There is one pic today.

Godiva Chocolates

Danita had a couple of nice things happen to her. She’s been at UMBC 15 years. That entitles her to go the awards ceremony, eat a free lunch, and get her 15-year gift. In addition to all that, she also won one of the door prizes — a large box of Godiva chocolates. We never buy Godiva chocolates because they are way too expensive. But if one gets a basket of them for free, they taste really good.

News of Danita’s retirement is still limited. It worked its way up to the VP of Research. (Danita’s boss’s boss.) Danita saw him while she was on campus. He was very supportive — much more than just “Congradulations”. He gave her a hug, told her she deserved this, thanked her for waiting until UMBC had the contract renewals, etc. There will be a meeting of the powers that be on Tuesday to start developing a plan to replace Danita. UMBC is closed 12/24 – 1/3. Most of the people in the office are taking vacation next week. The next time the entire office will be together will be 1/5. Danita will announce her retirement to the staff then. That will make her retirement public knowledge. And that will be a big relief to Danita.

Buried in the bowels of our new website is a “contact us” page that has an address for the webmaster. Those Emails go to me. There’s not exactly a lot of traffic. I’ve received less than half a dozen Emails in all so far. I got one of the strangest Emails ever on that address this week. Somebody claimed that truckers were entering our neighborhood before the gate closed and sleeping in their trucks overnight. Personally, I find this to be very unlikely. Our gate closes at 8. I doubt that truckers want to quit that early, especially as there is no place to shower. The closest restaurant is about 3/4 mile away. I don’t think many truckers would want to walk that far for dinner. (Remember, the gate will be locked when they get back from dinner.) And all our streets are just wide enough for traffic. There’s no place where a rig can park. I decided this had very little to do with our website and forwarded this urgent warning to our president.

We had strange event happened this week. One of our residents had a visitor from a family member the other evening. The visitor is on the “Frequent Visitors” list so the guard let her in. The resident didn’t open the door. The visitor became concerned that the resident might be in diabetic shock. She found the condo president. He called the police. The police came and said the fire department breaks down doors. They called the fire department. About the time the fire truck got to our gate, the resident finally woke up. She had slept through doorbell ringing, door pounding, numerous sirens, and flashing lights. Fortunately, she woke up about 2 minutes before the fire department broke through her front door. We have a list of emergency contacts. It’s on the computer (of course). One of the things the condo president did was call our Office Manager at home and had her walk him through how to get to this list. The resident had not provided any emergency contact information.

I went to a SOCA board workshop to discuss whether residents should log into our web site. And discussed, and discussed. 2 1/2 hours later, they said they would take a vote at the January meeting. A couple of days later, the president sent a very long and detailed Email which mostly asked the same questions we discussed at the meeting. I answered, providing the same answers I had already provided in the meeting. Then there was a whole round of questions and answers, with no new information. We’ll see how the vote goes next year. One of the things the proposal will do is make the emergency contacts available to the SOCA board members any time, just by logging into our web site.

I like toilets. They are one of the great conveniences of our lives. Until they don’t work. One of our toilets started leaking about a year ago. I put in an all-so-cool dual flush flusher. (Small flushes for #1, large flushes for #2.) Except it never worked right and I had to hold the flusher in for 2 seconds on a #1 flush. We joked about this at Men’s Club and came up with a bunch of remedies. My favorite was a page of instructions and warnings on the bathroom wall, with a second page in Spanish. This week the new dual-flusher stopped working. I decided to go back to a standard flusher. But that meant I had to replace everything down to the flush handle. I had the water tank disassembled from the toilet with rags, parts, and tools all over the floor. But it’s finally done. And it’s not leaking. Maybe this time it will last longer than a year.

We’re just about ready for Christmas. All we need is people — and maybe some toy parachutes for the kids to throw off the balcony. Ed and Lynne are having a Christmas party on the 25th and a second Christmas party on the 30th. We’re looking forward to having Mark and the Reeds stay with us several days of Christmas week.

Amazon offered me a bonus code to buy Kung Fu Panda for free. We would be able to stream it over the internet whenever we want. It’s just in time for Christmas, so I jumped right on the deal. Only the code didn’t work. I called Amazon and the offered me a $15 credit against my next Amazon purchase. That’s enough to buy 2 movies, and it’s a very nice gesture. But now I don’t know what I want to do with my credit. I started out with a free movie for the grandkids and ended up with way too many choices. We have so many first world problems …

I hope this finds everybody doing well.