Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. We had a great one this year. Mark, Jiajia, and Mira came for the weekend; as did Jul, Brian, and Elizabeth. (Pat wasn’t able to get time off from his job). Shirley, Ed, and Lynne joined us for dinner in Thanksgiving day. Danita made all our favorite foods.

Unfortunately, I missed the adventures this year. Danita, the Reeds, and JaMM went to the aquarium Friday. I had an appointment with the motor vehicle folks because I can’t seem to get my drivers license updated. I keep getting conflicting information and advise. For the moment, all I can do is wait until next Friday and see if it shows up.

It was quite an exciting visit to the aquarium. It was mobbed with people. Danita was trying to ham it up for a picture, but she tripped on a safety cable and hurt her hand. It’s nothing serious, but it sure is ironic to hurt yourself on a safety wire.

The other adventure was Saturday. Danita and the Reeds went to downtown Ellicott City to visit the B & O Railroad museum. This is a small but nice place to visit. It’s also free, which doesn’t hurt. The report was that everybody had a good time.

Mark ran a half marathon that was near Ed & Lynne’s house. I gave him a ride up. When he finished, he tried to call me to pick him up. He had Danita’s and my phone numbers mixed up. In addition, Danita was driving so Jul answered his phone. Mark’s phone signal was weak so Jul called me to let me know. It took me a while to figure out what happened. But I picked up Mark successfully. I drove him to Ed’s where we linked up with Jiajia and Mira. We had a very nice lunch. JaMM and I went our separate ways to go home.

I hope everybody enjoyed their holiday.

I don’t know how old our TV is, but I have the receipt with a delivery address in Kingsville. We decided to update our TV. We got a good price on a Samsung at Amazon. Plus they threw in free setup in the room of our choice. The TV picture looked great. Until one of the installers said I have a dead pixel. I would have been perfectly happy in my ignorance, if they had just kept their fat mouths shut. I didn’t want to send the TV back. Partly it was on the theory that the next one might have two dead pixels, but mostly it seemed to be a colossal waste. I called Amazon, and they gave me a 20% discount. I wonder what you get for two dead pixels. The new remote control is designed to help you get content from your streaming services (Netflix and such). That makes sense, because that’s the only way to get 4K video to display on your brand new 4K TV. But the remote doesn’t have any numbers. This is a serious inconvenience for us. We still watch TV on our TV. Without a number pad, we would spend a lot of time scrolling up and down to get the channel we want. I bought an old style Samsung remote with numbers for $10. The next thing was that our DVD player doesn’t have an HDMI output. It was strictly RCA cables. Our lofty TV is way too advanced to accept RCA cables, so I got a new DVD player. Now we’re down to one problem. The old TV is still in the basement, and we want it on the second floor. Are you feeling strong, Mark? (Hint.)

We also had several smoke detectors go offline. This isn’t an urgent problem. If there’s smoke, they will beep. But it would be nice if they would alert me while we are traveling. I traced the problem down to a many-years old WiFi access point. A new one is on the way.

We had a lot of activities at the clubhouse this last week. We only attended half of them. The best was a band called “Sons of Pirates”. They play Jimmy Buffet and similar music. They did a nice job. They kept the volume down to a comfortable level. It was a well attended event.

But wait … there’s more. The BMA had a members evening for an exhibition of John Waters’ collection of contemporary American art. There was free food, followed by a slide show tour of the exhibit, and then an interview with the man himself. Like many artists, Waters lives in a different universe than do I. But it’s a very funny, upbeat universe. Everybody had a great time. After the interview, we were invited upstairs to see the exhibit, along with a very large crowd of others. We decided we might come back another time when it’s not so crowded.

That’s a lot of activity for one week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Danita volunteers at the Howard County food bank. Sometimes somebody will donate candy. They aren’t allowed to give the candy to clients, and they never say no to a donation. So they offer candy to volunteers. Danita will often come home with something like a few mini-Kit Kat bars. This time somebody donated entire boxes of Ferrero chocolates. Danita was invited to take an entire box of 24. I don’t claim to know which chocolates are the best. But Danita and I both think Ferrero chocolates are better than Godiva. Of course, at $1.25 per chocolate, they should be pretty good. We enjoyed ourselves tremendously.

We had a lot of activities this week. We started off with a concert from the most excellent Peabody Ragtime Ensemble. We ate OK food truck pizza with our neighbors. We had a neighborhood “Cultural Conversations” presentation from a Native American Artist. The woman was quite interesting. We wouldn’t have missed it for the world. But she obviously lives in a parallel that barely touches ours. Of course, hearing from somebody with a perspective that much different from ours is a good part of what makes it interesting. We had many days of warm sunny weather, allowing me to put plenty of miles on the bike.

The church counting session did not go well today. We had a lot of extra busy work this time. We couldn’t get the checks to reconcile. We were closing in on the answer when the computer suddenly stopped displaying our spreadsheet. When I got home, I was able to ascertain that the file was OK. The problem seems to be with the computer. After several months of having perfect counts, we ended up staying very late (4 hours), with two unreconciled checks, and leaving on somewhat of a downer.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I ran across somebody’s comment about the movie “Practical Magic” with Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, and Dianne Wiest. I thought that would be a fun movie to watch on Halloween night. It turned out to be a great movie. Danita and I had a great time watching it. I told Danita it appears to be a Halloween chick flick. She didn’t see how a movie could fit into those two categories. But after we watched it, she agreed.

Every year our church has a memorial mass for those who have died within the last year. We went to light a candle for Bud. It was a nice service.

Our great fun was Mark and Mira. Jaijai had a seminar in DC. Mark and Mira stopped at our house for two days. This time Mira let us hold her and feed her. This was great progress. In the past, she would grab the nearest parent’s leg and hide. Or cry and turn her head. Or otherwise make it clear we were probably trying to steal her away from her parents. I offered her a little ice cream after lunch and dinner. Mark said that didn’t make any difference. I say sometime, grandparents know things.