This was a busy week. Our community has a database with the passcards issued to each resident. We also have a paper 3-ring binder “pool book” with pictures of about 500 residents who have pool passes. These pictures are taped onto pages which slide into plastic sleeves, like a photo album from the 1966. The database and pool book are managed entirely separately. Our property manager pointed out this represented a lot of duplicate work for our office manager. So I created an electronic pool book which can be printed on paper if desired. I had the office manager scan the pool book pages, and I pulled photos from the scans. All 500 are loaded in the database. Whew. In the process, I found that photos for residents in over 40 of our houses are for people who have either moved out or died. I can see that in most cases, new people have moved in. But we don’t have their photos. We have several hours a day when the pool is open without a lifeguard. These hours are “residents only”. The county requires that we verify that everybody swimming during this time is a resident. So now the board has a great crisis. Do they try to get the photos for these folks? Or do they give up on the pool book and use another way to identify residents? Time will tell. No matter what they do, there will be less work for the office manager next year when the pool opens.
We also booked the majority of our France trip. I booked all our hotels. I spent so much money so fast that I triggered the credit card fraud flag. Citibank contacted me with a computer-driven phone call. The caller ID came through as “unknown”, which is usually a junk call. I almost didn’t answer it. I had to verify the purchases. Then I had to call Expedia and verify the charges went through.
I also purchased the air tickets to get to France. That took quite a long time. I know that airfares are not rational, but this is ridiculous … we can fly from BWI to Paris for $300 each. The flight connects through either Detroit or Atlanta. Or we can fly direct from Dulles airport (west of DC) for the same price. A third option I considered was getting to Atlanta ourselves and taking the direct flight from Atlanta to Paris. That way we could spend the night in Atlanta and avoid a 12 hour flight. We decided not to do that when we saw the airfare leaving from Atlanta was over $600. How is it possible that we can save $300 each by flying from BWI to Atlanta? This is on Air France, a major carrier. If you figure it out, please let me know. We ended up opting for the direct flight. The hassle and expense of getting a ride to Dulles is more than offset by saving 5 hours on the flight, not to mention the risk of missing the connection or having bags lost in the plane transfer.
The next big thing is to reserve tickets for our cave tours (to see the 40,000 year-old cro magnon art). This is important because the demand for cave tours exceeds the supply. Tickets will become available Tuesday. Another thing we have to do is get ourselves from NY, where the ship docks, to home. This was another surprise. We can take the train for $85 each, which is much less than the cheapest airfare. Even the Acela (express train) is cheaper than flying. We’ll probably cheap out on the tickets and take the extra hour to get home. I didn’t buy the tickets because it appears that Amtrak doesn’t discount tickets under any circumstances. Every ticket on every train is exactly the same price, as far out as their schedule shows. We just might wait until we’re at the train station to buy the tickets.
For New Year’s Eve, we’re going down to the basement and watch a movie. Cashews and red wine might be available. We won’t have to fight a bunch of drunks driving home. We won’t have to try to talk in a noisy party. We can go to bed whenever we want. Heck, the recliner chairs are comfortable enough that we don’t even have to walk upstairs when we decide to go to sleep. And we just happen to know that if we fall asleep in the chairs, the TV will eventually turn itself off. It doesn’t get any easier than that.
Here’s wishing everybody good health and good times in 2018!