Mark, Jiajia, and Mira visited this weekend. They came down Friday and left mid-morning Sunday, We had cool, rainy weather so Mira stayed indoors. Mark & Jiajia had a dinner out, did a food tasting for the wedding, and had brunch with some friends. You can see pictures in the website.
Ed and Lynne came up for dinner after a trip to Texas. They visited their grandchildren Masie and Annie and also visited Rick & Suzie. All of us had dinner Saturday. Danita made beef stew for dinner, with chocolate-raspberry brownies for desert. We have plenty of deserts. Mark & Jiajia brought some cheese cake.
Besides that, I got the garage, deck, and porch cleaned for the spring. Danita got Bud’s old apartment completely empty. She will turn in the key this week.
I sold my bike. I rode that bike 18,000 miles and it still rides like a dream. It was a real workhorse. But I was riding the trike whenever I could. I finally got the panniers on the trike. It is far from perfect. It absolutely has to be improved. I don’t think the trike will be nearly the workhorse that my old bike was. But it is time to move forward.
I put the bike on Craig’s list Thursday. I figured there was a 50/50 chance somebody would see it and contact me sometime over the weekend. When I got up Friday, I had a dozen people asking to buy it. Everybody wanted to buy it sight unseen. Nobody was hem-hawing. The first person who contacted me wanted to pick it up right away, but Thursday is our dinner out night. I didn’t want to interfere with that. I made him wait until Friday.
Danita is finishing up the cleanout of Bud’s old apartment. She will finish packing up and bringing stuff home Monday. Then she has to call “800-get-junk” to get the last of the stuff out. Poor Bud is not enjoying his new apartment. He has said he is moving in with his parents, with is (deceased) sisters, etc. Unfortunately, he is no longer safe in independent living.
Mom’s apartment is almost done. A carpenter will take a couple of days to finish everything up. That will be one less thing for her to worry about. Her move is moving along. She has a Zoom appointment with a decorator (to discuss colors, appliances, and other stuff), and an in-home visit with a moving specialist (to discuss what to move, furniture layout, etc.) Mom has to fill out lots of forms, from financial information to how she wants her newsletter delivered. Unfortunately, her printer stopped working. I had been download forms to her computer and printing them out for her to complete. Then I would scan them and upload them to my computer. It was a wonderful system until the printer stopped working. Now we have to wait for the US Post Office to deliver things by mail.
This is biking weather and I’m taking advantage of it. Rides obviously get shorter during the winter. I have to do some re-conditioning this time of year. My goal was to be able to do a 40 mile ride with moderate hills. I met that goal last week. I have a shorter ride that I like because of the killer hills. I had to modify that route because my trike is not up to the most extreme hill on that ride. Oh, well. We all have to move on.
The mold in Mom’s house has been remediated. They had to treat it twice, but it’s done now. While treating the mold, they hang plastic floor to ceiling curtains to contain the infected areal. Because Mom’s bedroom was isolated, they used curtains with zippers so Mom could get in and out of her bedroom. They took the curtains down Saturday. Mom no longer has to crawl through two zippered slits to get from her bedroom to the rest of her house. That was quite an operation for her, managing her walker and zippers at the same time. I hope they will be patching up her wallboard this week.
Monday Danita and I will view a couple of apartments at Charlestown, bringing Mom in by Zoom. If she likes what she sees, she might select her apartment. There’s a lot involved in the move. The folks at Charlestown are telling us we shouldn’t expect her to move before July.
Danita is making good progress on emptying Bud’s old apartment. I went down with her this week and packed two boxes of glasses — wine glasses, brandy snifters, Manhattan glasses, water glasses, shot glasses, and many more for which I have no idea of their purpose. That’s two heavy boxes for Goodwill. I plan to go down with her this week to start shuttling stuff to Goodwill. We won’t be done this week, but we should be done the week after. Her other project is getting all of Bud’s sheets, towels, and clothing labeled. She’s labeling sheets today. Bud has two very large china closets in the apartment. No charities will take them because they are too big. We will be to using 1-800-GotJunk.
You may recall that bolts came loose, causing my new trike fell apart under me a week or so ago. I had to take it to the shop to readjust the gears. I was able to test my bike ramp. I actually can put the bike in the car by myself. After all that, I have decided it’s not wise to ride the trike up the steepest hills. I re-routed my hilly ride to avoid the most “interesting” hills. It’s a sad but wise thing to do. My last trike project is to find a way to carry a moderate load of stuff so I can ride the trike to the store.
That’s the news for this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.
A couple of weeks ago I talked about being busy on two fronts. We upped our game since then.
Mom decided to move to a CCRC in Baltimore. Mom, Danita, Dani, and I had a Zoom meeting with Charlestown. We discussed several options. Charleston is an Erickson community. They work with a relocation company that specializes in elderly moves across the US. A relocation consultant will be visiting Mom soon.
Repairs to Mom’s unit continue. The leak is fixed. A mold company found two area of mold. A remediation team will be working on that this week. After that, we should be able to start on repairs to the drywall.
Danita is visiting Riderwood every other day to clean out Bud’s old unit. It’s a lot of work to find a new home for everything. For example, Bud has 4 sets of china. They had significant financial value when purchased, but today people want dishwasher safe. Ed, Lynne, and I help; but Danita does most of the work. Danita and I were at Riderwood yesterday. It was fun watching all the flower delivery trucks and visitors carrying flowers.
I visited the audiologist this week. I learned that dropping the hearing aid into my shirt pocket wasn’t caused by wearing the aid incorrectly. They offered a small plastic wire that is supposed to help keep the hearing aids in place. Later that day, I took my bike to a shop to have some adjustments made. I was discussing the bike with an employee when my hearing aid fell off my ear. The plastic wire did its job. I just put it back behind my ear. I’m back to wearing the hearing aids most of the time. However, I’ve decided that hearing aids don’t mix with physical activity such as home projects and bike rides.
Danita and I are enjoying our COVID vaccinations. We’re back to going to Church. We eat out at restaurant one dinner a week plus breakfast on Sunday mornings. Thanks to the early 7:30 mass, we were even able to get into Panera this morning before the serious crowds started.
That’s the news for this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.
We snuck out of town and drove to Julia’s Friday. We drove down in one day, taking the I-95 route around DC, Richmond, Greensborough, and Durham. This is the shortest but most stressful route. All those driver aids proved to be a big help. The trip down was uneventful.
We had a few misses this weekend but also had a lot of fun. The weather was perfect.
We started our Saturday watching Bryon at fencing class. Even the warmup exercises were interesting. We learned a lot about fencing. This time the class was organized as a mini-tournament. Bryon came in second in his group. (There’s more pics in the website. Bryon has his back to us in the pic.) Elizabeth wanted to come along. She spent her time entertaining herself.
Where we didn’t play
While visiting, we like to take grandkids on adventures. Saturday we wanted to take the kids to a really nice mini-golf course and then pick some strawberries on the way home. The afternoon was a complete bust. The drive to the mini-golf took closer to an hour than a half-hour. The mini-golf looked great, but it was completely packed. There were long lines of people everywhere. We decided it wouldn’t be fun and didn’t stay. I even had trouble getting out of the parking lot. On the way home, we stopped at the strawberry farm. In spite of their website, they did not have pick-your-own. They had some great looking strawberries, but the only had huge buckets — far more than we could use before they went bad.
After dinner we made a recovery of sorts. We made some comments comparing Bryon to Zorro, only to learn that neither Bryon nor Elizabeth knew anything at all about Zorro. Saturday evening, we watched the 1998 version of “The Mask of Zorro” with Anthony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Everybody enjoyed the flick.
Dung Beetle
Sunday was better. We drove to a place called 40 acre rock. They have some very rare red plants that only grow in a few places around the world. Bryon got to show off his Boy Scout skills, identifying several types of plants and critters. He even sighted a dung beetle. It was the first time any of us had actually seen one.
We decided to break up the trip home. We’re in Burlington, NC tonight. We’ll make it home tomorrow.
