I am writing this on Monday, 5/26. There are no pics.

We’re enjoying a quiet and relaxing holiday. The weather has been very nice. We had our Thursday dinner out on Wednesday this week. On Friday, Danita worked at Goddard. This always means a longer commute with more traffic. By Friday afternoon, the holiday traffic was so bad that I-95 became a virtual parking lot. Danita had her GPS route her home on back roads. With nothing happening Friday evening, and having eaten at home Thursday, we decided to go to Jason’s and have a salad bar dinner. After that, we watched the last of this season’s TV shows. We stayed home Saturday.

Sunday was Ed and Lynne’s Parkton Open, the annual invitational croquet championship. There were so many people this year, Ed had 3 croquet courses set up. There were two sets of games (6 games in all). The winners of each game played in the championship game. Danita was in the first set. She came in 4th out of 6. I was in the second set, coming in 6th out of 5. In my defense, I was knocked way out at the beginning of the game. After that, I was well behind everybody else. Unable to tap anybody’s ball and get two more strokes, I ended up almost half way through when the game was won.

This morning, we took Mark out to breakfast. He’s busy packing for his big trip. He got a summer job teaching physics to high schoolers through CTY. This year, he’s teaching in Saudi Arabia. He’ll be living on the US compound. The Saudi students will come on the compound for their classes. The second half of the summer, he’ll be teaching astrophysics at Hopkins, also for CTY. Mark knows a lot of people working in physics. One of the things he likes to do is arrange Skype sessions so the students can meet a lot of people and hear what they do with their education in physics. He’s had a bit of a trouble getting people lined up this year due to the time difference. His classes start at 1 AM East Coast time. While it’s possible that some folks are awake at 1, he also needs them to be sober. ;-) He’s using more folks from the west coast for this class. They told him to be a cultural ambassador. He’s taking that seriously. He said he has females, blacks, asians, whites, and even a middle-eastern person lined up.

My personal news is about my laptop computer. The fan started making noise. Sometimes, the computer reports “fan error” and refuses to boot. I decided to have the computer repaired. It’s amazingly expensive, but the computer is only 3 years old. I’m hoping that a new fan will make it good for another 2 years. In the mean time, Danita has a work laptop and iPad. She uses them for working at home and takes the laptop to Godard when she works down there. But one of them is generally available. She has a keyboard for the iPad, which makes it much easier to type. In fact, I’m writing this on her iPad. My computer is supposed to be ready near the end of the week.

That’s the news for this week. I’ll be starting the charcoal for some hamburgers pretty soon. Then we’ll stream a movie suitable for Memorial Day. I hope this finds everybody doing well.