We combined a Thanksgiving day Zoom with a baby shower for Jiajia. It was a lot of fun. Danita prepared two Cornish Hens for dinner and made some of her most excellent sausage stuffing.

Our most interesting Zoom was a concert called Latency. Back in the day, the BBC formed a group of musicians to make electronic music for shows like Dr. Who. They called themselves the Radiophonic Workshop. They played some of their better known works and performed one new piece live. Each member was in their home, playing over the internet. This is much harder than it sounds because the internet adds delays, making it impossible for the musicians to keep together. Their music was famous for using tape recorders to purposely create delays. They came up with the idea of setting themselves up with equipment that created an intentional delay loop. Each musician added to the piece as the loop passed through their house. Following the language of the day, the concert was far out. The concert is on YouTube. You can hear it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWYIQMzRUd8

I hope everybody had an enjoyable Thanksgiving day.

We had lots of Zoom seminars this week. The funniest one was a seminar about Beethoven’s 9th symphony. It featured the conductor of the Johns Hopkins Orchestra and the acting manager of the local classical music station. Both have impeccable music backgrounds. But I found their presentation so far fetched as to be humorous. They were talking about specific musical phrases and associating them to specific events such as the creation of the universe. There’s no doubt Beethoven had a large vision and high ambitions, but somehow I think he probably good a good chuckle out of this detailed analysis. Who knows? Maybe they’re right. To me, there is no physical meaning. I enjoy the music.

This is the holiday season, but severely lacking in holiday activities. It strikes home as we go through days with traditional activities that aren’t going to happen this year. In spite of our self-imposed restrictions, we’re doing what we can. Notably, we had ginger snap cookies and port wine cheese after dinner last night. This is extremely noteworthy because it portends a dinner of sour beef and buttons. For dinner tonight! Woo-Hoo! One recipe makes a lot of food. We plan to freeze leftovers and enjoy multiple dinners.

A new bagel restaurant is doing a soft opening. We had their omelet and bagel breakfast this morning. It was pretty good.

I’ve written a couple of times about neck and upper back pain from bike riding. After spending weeks looking at options, I decided to get a recumbent tricycle. I literally considered every recumbent trike sold in the US. Many of these are outrageously expensive. I selected the Hase Trigo. It has a good reputation. It’s expensive but half to third the price of many others. It has a very tall seat for recumbent. That makes for good visibility. There’s nothing in stock, but a shipment is due in December. For now, I plan to keep both bikes. I have some rides I like to take that the trike might not work for.

That’s it for this week. I hope everybody is doing well.

It was a fairly normal week. We had some Zooms. We had some carry out meals. We had several really good home cooked meals. Nothing unusual happened.

I’ve been having problems with my neck and upper back being sore at the end of a bike ride. I tried Danita’s bike. Hers is a “crank forward” design. The idea is that I would sit more upright and not have to be as flexible. It was great for eliminating my neck pain, but my upper back pain persisted. I guess I’ll try something else.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We are having unbelievably nice weather. I did a ride today in 75 degree weather. I was in summer clothes, and sweating! I wasn’t sweating a lot, but I think this is the first time I ever sweat outdoors in November. I’ve missed two interesting Zooms. I carefully planned my day Friday so I could watch a Zoom from the Museum of Industry about Baltimore industry during WW II. I was going to hit the road immediately after that Zoom so I could get home in time for a Circle Zoom. About an hour before the Zoom was supposed to start, I learned that the Zoom would be an hour later. It was too late to get a ride in and catch the Zoom. Danita enjoyed the presentation.

We usually watch a couple of hours of TV after dinner. We ran out of interesting Amazon Prime videos quite a while ago. We’ve been using Netflix. We’re getting pretty good at finding interesting content. Right now we’re watching Lucifer and Queens Gambit. I didn’t think a series about a woman who plays chess could possibly be interesting. But there were so many good reviews that we gave it a try. It’s quite good.

Bud called Sunday and said his mouth hurt from his tooth extraction. He’s doesn’t normally complain. Danita and I spent almost all day Monday taking him to the oral surgeon and the regular dentist. It seems to have been a false alarm. That took a lot of time, but the good news is quite welcome.

Our class about detective novellas is more work than we intended. The first book was a fun read. The next book was written in England in the 1950s. The third was written in New Zeeland in the 1940s. There’s too many English words! Even the Kindle dictionary doesn’t recognize them all. Plus there are allusions to pop culture of the day that we don’t get. Still, we’re learning interesting things about how detective novels are constructed, and some of the things that make them interesting.

That’s the news for this week. I hope all are doing well.

I spent several hours Saturday finishing up the computer swaps in our clubhouse. I also made progress on our clubhouse WiFi. We purchased an outdoor WiFi device to cover the pool area. I spent several more hours Saturday plus most of this morning taking data and coming up with some options for installation. We’ll have to find a way to route Ethernet cable through the clubhouse to where the WiFi device will be mounted.

Danita and I took Bud to the oral surgeon to have two teeth removed. Bud did well. By the end of the week, he was eating real foods.

The front derailleur stopped working on my bike. That’s the part that changes the gears. I was having trouble shifting down to the low gears. I took it to the bike shop. They mis-diagnosed the problem and did an adjustment. Two days later, I was back at the bike shop, completely unable to shift into low gear. This time the problem was obvious. The bike works great.

The backup sump pump is not doing very well. We have a water powered backup pump and it didn’t work. The pump company sent me a new pump under warranty and gave me a lot of advice on how to make it work better. One thing that was needed was to enlarge a hole in the sump cover from 2″ to 3 1/2″. I bought a hole saw, and learned that while drilling a 3 1/2″ hole isn’t very hard, enlarging an existing hole is a whole lot harder. A plumber came by Friday and spent 3 hours installing everything. When all was done, it still didn’t work. In fact, it’s possible that it never worked. I have some things I want to do yet. We’ll see how it turns out.

I was so busy dong stuff that I missed three Zooms that sounded interesting. One was about Baltimore Arabbers. We still have them. In fact, there are two active arabber horse stables. Unfortunately, the main guest either didn’t show or couldn’t get their computer to work. Danita told me they did a brief interview of an arabber. He told stories of the 500 days he spent in solitary while in prison. If you don’t know abut the arabbers, here’s a YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5h5LDVwZHg The other two zooms were about Day of the Dead dancers. Danita told me the videography was so bad she stopped watching. It’s not easy to make a bunch of people dancing look good.

There aren’t very many Zooms for us next week. But the rain should roll out, allowing more time for bike rides. In low gear!

I hope this finds everybody doing well.