In retrospect, our Christmas turned out to be a little more quiet than we would have preferred. We opened presents in the morning. Then Danita prepared a brunch and we took it to Mom’s. We had quiche, fruit, and muffins. It was all very good.

I received a gift that I think is way cool. Of course, some may not understand its significance, but I think it’s an amazing idea. It’s a digital sundial. It actually displays time in digital format (like this: “12:40”). It needs no batteries, computers, or WiFi. It has one moving part. You set the time by twisting the sundial body. As simple as it is to use, it is based on some math that I frankly don’t understand. Digital sundial math What could be cooler than that? I’m a little frustrated that we haven’t had a day of good strong sunshine, so the display is not very good. I’m including a picture from the internet.

Our parish has two teams counting the plate. Each team counts once every four weeks. The other team got the checks wrong two times in a row. For some reason I don’t understand, getting checks wrong is a much bigger deal than getting cash wrong. Our bank threatened to prohibit our dropping the deposit in their night box. If we got it wrong again, we would have to send two people to wait in the bank while tellers counted. If there was a discrepancy, the two would make a corrective entry in the deposit slip. Obviously, nobody wants to sit in the bank lobby for a hour or two. Our pastor gave us his best half-time motivational speech. Because our team consistently gets it right, there was some less-than-good-natured grumbling about the other team — until I warned that we could end up doing all the counts. Nobody on our team wants that either. All in all, it was a big hoora.

Because our team prefers to count the Christmas plate separate from the regular weekly offerings, we have another count January 5. Hopefully the residual bad feelings will have been resolved.

We’re getting ready for our big vacation. This is a two-month jaunt in the western US (Jan 8 – March 1). We are deciding on clothing, counting pills, and deciding where we will have our last Sunday breakfast. (Bob Evans won.) Details to follow!

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Three food trucks were scheduled this week. One of them showed. We enjoyed eating with the Joneses.

I wanted to retire from being the webmaster for our community website. Jeff volunteered. I trained our events coordinator how to update content on the website while Jeff contributed and observed. That was the last item on the handoff checklist. I’m free!

Danita is still slowly recovering. She can do a 45 minute walk. That’s good progress.

There were no concerts, plays, or theater movies. All the gifts were taken care of weeks ago. It was a quiet, relaxing week. Even the weather was conducive to peace and quiet. Who wants to bike when temperatures are near freezing, winds gust to 30 MPH, and rain is coming? Not me.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

-SC

We had a neighborhood party this week. The twist for this party was randomly assigned tables — we couldn’t just sit in our normal groups. But no doubt the star for this week was Mom. Sunday, we took Mom to one of the local train gardens. This one was particularly nice because they had signs listing a specific item or setting to find. One scene was for people playing checkers, another was for a new and an old Ford car, and so forth. We had a lot of fun finding the scenes and pointing them out to each other. Plus they had push buttons that made the flag fly, or turned on flashing lights, or whatever.

That certainly is not enough to make Mom the star, so we next went to a concert in the chapel at Charlestown. We heard a group called The Suspicious Cheese Lords. They are an acapella group that sings ancient pieces with lots of moving parts. They put on an amazing show. The chapel is gorgeous, and the acoustics are simply perfect for this type of music. The included a couple of sing-along songs. For those, they used the organ to get everybody singing together. I was surprised at the quality of the organ.

For a capper, we went to the Catonsville Gourmet restaurant. It didn’t take much arm twisting to get Mom to pick a favorite she normally can’t get — quiche — and a generous desert.

I hope this finds everybody doing well and having a jolly Christmas.

They installed a new roof for our house this week. Due to variations in the weather, the contractor can’t follow a set schedule. Their system is to hang a tag on your doorknob the day before they will work on the house. I called this the “tomorrow tag”. I spent days saying things like “Will we get the tomorrow tag tomorrow?” I’m sure Danita will tell you it felt to her that I did this for months. We finally got out tomorrow tag on Wednesday, which was really too bad, because I wanted to write that “We got the tomorrow tag on Tuesday.” Really, who can deny that “alittle alliteration” can be fun? Just for the record, I ended up spending most of Tuesday afternoon at the clubhouse. Danita spent it in the basement. As noisy as they were, the crew did a marvelous job of cleaning up.

Tuesday is discount day at our local movie theater. That made Tuesday a great day to see Wicked. You should see it too. The buzz is right. It’s a very good movie.

Saturday was train garden day. We visited the Glen Avenue trains, a great fav of ours. We also found a new fav at the Ellicott City Fire Station. It doesn’t have night and day lighting like Glen Ave has. It doesn’t even have a building on fire like Glen Ave does. But it does have a fire house that opens the overhead door, then the fire truck comes out and goes back in, then has the door close. As well as countless other very cool things.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.