I am writing this on Saturday, Oct 18. There are no pics. This might be a little long. I’ll put the most important stuff first.

Danita’s Aunt Delores died. She has been suffering from Alzheimer’s for many years. She died in Atlanta, where her daughter Darlene lives; but she spent most of her life in Scotsboro, Alabama. Her funeral will be Saturday in Scotsboro. (Long story, but it’s not helpful to make arrangements ahead of time if the funeral home goes out of business.) Our original plan was to change our plans for next week and attend the funeral. But Danita found that it takes all day, 3 planes, and a one-hour car ride to get from San Diego to Scottsboro. Getting from there to home isn’t a lot easier. Danita decided to send a note of remembrances instead of attending the funeral.

We are leave for San Diego in the morning. This should be a quiet, relaxing trip. Here’s the itinerary:

Sun, Oct 19: Southwest Airlines flight 503 – BWI to San Diego, 9:40 AM to 12:20 PM

Sat, Oct 25: Southwest Airlines flight 908 – San Diego to BWI, 12:15 PM to 8:10 PM

Hotel:
Best Western Plus Suites Hotel Coronado Island
275 Orange Ave, Coronado, CA 29118
(619) 437-1666

We were quite lucky with the stomach flu. We drove home from Jul’s house Monday. Danita felt bad and spent most of the car ride sleeping, but I felt fine. Tuesday, I felt bad and spent most of the day sleeping, but Danita felt fine. This meant we were able to get home on time, and Danita was able to go to work Tuesday, which was a very busy day for her.

We went to another retirement financial planning seminar last Thursday. The idea was that attending these would let us see what kind of people are available to help us with our financial planning. What we saw was pretty bleak. We don’t plan to attend any more of these, with or without a free dinner. A popular service is to submit all our finances into some kind of computer program that prints out a detailed financial plan. We are getting that free from Danita’s retirement plan. We will also get, for free, recommendations of how we should rearrange things to achieve a wise diversification of investments. We’ll see where we go after we have our next meeting with her retirement advisor. The good thing for us is that we have lived under our means and been lucky financially. We have no debt, some pension, and a good collection of IRA / 401(k), etc funds. We never bought anything that went out of business like Enron, or Bethlehem Steel, or the old General Motors. So with a little knowledge and some basic advice, we should do fine.

I went to the Howard County 50+ Expo Friday. I go to get a free flu shot and to hear the Capitol Steps perform. I also usually listen to the keynote presentation and walk around scarfing up swag. I rode my bike as usual. This lets me park right at the high school, wrapping my bike lock cable around a “No Parking” sign. Everybody else has to park at the mall and take a shuttle bus. It was a beautiful day for riding. I got the flu shot without waiting in line. The Capitol Steps were fabulously funny. The keynote was an AARP person talking about moving into the next phase of life (retirement). It was a nice presentation, and I found it to be quite funny. She included a short exercise where we were supposed to write down a goal and how we would achieve it. Then we were supposed to share it with somebody near us in the audience. I noticed 3 groups of people in the audience. Married couples conferred quietly together. Women who came without a husband immediately moved closer to each other and started animated conversations. Men who came without a wife totally ignored the activity, spending this time reading a brochure they picked up at the exhibit or playing with their phone.

Picking up swag or getting tickets can be quite challenging because of all the old people. If you haven’t ever done something like this, you won’t be surprised to hear that many old people are mobility challenged. They move slowly, want one of everything they see, and take a long time organizing their junk. When they are finally done, they tend to stay where they are while they look around and decide where they want to go next. And, of course, they are always directly in front of me. I would stand back to give them a little space and wait for them to move out. What’s not so obvious is that there were other old people behind me. Those folks wanted to get to the swag, and they saw nothing wrong with pushing me out of the way, or jamming in front of me. More than once, I received such a push that a booth worker asked me if I was OK.

Tonight is our last dinner in Maryland. And we will have it at the clubhouse. This the annual “Volunteer Appreciation” dinner. Of course, it is put together by volunteers. Danita and I get to attend because I volunteer to help with our computers and such. Mostly what I do is pretty easy. For example, they want to change the times when people can use their pass cards to get into one of the doors. So I spent a couple of hours reading the user document. When we get back, I’ll spend another 15 minutes helping the staff effect the change. But even though I don’t do much, Danita and I will enjoy the dinner as much as if I spent hours and hours doing such things as cooking hamburgers or setting up for dinners.

I finished Ken Follet’s middle book of his Century trilogy, about the WW II era. Much of the story is familiar, but I enjoyed the read and learned quite a bit. He is so good at getting his facts right that I finally stopped checking them. He knows how to bring home a point. For example, many have written how important the US manufacturing capacity was to winning the war. Ken brought the point home. He wrote that the battle of Midway made it obvious how important air craft carriers were to control of the oceans. After Midway, Japan built 7 more of the complex and expensive air craft carriers. The US built 99. Unfortunately, he ran out of pages at the end. His coverage of the post WW II recovery in Europe was so abbreviated that it resulted in serious distortions of what happened and how. For example, he said that Truman got the voter support he needed to pass the Marshal Plan after Russia forcibly and obviously took over the Czechoslovakia government. I’m not an expert on this subject, but I know enough to know that this is a gross over simplification. He didn’t cover the Japanese recovery at all. I think there are a lot of interesting things to know about this era. Maybe someday I’ll find a good source on the subject.

Here’s an interesting tidbit I learned while reading up on the Marshal plan. Russia was desperate to prevent the plan from happening. They were offered the aid themselves, but refused it because it would result in the US controlling too much of their government. But the offer was a bluff. There was no support among voters for sending aid to Russia. If Russia had accepted the aid, the package probably wouldn’t have passed congress.

Well, this is quite long, and it’s time to stop! I hope this finds everybody doing well.