I am writing this on Saturday, July 5.

Mark & Danita

Somebody hit Danita’s car, and they didn’t leave a note. The damage was to the rear quarter-panel on the passenger side. She didn’t notice the damage until she got home. It’s nothing earth-shattering, but it’s big enough that the person who hit her had to know what they did. We feel a little disgusted at whoever did the damage. We called the insurance company last week, took the car into the body shop last Monday. While it was there, we got a few other bumps an bruises fixed. We got it back Thursday afternoon. The car looks good. It turns out that it’s pretty easy for us to live with one car these days.

I wrote a book. It’s titled “Riding in Traffic Safely”. I’ve been playing around with it for well over a year. I thought E-Publishing the book would be easy. It’s not. There’s a web site called “Smashwords” that distributes E-Books to just about every outlet except Amazon. They use a program they call “Meat Grinder” to generate all the various formats required (E-Pub, Apple iBook, etc.) It’s pretty easy for fiction. Just submit a Word document, making sure all the formatting is defined by styles. Unfortunately, it gets more tedious for non-fiction. All references (table of contents, footnotes, etc.) have to be entered and linked by hand. Figures, pictures, text boxes, etc all require extra work. It’s not very exciting.

Waiting for Fireworks

Here’s something that’s more exciting. Mark made it back from Saudi Arabia. He came over for the 4th. Danita made pulled-pork, then we went to the Columbia fire works. We got there a little earlier this year and found a great spot. It was an amazing show — the best they’ve had so far. We used one of the Bob Evans BOGOs to take Mark out to breakfast before returning him to Hopkins earlier today.

I’m still riding. Sometime last week I rolled through 20,000 miles.That’s a lot of hours on the bike.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.