Last Sunday, we went to Ed & Lynne’s “Parkton Cup” Croquet party. All the usual people were there, including surprise visitors all the way from Texas, Rick and Suzy.

— Croquet Finals

After the eating and after the croquet, we took Mira home for a one day / two night visit at our house. This was the first time Mira was separated from her parents. Here’s Mark and Jiajia pretending to relax as we take away their oldest child.

— Mark and Jiajia. What could go wrong?

Danita did the most to entertain Mira because I drove Dani, Gayle, and Mom to Kohl’s because Mom needed some clothes. The trip was wildly successful. So was the après shopping lunch.

— Après shopping lunch

— Fun and games with Grandma. Trust me, baking a red, white, and blue cake is much more fun than magnetic darts.

After that, Dani and Gayle flew home. We took Mira back to her parents. It was a lot for one week. We may never top it. But we got this week off to a decent start. We went mini-golfing. This is a particularly interesting course, with good use of the hills, imaginative hazards, and the world’s longest mini golf hill — a long downhill with banked turns. We haven’t been to this course in many years. It’s still a lot of fun, but it desperately needs maintenance.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Everybody loves a good party. We had a a regular blowout, I was having trouble predicting how the clubhouse WiFi worked when we made changes. I finally realized what we were seeing is the router somehow changing in response to the changes in demand. Is it MIMO? Or Beam Forming? Or something I don’t know about WiFi 6e? It’s obvious I was getting nowhere. I decided to just start streaming and see how the network holds up. I was pleasantly shocked. I had the gym TV, my computer, and my phone all streaming video. My predictions were that the network would fall apart. Instead, everything worked without a hitch. I decided I didn’t have to understand why the network did what it did. I only had to verify it would do what we want.

I invited four guys to join me in the clubhouse. We all brought laptops and tablets. All together, we had 9 devices running. Our goal was to stress the network until it failed. We had many variations of Zoom meetings and streaming movies. No matter what we did, the network calmly re-adjusted itself and offered perfect service. That’s about three times more load we would normally expect to see.

The WiFi party was an outstanding success. I’ve been working on this for a couple of months. Now it’s all buttoned up. Just in time for …

Dani’s visit! Dani and Gayle are in the air as I write this, on the way to the airport. They want to take Mom shopping, and have some family meals, etc. Dani doesn’t like driving in Baltimore. So I will do the driving. As i happens, they will be here during Ed and Lynne’s annual party. Plus we will take Mira for a couple of nights for her first time away from her parents. And my counting team is doing their thing on Sunday. It’s kind of like Mission Impossible. We have a plan that will let everything happen, with tight schedules all the way through. Hopefully, it will be completely unlike the last minute SNAFUs the Mission Impossible team encounters. Every. Single. Time. Really. We all know that pros make things look easy. Mission Impossible is on the edge of disaster for the entire 90 minutes of the movie. I think we can do better than that.

I hope all are doing well.

A week or so ago, Danita attended a retirement expo. This week she learned she earned a door prize. It’s a very nice one, as you can see.

We also attended the annual event for retired UMBC employees. We heard a very strange song written for the alto flute. When it takes longer to explain a piece than it takes to play it, you’re in trouble. ;-)

We also attended a more traditional neighborhood musical evening. One of the residents has a strong background in theater. She wrote and performed her creation for us last evening.

I’m off to clean the pollen of the porch. I hope this finds everyone doing well.

We like to go out for breakfast on Sundays. Unless it’s mother’s day. That’s the worst possible day for us to eat out. This year, Danita made some of her magnificent mixed berry scones. Hmmm, delish.

The next time you come to visit, you might have problems finding us. The tree guys are scheduled to take the old tree out tomorrow. I haven’t received a confirming call. Hopefully they’re still on track.

I also dealt with some smartphone issues. My Google Fi device had been struggling with battery life. An occasional unresponsive screen required me to reset the phone. I discovered that our $20/month “upgrade subscription” didn’t actually offer any savings; the cost of an upgrade was the same as a new phone minus the subscription fees I had already paid. To add a little salt to my wound, Google had a sale running where I could buy a better model for even less than the upgrade deal. I purchased the better phones. And I canceled the upgrade subscription.

That’s the news for this week. I hope all are doing well.

I bought this bookcase to act as shelving for our new utility closet. It didn’t fit. It didn’t even come close. It is down right ugly — not important for a utility closet but too ugly for any public area of the house. I ended up basically giving it away. Danita has been very kind not to remind me of all this. Bu that’s not what’s interesting. The person who took it wanted it “for her business”. She didn’t mentioned what her business is. She sent a truck with two women. It’s the most elaborate truck I ever saw. It had all kinds of railings and rubber stops that let the driver lock the bookcase in place, guaranteeing the cargo wouldn’t get damaged. It was set up to haul two large items about that size. My curiosity got the better of me, I asked. They are in the funeral business. The truck could carry two elaborate coffins. It turns out one of the office workers found a nice inexpensive bookcase. The other worker wanted one for herself. For whatever it’s worth, I know the bookcase has found a good home.

I know there’s some technical jargon in this story, but hang in there. You’ll get the punch line. Our clubhouse switched from Comcast to Verizon FIOS. We connected the Verizon router to our existing access point. Performance was terrible. I turns out that the router has a built in mesh controller. That is a super nice feature, but it absolutely refused to play nice with the access point. Looking for answers, I noticed the router has a coax port (like cable TV). The owner’s manual did not describe what the coax port was for. I took a deep breath and prepared to call tech support. There was no phone number. There was no chat box. The only thing I could find was a box labeled “Ask a question”. So I typed out my query. I quickly received an thorough explanation. It was obvious the question box understood the intent of my question and covered all the bases. I was amazed. I tried a couple of other questions. I got equally good answers. It sure beat waiting for my “important call”, then being switched to a support specialist who might not know the answer their selves. This is AI at it’s best. Of course, it was limited to Verizon services. Still, I was quite impressed.

I hope this finds everyone doing well.