The flight to Tucson was uneventful. We’re staying in a Home 2 Suite hotel in the downtown district. The property is excellent. Our room is fabulous. Our bedroom and living area are separated with a door, which makes it much easier for one of us to sleep in a little. Here’s a view from our 6th floor lobby.
We were counting on a locally owned super grocery store for most of our needs. It’s a short walk from the hotel and stocks a large variety of pre-prepared foods. Unfortunately, it’s closed for renovation. That’s no real problem. Public transportation is quite good and totally free.
It was time to get dinner. We arrived on the first day of a major cold snap. Evening temperatures were around 40 degrees. We found a bar/restaurant that has an excellent reputation. The food was very good for bar food. We even had a restaurant favorite — chocolate covered bacon. It was a nice dinner but there was one thing that surprised us. The place had air conditioning, but it doesn’t have heat. Customers were eating with their coats on. Nobody else seemed to find this at all remarkable. I remember when I was a kid, some places started air conditioning the entire store. They would put signs on their windows advertising it was cool inside, with a picture of a penguin standing in the snow. We didn’t see any store advertising they were warm. ;-)
We are leaving for vacation Wednesday. Our first few weeks are in Tucson. You might heard of the movie “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles”. If you didn’t see it, you haven’t missed much. But the title and premise were good. We’re doing that this year — plus we’re adding a boat (cruise to Mexico), and Uber, walking, and a bunch of other transportation modes.
As most of you know, it’s snowing today. We might get 5″. 40 years ago, it would have been an inconvenience. But we haven’t had any substantial snow for 3 years. Nobody knows what to do, other than perhaps check that their car’s flashers work. The snow ends tonight. We are very lucky to be leaving Wednesday. Everything should be back to normal by then. (Fingers crossed!). If we are delayed a day, it’s no big deal.
A few days ago, my router started flaking out. I had to unplug and re-plug it to get it working again. This is a really bad thing because our security cameras need WiFi to do their thing. I ordered a new router. (MikroTek hAP ax2, if you are into that kind of thing). It’s a sweet piece of equipment, but setup is more complicated than I thought it would be. I spent two long days getting a simple setup we can live with. I’ll work on it more after we return.
For more fun, I fired up the security cameras. One doesn’t work. Amazon says they can get a replacement by 11:00 AM tomorrow. We’ll see.
We were probably the first people reading this to celebrate 2025. We had a “New Year at Noon” dinner. Ed & Lynne, and Rick and Suzy joined us. Danita prepared a wonderful meal. Here are a few pics.
In retrospect, our Christmas turned out to be a little more quiet than we would have preferred. We opened presents in the morning. Then Danita prepared a brunch and we took it to Mom’s. We had quiche, fruit, and muffins. It was all very good.
I received a gift that I think is way cool. Of course, some may not understand its significance, but I think it’s an amazing idea. It’s a digital sundial. It actually displays time in digital format (like this: “12:40”). It needs no batteries, computers, or WiFi. It has one moving part. You set the time by twisting the sundial body. As simple as it is to use, it is based on some math that I frankly don’t understand. Digital sundial math What could be cooler than that? I’m a little frustrated that we haven’t had a day of good strong sunshine, so the display is not very good. I’m including a picture from the internet.
Our parish has two teams counting the plate. Each team counts once every four weeks. The other team got the checks wrong two times in a row. For some reason I don’t understand, getting checks wrong is a much bigger deal than getting cash wrong. Our bank threatened to prohibit our dropping the deposit in their night box. If we got it wrong again, we would have to send two people to wait in the bank while tellers counted. If there was a discrepancy, the two would make a corrective entry in the deposit slip. Obviously, nobody wants to sit in the bank lobby for a hour or two. Our pastor gave us his best half-time motivational speech. Because our team consistently gets it right, there was some less-than-good-natured grumbling about the other team — until I warned that we could end up doing all the counts. Nobody on our team wants that either. All in all, it was a big hoora.
Because our team prefers to count the Christmas plate separate from the regular weekly offerings, we have another count January 5. Hopefully the residual bad feelings will have been resolved.
We’re getting ready for our big vacation. This is a two-month jaunt in the western US (Jan 8 – March 1). We are deciding on clothing, counting pills, and deciding where we will have our last Sunday breakfast. (Bob Evans won.) Details to follow!
Three food trucks were scheduled this week. One of them showed. We enjoyed eating with the Joneses.
I wanted to retire from being the webmaster for our community website. Jeff volunteered. I trained our events coordinator how to update content on the website while Jeff contributed and observed. That was the last item on the handoff checklist. I’m free!
Danita is still slowly recovering. She can do a 45 minute walk. That’s good progress.
There were no concerts, plays, or theater movies. All the gifts were taken care of weeks ago. It was a quiet, relaxing week. Even the weather was conducive to peace and quiet. Who wants to bike when temperatures are near freezing, winds gust to 30 MPH, and rain is coming? Not me.
We had a neighborhood party this week. The twist for this party was randomly assigned tables — we couldn’t just sit in our normal groups. But no doubt the star for this week was Mom. Sunday, we took Mom to one of the local train gardens. This one was particularly nice because they had signs listing a specific item or setting to find. One scene was for people playing checkers, another was for a new and an old Ford car, and so forth. We had a lot of fun finding the scenes and pointing them out to each other. Plus they had push buttons that made the flag fly, or turned on flashing lights, or whatever.
That certainly is not enough to make Mom the star, so we next went to a concert in the chapel at Charlestown. We heard a group called The Suspicious Cheese Lords. They are an acapella group that sings ancient pieces with lots of moving parts. They put on an amazing show. The chapel is gorgeous, and the acoustics are simply perfect for this type of music. The included a couple of sing-along songs. For those, they used the organ to get everybody singing together. I was surprised at the quality of the organ.
Yes, that’s real marble. They hired artisans from Italy when they refurbished the chapel.
For a capper, we went to the Catonsville Gourmet restaurant. It didn’t take much arm twisting to get Mom to pick a favorite she normally can’t get — quiche — and a generous desert.
I hope this finds everybody doing well and having a jolly Christmas.
They installed a new roof for our house this week. Due to variations in the weather, the contractor can’t follow a set schedule. Their system is to hang a tag on your doorknob the day before they will work on the house. I called this the “tomorrow tag”. I spent days saying things like “Will we get the tomorrow tag tomorrow?” I’m sure Danita will tell you it felt to her that I did this for months. We finally got out tomorrow tag on Wednesday, which was really too bad, because I wanted to write that “We got the tomorrow tag on Tuesday.” Really, who can deny that “alittle alliteration” can be fun? Just for the record, I ended up spending most of Tuesday afternoon at the clubhouse. Danita spent it in the basement. As noisy as they were, the crew did a marvelous job of cleaning up.
Tuesday is discount day at our local movie theater. That made Tuesday a great day to see Wicked. You should see it too. The buzz is right. It’s a very good movie.
Saturday was train garden day. We visited the Glen Avenue trains, a great fav of ours. We also found a new fav at the Ellicott City Fire Station. It doesn’t have night and day lighting like Glen Ave has. It doesn’t even have a building on fire like Glen Ave does. But it does have a fire house that opens the overhead door, then the fire truck comes out and goes back in, then has the door close. As well as countless other very cool things.
The whole week was about Thanksgiving. We had 10 for dinner. Ed & Lynne – Pat, Jul, Bryon, and Liz – Ryn and dog – Mom. Danita and I enjoyed hosting Thanksgiving immensely.
The party crowd
Jul & family arrived with a beautiful poinsettia.
Mom joined us. She was proud of having completed a wickedly difficult jig saw puzzle. The sides and top did not have any straight pieces.
Ryn got a last minute cancellation from her dog sitter, so the dog joined us. Ryn named it “Tin tin”, so she has “Ryn tin tin’. Tin is very protective of family and loves scratching her back on the rug. But she can’t understand why she isn’t allowed to go off leash to chase deer when visiting us.
Danita did her amazing food preparation. Of course we had way more food than we needed. And of course it was really good. If you visit the web site, you will see just how amazing it was, as well as a few other pics.
Friday we visited the Ellicott City train garden in the morning, then drove to the National Cryptographic Museum in the afternoon.
Everybody disbursed to their homesteads by early Saturday morning. We have the house almost back to normal .Danita and I had a wonderful time. I hope all had a great Thanksgiving.
We’ve had quite a few minor repairs lately. I already talked about my bike disaster.
The most unusual (for us) issue was our credit cards. If hackers get to your bank account, they love to buy gift cards. We had several gift cards as gifts this year. We bought a few gift cards, then the credit card stopped working. After another gift card, the second credit card stopped working. We completed our purchases on our third (and last) credit card. All was explained when I opened my Email and saw fraud alerts. Fortunately, this was easily fixed with a couple of phone calls.
We had our furnace checked out. It needed a new capacitor. I could save $200 if I did it myself. I ordered the parts. Installation required a little soldering. Imagine my surprise when I discovered my soldering iron didn’t work. I was able to do a temporary installation. Thank goodness Amazon has soldering irons available with one-day delivery. The furnace guy also recommended a water leak detector. That went a lot more smoothly.
Our primary toilet broke. The innards of toiles are plastic these days. It’s inexpensive but not very long lasting. I got a repair kit. Installation went smoothly, but it required 49 steps, not counting several “If .,.. Then” to get the correct part installed.
The window washer on our Leaf stopped working. This is important because the Leaf sits under our tree when I’m on the bike. This time of year, it collects a lot of little sappy things on the windshield. A working washer is a highly desirable thing to have. Adding new washer fluid didn’t help. I diddled with it, undoubtedly creating a small lake of window washer fluid somewhere under the hood. I took it to a repair shop. The hose had rotted. The shop made it good as new in just a few hours. The car is only 8 years old. I don’t understand why Nissan can’t use a hose that’s a little more robust.
I was also called on to help with some minor problems on our web site. A very knowledgeable man took over the web site several months ago, but a few issues were popping up. We spent an hour together getting everything squared away. Before the meeting, I spent several hours reviewing the issues so our work together would go smoothly. I used to know this stuff, but these days I have to look up a lot of stuff to refresh my memory. Thinking on my feet is a definite no-go, unless I have lots of quiet time to get my mind right.
There’s much more to life than niggling problems (such as having the furnace work in the winter time). We had a nice food truck dinner with the Jonse’s. My blood work returned a very respectable “all green”. We’re looking forward to going to a play at Howard Community College in a couple of hours. Danita’s knee is still recovering, albeit very slowly.
It was a mostly nice week. We had a food truck dinner with the Jonse’s, a neighborhood trivia night (our team didn’t do very well this time), and a concert at UMBC. The concert was a string quartet. They played Mozart and Bartok. The hook was the Mozart’s piece is known ad “Dissonance”. Who knew Mozart wrote anything like this? Not me for sure. The Bartok was — well, we expect dissonance from him. One thing about this kind of music, you’ll never know if they got some of the notes wrong. As usual, the descriptions were nearly as entertaining as the music, with “intervallic relationships” and “palindromically arranged movements”. Someday I’ll have to look up what this stuff means.
Danita’s knee isn’t getting better quickly. She is doing less walking than a week ago. The good news is that she has good range of motion, and she can use the stairs.
I wanted to make a minor change to my bike. I ran into trouble and tried to solve it myself. That was a bad move for sure. Suddenly I had a bunch of parts all over the garage. It shouldn’t be that hard to put back together. It’s bearings and races. Somehow I don’t seem to be able to figure out how to put it back together. I’ll be taking a trip to the bike shop today, and also losing the best biking weather we will have this week.
The excitement this week started Thursday. The roofing company started. They weren’t scheduled to work on our roof until December. But they changed their minds, deciding to remove all the fake chimneys first. And they also decided ours would be the last chimney removed Thursday. Both of our cars had to be parked on the street. I was using one car to visit Mom, Danita was using the other for her PT. Danita moved her car, but I didn’t know because I was at Charlestown escorting Mom to her doctor. Danita tried calling me several times, but somehow my phone connected to Mom’s hearing aids. We kept on stopping to answer the phone only to have an unsuccessful conversation. Mom’s anxiety started taking off. Talking to Danita through Mom’s hearing aids, I was able to say I would call her back after Mom was at the doctor’s.
By 4:00, they hadn’t started on our chimney. I figured they would wrap things up and go home. I was wrong. The goal was to get my chimney down. That day. They started a little after 4, working like crazy. Time moved on. By 5 the sun was down. It was getting dark. The crews kept on working. By 6 it was dark out. The crew strapped headlamps to their heads and kept on working. 7:00 came and went. They tied headlamps to trees and posts and kept on working. They finally got done about 7:30. I have to had it to them. When they were done, our roof was totally waterproof and everything was picked up, except for one headlamp tied to our tree, bravely shining light throughout the night. Any stranger that decided to take a nighttime stroll would never guess roofers had worked on my house at all. Crews came back Friday to finish chimney removals. They knew exactly the best way to remove the remaining chimneys. They were more relaxed. All chimneys were down by 4:00. What an amazing crew. It was strange to see them walk on the roofs with no safety lines and concern, just as if they did it every day. ;-)
Although that was be far the most unique event of the week, it was far from all the excitement. We had a neighborhood party Friday (soup & sandwiches). We went with the Jonse’s and had a good time.
Saturday morning we had a free members only brunch at Gertrude’s at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The food was excellent as always. The talk was given by the artist LaToya Ruby Frazier. Her exhibit is about Baltimore community health workers, especially during COVID. Besides being a good artist, she is an excellent speaker. She gave a vivid description of what life was like for the under-privileged during COVID. Here’s one of her photos. What a powerful statement.
Tiffany Scott, flanked by the Bank America and the Trans America buildings in the background.
Saturday evening we attended the neighborhood volunteer dinner. Quite honestly, the food wasn’t very good. That’s not the main point, of course, but it would be nice if the food was hot and not dried out.
That would be enough for most retired folks, but we had more. This morning we had breakfast at Panera where we both had discounts. It was counting day at church. This afternoon, we attended a concert at UMBC. The Inscape Chamber Orchestra offered pieces by Shostakovich and others. The music was quite good, but the writeups these groups give themselves stretch the imagination. We heard the group “reach across genres and generations, and transcend the confines of the traditional classical concert experience”, which is something I might have missed if I hadn’t read the program.
It’s time for dinner here in Snowden Overlook. I hope this finds everybody doing well.
