’m sure it will be fine.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.