It’s been one of those weekends that just turned out differently than we thought. It’s too unimportant and boring to go into all the details, and everything turned out fine. But it was just not … what … we … expected. Still, it was a good weekend and lots of good things happened. The best was that we’ve started planning a birthday party for Mom. We’ll have the party in West Palm Beach on the first weekend in April. So far, planning is a lot of fun and everything is going very well. Of course, that’s to be expected when you get the “3 Ds” on your Dream Team — Dani, Danita, and Dennis.

One of the weekend highlights came to pass. We had a neighborhood “Country and Blues” concert last night. The band has been here a couple of times before. They put on a good concert. In the past, they’ve been here in the summer when we have the deck available. This time it was way too cool to use the deck, so we were all inside. Attendance wasn’t that large, so there was enough room for everybody. But they had 5 musicians with speakers and amplifiers. It was a little loud for the venu. The concert included crackers, cheese, beer and wine, plus deserts at the break. There was way too much food. It was a good time.

I was hoping for a bike ride Sunday, but the weather forecast changed to an all-day rain, which put that out of the question. I managed to get an unexpected ride in Saturday. I might have overdone it a little. This morning, I started feeling some discomfort in one of my biking muscles. A ride would have been out of the question even without the rain. Tomorrow will be nice. Maybe I’ll try an easy ride. We’ll see how I feel.

I had several proposals for our neighborhood board. I suggested we replace a WiFi access point that needs to be reset way too often. That was accepted. For some reason, the new unit isn’t in yet. I’ll be following up on that. The installation will be a little involved because the configuration has to be done on the office computer, and it will take some time for me to remember exactly what I’m supposed to do. My second proposal was that we do a security review. Not only are ransomware attacks becoming more likely, hackers are starting to attack online backups. We also have some other security concerns we’ll be discussing. A neighbor agreed to contact an expert and set up the review. That should be an interesting exercise. The third proposal was a “computer assistance” offer for residents. Getting board approval is essential because board-sanctioned activities put me under the board’s liability insurance. That was also approved, but no residents have requested assistance. While I’m waiting around, I thought it would be fun to put together a little database application to generate invoices and track activity. Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten more than I realized. My first attempt crashed and burned. I’ll be starting a second attempt this week.

We have so many activities next week that we actually have a conflict. Both our church and our neighborhood have Octoberfest dinners next Saturday (the 26th). Normally we would serve food for the church dinner, but we didn’t want to miss the neighborhood dinner. We decided to help set up at the church dinner, then come home to eat at the neighborhood dinner. They say idle hands are the devil’s workshop. The devil isn’t getting much of an opportunity for us right now.

That’s the news for this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.