It was a small Christmas party this year. Mom joined us for dinner. JaMM stayed 3 days. Danita made an insane amount of very good food, including ham, lasagna, and chocolate-bacon muffins. Jiajia brought a very good beef brisket.

All the food was good (and so was the wine), but Mira was the star of the show. It turns out Mira loves to swing. She did very well over Christmas. She was just learning to walk. Before she left, she learned how to push a toy grocery cart, “sproing” the door stops, and climb up to the couch. She was so proud of her climbing ability. We set up boxes to help her. After she got to the couch, she ran over to the arm rest and looked down to see how high she was. She would have climbed up and down more, but structural limitations of one of the boxes put an end to the climbing for the day. The best part of the visit is that Mira let us play with her and hold her without crying. Even when her parents went out to do a little shopping, she didn’t kick up a fuss at all.

We had a lot of rain, but we also had some dry weather. We didn’t want to go indoors to see train gardens and such. Fortunately, the Ellicott City train museum divided their train garden into 8 displays and placed them in store-front windows in historic Ellicott City. It was fun looking at all the displays.

Danita and I had a great time on our little 3-day jaunt. It was so much fun to get out and about a little. Now we’re in a modified quarantine. We wear masks whenever we leave the house. That means no eating in restaurants. We’re scheduled for a COVID test tomorrow. So far, if we have COVID, we are symptom-free.

We have Verizon FIOS internet service. It’s great service, fast and reliable. At $45/month, it’s not crazy expensive. This month the cost went up $5. I called Verizon. They couldn’t decrease the price, but they could double our speed (to 200 Mbps) and upgrade our ONT (Optical Network Adaptor) at no cost. I decided if we had to pay the extra money, there’s no reason we shouldn’t have the faster service. The tech arrived on time. That’s when I learned we weren’t actually getting an upgraded ONT. In the past, our ONT converted our internet from fiber-optic to coax. A modem connected to our coax converted it to Ethernet. Verizon was going to bypass the coax and take Ethernet directly from the ONT. Fortunately, our house wiring allowed us to do this, but it meant I had to rearrange our Ethernet wiring. I also had to move some heavy furniture to give access to the wall plates. The tech did his job and left. It took him an hour to do what is normally a 2-hour job. That left me with the task of making a modification to the wiring in the house. After over an hour of frustrating failure, traipsing up and down two flights of stairs, I realized I had to put an Ethernet connector on a cable. That’s when I learned that it is much harder for me to put a connector on an Ethernet cable than it was 3 years ago. No matter how much light I had, I simply couldn’t see well enough to do the job. It took over three hours with two major “frustration breaks”. I got the job done before dinner, but it took a good chunk of the day. In addition, I hurt my back. I’m still in pain, but my back seems to be responding well to rest. Hopefully, I’ll be able to put the furniture back in place in a couple of days. All in all, a job that would have taken an hour when I was younger took a day. On the good side, I was surprised to find our latency went from 15 msec to 7 msec. That’s quite an improvement.

JAMM (Jiajia, Mark, and Mira) are coming for a 3-day visit, and we’re upping our game to be prepared. Besides the COVID precautions, we put coves in all the unused power outlets. I also got cabinet locks to keep Mira out of danger. I went with latches that require a magnet to open the cabinet door. I chose them because after JAMM leaves, we can reconfigure the latches to leave the cabinets unlocked. It sounds pretty slick, but when the package arrived, I noticed they have a video to explain how to install them. We’ll see how this goes.

Things are going very slowly on the maintenance front. The Leaf is still at the dealer. It seems our car has a problem that is unique. Lucky us. Nobody has come up with a way to install the new door to the deck. The old door is still in place, but all the framing was removed in preparation for the door swap. The new door is sitting on the deck, tied to the old door with a strap. The entire area is covered with a blue tarp to protect the new door from the weather. My joke is that I can’t take a nap on the couch because, as everybody knows, blue light disrupts sleep. The construction crew “sealed” the old door with blue painter’s tape. It’s a most unusual “accent wall”. The vertical blinds have been sitting on our couch for the last week. There’s no other place in the house to put them. The construction foreman promised to re-install the blinds before Christmas if they can’t install the new door by then.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We toured the Winterthur property in the morning yesterday. The house has 94,000 square feet on 10,000 acres of land. The house tour was nice. Afterwards, we visited exhibits of china, etc. Danita found it more interesting than I did. After a trolley ride around the property, we ate our packed lunch on a bench near the Winterthur parking lot. After we finished lunch, we found a heated picnic building. We could have had the building to ourselves.

For our afternoon adventure, we visited the Delaware Art museum. I enjoyed the art for a while. I learned about the Pre-Raphaelite artists in England. They developed about the same time as the Impressionists in France. There was a way cool painting of Macbeth by Schoonover. Then I went to the café and enjoyed some coffee. Here’s a shot of their Chihuly Bridge.

At the end of the day, we took an hour ride on the Delaware & Western Railroad. It was fun. There were plenty of excited families. Many of the houses with back yards abutting the rail line put up elaborate light displays. Several residents came out to wave. Here’s a shot of our rail car.

We had a blast yesterday. We started out at the Brandywine Art Museum. Most of their collection is painted by the Wythe family, but they had some other art also. They also have a large and elaborate train garden — much more so than the firehouse gardens in Baltimore.

After checking into our hotel and eating lunch, we went to Longwood Gardens. There was a good sized crowd. As I should have guessed, the night time pictures came out blurred.

We just got back from a wonderful show. The Baltimore Symphony played “Nutcracker” while an acrobatic team did their thing. The acrobatics were terrific. They even followed the Nutcracker story. We felt comfortable going. All attendees had to show proof of vaccination, and we used our N-95 masks. It was a delightful show. The symphony hall was nicely decorated for the holidays.

The construction crew were going to install the new door to the deck last week, but the door manufacturer made a change. Nobody is sure how to install the door. An expert is supposed to come in tomorrow. In the mean time, our Leaf gave up the ghost. We had it towed to the dealer. We will pick it up Friday because …

We’re taking a trip. Several weeks ago, we decided to take a short trip to the Longwood Gardens area. As usual, we planned ahead, made reservations, etc. Since we did that, the COVID case rate has gone up, and Omicron is adding additional uncertainty. Being mindful that Mira will visit for a few days at Christmas, plus we both visit parents weekly, we decided to still go on the trip but change some of our plans. We will get carry-out and eat in our hotel room. Whenever we’re inside, we’ll be wearing N-95 masks. We have an appointment to get a Covid test when we get back, and we have a couple of home test kits that we will use just before Christmas. We’re looking forward to a few days away from home, being (careful) tourists.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

It’s sad news for our cell phone plans. We have been using a prepaid AT&T service. The minutes roll over. Over the years, we had each built up well over $300 in unused minutes. It’s all funny money, of course, as has been proved in the last few weeks. AT&T and another prepaid service (I forget which one) both require a phone sold by the carrier. The excuse they give is the shutting down their old 3G service, but that can’t be the true reason. Danita, I, and at a few of our neighbors all have 4G LTE phones that don’t qualify for prepaid service. AT&T will end all prepaid service on non-AT&T phones in February. For whatever reason, my phone has been blocked frequently even though the deadline is months away. I switched myself to Google Fi. I’ll switch Danita in February. Her existing phone is older and doesn’t support Fi, so she’ll be getting a new phone.

This is a busy and fun time of year. Friday we did our traditional Christmas shopping at Bob Evans for breakfast. It turned out that we couldn’t actually shop at Bob Evans because their WiFi service wasn’t working. I tried using my Fi to set up a hot spot for Danita’s laptop. It didn’t work, so we did our shopping at home after breakfast. Later, I figured out that I missed the step of authenticating myself when requesting hot spot service. Some of our gifts are drop shipped. All of the gifts being delivered to our house should arrive by the end of the day today.

We don’t exactly go overboard with Christmas decorations, but Danita usually sets up the Christmas tree in the basement. We haven’t been able to do that yet. All the construction repairs for the year are complete, but the painting isn’t done. The painter said he would be in last Thursday and hasn’t shown up since. Besides the repairs, we ordered two new doors. (Water rolling through the doors into the basement wall was the major cause of our rotting.) The door in our bedroom is replaced, but the door in our living room is not replaced. The doors arrived last week, but they look different in some way I don’t understand. Everything will come to a grinding halt while the condo board agonizes over what to do. I’m hoping they go ahead with the doors and all interior work can be done before Christmas. It takes the crew a day to swap doors and a second day to do the finish and trim. Then it’s a few days for the painter. If this comes to pass, they will be done until spring. When temperatures warm up, they will return to install stone on the outside of the basement wall.

We had a lot of neighborhood activities scheduled this week. We had three food trucks, two of which actually showed up. We weren’t warned the third truck wouldn’t come, so we did an impromptu dinner at Jason’s sandwich shop. We had clubhouse decorating day, which Danita attended. She got free pizza and cookies. This week we have a Meet and Greet and also a Mix & Mingle. The former is wine and cheese. The latter is wine and dinner.

Our Nissan Leaf had the 12 volt battery die again. Fortunately, it died while parked in our garage, so it was only a minor inconvenience. I took the car to the dealer. They claim there’s nothing wrong. They have one mechanic trained on electric cars. I have an appointment to discuss this with him in person Tuesday.

Danita’s taking physical therapy for her knee. She was very sore after her first appointment. The therapist was more gentle the second time. She only had a little discomfort.

Wow! Lots of news in one week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.