Mom had a CD in her trust at Chase Bank. The CD matured recently. Chase send a letter saying if we didn’t want to roll it over, we could call or visit a branch. We wanted to sell the CD and move the money to Mom’s Chase savings account. We called. The customer service rep could not sell the CD. So we went to a “local” branch, about half an hour away. Not counting the driving, it took them two hours. As an apology, they gave us a free cloth bag. It isn’t very sturdy. I can’t imagine a bank that is harder to do business with. As a topper, I checked the account today. The CD is gone. The deposit to savings is marked “pending”. Pending what? Its moving money between two of Mom’s accounts. I can’t imagine why the transfer is pending.

The construction on the back of our house is finally done done done. I spent some time cleaning up some junk behind the house. A few years ago, I tried to paint the porch. I did a terrible job. We hired Pete to paint it for us. It looks great. The contractor will be doing a few days of work on the front of our house, probably starting next week. We won’t have access to our garage during the day, but they move the scaffolding away every night. That will let us charge the Leaf. The contractor will be working on the other buildings most of the summer. After this is all done, we have a huge mud field behind our house. All houses have to be cleaned and painted. Our road needs some work. Some people have stone falling off their walls. There’s probably a bunch more. I know everything will be put in good shape eventually. Still, it’s destressing to think about.

The yard junk put a big dent in a 55 gallon trash bag. In addition, plastic drain pipe was brittle from 10 years in the sun. That filled the rest of the bag. I also had a huge foam block that used to be in our Honda’s trunk where the spare tire is now. I put all this together today and made my first dump run in many years. I still miss Car Talk.

Our big excitement was last Sunday. Joe and Toni were up from Texas to attend a friend’s wedding. All the Schmauses got together at Ed’s house for lunch. The food was good. The conversation was better. There are a few pics on the website.

The big news was a visit to Jaijai, Mark, and Mira. Mira has advanced in every way since we saw her last. She has a good vocabulary of spoken words and obviously understands a lot more than she can say. She frequently understands normal adult sentences. It was supposed to be rainy, but mostly we lucked out. We were able to visit a playground Saturday. We had a couple of very nice meals out, including one of the best tasting curry I have ever had. Adding to the peaceful atmosphere was a Buddha fountain and a most intriguing tree. I even took a posed picture, but somehow I lost the picture. After that lunch, we took an impromptu walk to another playground which turned out to be Mira’s highlight. The playground had a tall slide with gentle humps. Mark sat her about half way up and helped her down the slide, with Jiajia at the bottom to catch her. As soon as she went down one time, she immediately said “more, more”. She probably went down a half dozen times before she had enough. You can see that pic and more by visiting the website.

Mom asked me to take her to Home Depot so she could look fort a new light. We found one she liked for $44.97. It was out of stock. So we went back to her apartment and went to the Home Depot website. They had it available, same price. When I went to order it, I got a large pop-up that we were just $.03 short of the minimum order for free shipping. Otherwise, we could pay $9. That was too bad … for Home Depot. Don’t they realize they aren’t the only game in town? After that bit of rudeness, Mom was quite amenable to looking on Amazon. We found one she liked equally well. Shipping was free, thanks to my Prime membership. And it was a few bucks cheaper. Wake up and sharpen your pencils, B & M. It’s a new world out there.

Today is Preakness. It just might be the hottest Preakness ever. The high temperature is supposed to be 95, with plenty of humidity. Tomorrow is almost as hot as today. I decided this is an excellent time to take a day or two off from biking.

I had surgery on my right eye Monday. Everything went fine. I’ll get my left eye done in 3 weeks. That’s all for this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Monday featured my first 45 mile ride of the year. It was hard. I took 6 hours doing it. Tuesday we visited the Mormon temple in DC. It was open for visitors for the first time in 50 years. Also my budget database came up with a bug. It took me four hours to find and fix it. Wednesday was cleaning the porch in preparation for painting. Later on today (Friday) we will drive up to Lewisburg, PA to visit JAMM for the weekend. While we’re there, we’re hoping Pete will be able to paint the porch. Throw in normal activities and a little pickle ball and it feels like quite a busy week.

We even have a little drama for a topper. The neighborhood brings in dumpsters once a year. They’ll be here this weekend. I’m hoping they come before we leave. I have several long lengths of piping that the previous owner installed for drainage. With all the construction, I removed the piping and found it was creating problems rather than being helpful. I would love to get that piping in the dumpster, if the dumpster is set up in time.

After spending a day taking care of a bum tire on the Leaf the other week, I decided we should have a spare tire for the Honda. Honda offered a spare tire when we bought the car. At the time, we decided to save the bucks, but now I think that wasn’t the best decision I’ve ever made. The tire came in, but the jack is delayed. Hopefully we’ll have an uneventful drive to Lewisburg. At worst, we’ll only need to borrow a jack from a good Samaritan. When I ordered the tire, the parts guy wasn’t sure how well it would fit, due to the hybrid battery. The parts guy wanted to come out and see how it fits. He swung his legs onto the parts counter and slid under the plastic COVID shield all while holding the tire in one hand. Young people are such show-offs. The tire fits fine.

When we get back from Mark’s I have cataract surgery Monday. I’ll have a couple of days of restrictions. I’m looking forward to getting normal vision in one eye.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Last week I forgot to mention we watched a delightful movie last week. It’s “My Cousin Vinny” (1992). If you haven’t seen it, it’s a hoot.

I help count the collection for our church once every four weeks. There’s been a strong push to make the count exact. The collection is comprised of many separate collections (regular weekly, Easter, Missions, etc.) We count each collection separately, recording results in an Excel file, one worksheet per collection. Then we throw everything into one pot and count the whole enchilada. Cash is tedious but fairly straightforward. Checks have been troublesome. Checks can have any value. We can’t bin them by check value because we don’t know ahead of time what all the values will be. With no bins, we don’t have a way to focus on where an error is. Last week’s count was $30 off. We had been working for four hours. It was 2:00 and there was no way we could re-count all the checks again.

This week I wrote a new worksheet that reads all the checks, bins them, and prints the sorted result. We ran the new spreadsheet against last week’s file and quickly found the error was in a small subset of all the checks. The next time this happens, we should be able to quickly find and correct the discrepancy.

The worksheet consumed me for most of the week, but it was a lot of fun. I have done a lot of this kind of work with Access and Word but not with Excel. Plus I have forgotten much more than I remembered. I had two screens. The left screen was for Google searches. The right screen was for the spreadsheet. I spent more time reading than writing. Now it’s done, it works, and it should be a big help going forward.

Danita ran into an unexpected obstacle when visiting Bud this week. Because there is a COVID case in assisted living, visitors have to have evidence of having passed a COVID test before entering. Visitors can go to the medical suite and get a test, but that would take a lot of extra time. There were several people trying to get in and much confusion. One couple decided to do a “window visit”. The weather was nice and their parent is on the ground floor. The parent didn’t know how to open the window, so the they used their cell phone to called the parent. It was a kind of low-tech Zoom.

Danita happened to have a picture of the results from our Easter test on her phone. She offered that and was admitted. She was lucky to get in because the entry clerk can swipe up and see the date the picture was taken. Moving forward, she will take a test at home before she visits Bud.

We were supposed to have the “Greek on the Street” food truck Friday. This is one of the better food trucks that visits. The Joneses and we were planning to have a food truck dinner together. Unfortunately, the bums cancelled. We decided to do a carry out dinner instead. Cheese steak sandwiches aren’t very healthy, but they’re no worse than Greek French Fries with Feta cheese.

That’s a lot of news for one week. I hope everybody is doing well.

This was a quiet week. I passed my pre-surgery physical. I’ll good to get cataract surgery in a couple of weeks. Danita had her pool training. She will have her first pool duty day tomorrow. An experienced operator will be with her for her first duty day.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.