The day started with a lot of tension. I am administrator of our neighborhood website, snowdenoverlook.com. Our web site host provider decided to move our site to a new server while I was on vacation. This morning our site was moved. I had to make a few changes. But every time I tried to do something, the program I was trying to use decided it urgently needed an update. In the mean time, our ship had docked and right outside my window was a very loud, very enthusiastic, and not very good band. I’m sure it was a nice welcome and quite colorful, but what I needed was an internet connection that could at the very minimum download those updates just a little faster. All’s well that ends well, as they say. So far as I can see, our website was migrated successfully.

Our visit to Nicaragua was an eye opener. I’m sure everybody reading this knows that there are countries that aren’t as rich as the US. But Nicaragua’s poverty was an incredible shock. It was even more of a shock when our tour guide told us that the country used to be the richest in Central America. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a country that relies on horse drawn carts for some of their transportation. And the horses are emaciated. If a citizen wants a taxi, they are likely to take a 3-wheeled bicycle powered by a strong young man. This is a country that if a young couple, both employed, gets married and shares expenses, they can’t meet their basic living needs. It’s a country where only 70% of the children go to school. I was too embarrassed to ask what the literacy rate is. (It’s 97% for Costa Rica.) We saw a house without plumbing. These houses have a well, typically 40 to 60 feet deep. They put a bucket on a rope, hook the rope up to a horse, and have the horse pull up their drinking water.

We visited Leon, which has a very nice square. I would have a better picture, but pointing a camera at an individual is an invitation to offer tips. One of our first stops was at the Cathedral. We were delayed at the steps while children performed a “traditional dance”. The idea was to make fun of the Spanish. But there’s no doubt the children were more interested in the tips than in the authenticity of the dance, or any other part of their history. When we gained access to the roof of the Church, we had to remove our shoes because they had just painted part of the roof.

After visiting Leon, we visited a school run by the Cohen family, This is one of the richest families in the country. Their estate, if you can gain access, has beautiful horses, any one of which is worth more than the entire residence of 10 average families. As it turns out, the Cohen family is enlightened. They run a school that educates poor children and includes a pre-Colombian art museum. (That’s one school for the entire country. But hey, they also contribute to the cost of “one computer for every child”.”) Our tour guide was a very self-assured 14-year old female student who had an amazing knowledge of pre-Colombian artifacts. She doesn’t speak English, so our bus tour guide had to translate. One of the many things she explained was that the Spanish were very interested in gold when they arrived in South America. This was very confusing to the natives, because they valued jade over gold. Only royalty could own jade,.

I wish the best for our nameless tour guide, and for the entire country. I hope this finds everybody doing well

Yesterday was an “at sea” day. There was plenty to keep us busy. Today we stopped in Costa Rica. Danita and I took a Mangrove River wildlife tour. If you click the link to see the pictures, you will see my wildlife pics. I was amazed that any of them came out. I’m not going to try to identify the species of animals. Image 2744 is an iguana. 2726 is an 18 foot long crocodile. The rest are all birds.

It’s time to get ready for dinner. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Today’s story begins with yesterday. We’re traveling with Ed and Lynne. Ed is really good at seeing things. He took us to the bow of the ship and showed us lots of flying fish. His theory is they were trying to get away from the ship. It’s impossible for me to photograph, but it was quite an impressive site. We spent quite a while watching flying fish, and gulls fishing.

Today we crossed the Panama Canal. It took 10 hours, which is typical. The thing that impressed me most was the lock doors, called leafs. The original leafs are still in use. They are massive. I think I heard 7,000 pounds, and I think I heard 9 tons. Either way, that’s heavy. However, they are hollow. They float. When the canal first opened in 1914, they were operated by 30 HP electric motors. Now they have hydraulic rams. Sometimes they refuse to open. When this happens, they can be opened by hand — just by turning a wheel.

It was all cool. It turns out that our lanai area was exactly where the pirates pilots boarded our ship. I was also impressed with the Culebra Cut, the toughest excavation and the site of numerous mud slides. Even today, it is narrow and crooked enough that ships prefer not to pass each other while in the cut. If you choose to look at the pictures, you will see many details of the canal.

After an exhausting day guiding the ship through the canal (and also enjoying a some wine, just as the French did when they were in Panama), it’s time to rest up for dinner. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

What’s wrong with a pleasant breezy day in the 80s? Nothing I can find! We took a “natural wonder” tour of Aruba. The main attraction was a butterfly farm. Caretakers put out slices of fruit for the butterflies to eat. The fruit ferments. The butterflies get drunk. If you look at the pictures, you will see lots of butterflies, including two that landed on Danita’s back. We saw an Owl Butterfly that disguises itself by looking like the face of an owl when it’s wings are stretched out. This was the only drunk butterfly we actually saw.

We also the ruins of the natural bridge. A smaller natural bridge is still standing, sometimes called “Son of a Bridge”. The entertainment on this trip has been excellent. We saw two performances by a dance troupe, a comedian, several talks by a naturalist, and concerts by a classical quintet.

Tomorrow is an at sea day. Sunday we will transit the canal. We aren’t stopping anywhere in Panama.

Well, it’s time to go sit on our lanai chairs. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We started our cruise with two days at sea. There’s not a lot to write about. The food is good. The entertainment is excellent. There’s plenty do do. But even so, after a couple of days, it’s time to visit an Island. Our first port of call is Curacao. The island is famous for having all white buildings until a governor claimed it was too bright and gave him a headache. He had the people repaint their houses and buildings to any color they wanted, as long as it wasn’t white. Later on, it became known that the governor was part owner of the island’s only paint store. But the tradition stuck. Colonial buildings were built with coral rock. The island decided to preserve these buildings, but it takes a lot of work. The buildings suffer from “wall sickness” caused by the salt in the coral rock. Buildings have to be painted every year and re-plastered every 3 years.We took a ride in a semi-submarine: a boat with under-water windows. We saw plenty of sponges, coral, and fish. Sargent Major fish have the same number of stripes as a US Army Sargent Major. Fire coral protects itself in an unusual way. If you touch it, you will feel a very painful burning sensation. The white sand beaches in this area are made by zebra fish. They are quite small and eat small plants that grow on the coral. When they eat, they get a small amount of calcium from the coral. They excrete this as white sand. If you come to lay on a white sand beach, you are laying on zebra fish poop! If we heard our guide right, each fish makes over a ton of sand a year. We also visited a Curacao liquor plant and met a bird that was wasting away again in margaritaville.

We started our month’s adventure with some time in Florida. We got to Mom’s place just after 5 PM Wednesday exactly as planed. There was lots for me to do. When the construction started on her apartment last year, I moved her computer, printer, and phones out of her bedroom. As a result, the only phones that worked were the two cordless phones. Mom told lots of stories about cables that used to be under the carpet but are now strung across the floor and cable connections that didn’t work. Or maybe she didn’t, but that’s what I heard. For some reason I don’t understand, a workman drilled a hole in her wall to run a coax from the porch to the living room. (So far as I can figure out, the cable we were already using was working fine.) I had no idea how much would be involved in getting things working again. I decoded to pack a separate suitcase with drills, cables, connector tools, cable staples, etc. Thank you Southwest for your policy of two free bags. I can’t imagine why TSA felt they had to inspect that suitcase. ;-) I decided to assess the wiring Monday evening in case I had to order something.

When we got there, I found all the wiring to be fine. I spent a few hours futzing around furniture and organizing cable, but by the end of the day all phones, computers, printers, and cables were in good working order and reasonably neat. I didn’t need as single tool. I spent several hours Thursday and Friday futzing with various things and even found a use for some of the tools. I was pleasantly surprised that Mom felt comfortable E-filing her income taxes, which saved us some time and effort in organizing paperwork for mailing. I was looking forward to cruising through Saturday when a very strange gremlin showed up. We were going through Mom’s important papers. I decided to re-scan her I-bonds. The scanner scanned the first page, then the printer stopped working. The printing and scanning functions worked fine. The network functions worked fine. But the driver could’t locate the printer. Reboots, updates, re-installs, Google searches, and every other trick I could come up with did not help. So I hooked the printer up to Mom’s laptop with a USB cable. (Can you guess the only cable I didn’t bring with me? Fortunately, we found the USB cable that came with the printer.) It works fine, but Mom doesn’t feel comfortable unplugging and plugging in the USB cable. She can only use her laptop at her desk. That’s mostly what she does anyway, so it’s not a major hardship. But it sure is puzzling.

We had time for some fun stuff also. We went to Pete’s Place for breakfast Friday. We went to the WPB Green Market for breakfast Saturday.

We left for Ft. Lauderdale Sunday. We had some extra time and visited the Bonnet House. The property had three owners. One was a person who knew how to turn swamps into useful land by draining swamps. He made his fortune buying swamps in Chicago and selling waterfront property. He made his second fortune in Florida. The Bonnet house is on an island with one of the highest elevations in the area — a full 15 feet above sea level — and was surrounded by swamps. The other owner was the son of a very wealthy man who owned a Chicago wholesale hardware business. (His wife was the third owner.) He decided he wanted to be an artist. I don’t know that his art competes with the greats, but he was perhaps the most commercially successful artist ever. His first commission was painting glass windows to look like stained glass, for which he earned almost $2 million in today’s money. He continued to talk his way into equally lucrative commissions for the next 15 years or more. The story is that everything he did lasted a lifetime. It’s easy to believe. We walked on cement floors faux painted to look like marble. The floors looked as good as ever, in spite of heavy tourist traffic.The house was built with plenty of reinforced concrete with excellent water management. It has not been damaged by hurricanes and has never flooded. The art we saw was whimsical. The better art we saw was purchased or made by his friends. It was a delightful tour.

It’s time to switch the phones to international mode and get on the boat. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We’re leaving for a month of travel. The itinerary is at the bottom of this message. Here’s how to get hold of us. THIS I S NEW. THIS IS NEW. THIS IS NEW.

The easiest way to get in touch is to send an Email. We purchased the Email plan on the ship. We will have access to Email every day. If you want to call, feel free. If our phones ring, we’ll answer. If we’re outside the US, phone calls are very cheap for us and free for you. If we don’t pick up (maybe we’re at sea and mobile phones don’t work), leave a voice mail. We’ll get the voice mail delivered to our Email. This is what’s weird. If we are outside the US and you want us to answer the phone, call Danita’s number. Her number will ring both of our cell phones.

Dennis: 410-417-8854.

Danita: 410-709-8854. This number receives calls except when we are at sea. When we are outside the US, this number rings both of our cell phones.

It’s been a good week and a good weekend. We’ve had plenty of time to get ready for our trip. The weather hasn’t permitted any drone flying, but I was able to get out almost every day, had several bike rides, and should be able to fly the drone a couple of days before we leave. We had a neighborhood party last night. The menu was soup and salad. The company was great. We have a neighborhood Valentine’s concert tomorrow. Tuesday, we’ll go out to eat with our neighbors the Jones.

It’s a good thing I started getting ready early, because the phones took several days to set up. My goal was to have our phones work normally the entire trip. That didn’t work out. Our phones are virtual numbers at Google Voice. That’s how we get voice mail delivered by Email. We forward the Google Voice numbers to whatever real phone numbers we happen to be using. I set my phone up with Google Fi, because that offers a very reasonable price for international phone and data. But I can’t forward a Google Voice number to a Google Fi number. In addition, setting up Google Fi while keeping my Google Voice number was a royal pain in the butt. I had to chat with tech support to get it working. I got a traveler’s international SIM card for Danita from a company in Estonia with voice but no data. The company offers a decent base price and a good price for voice, but the data is expensive. All together, it turned out to be a reasonable solution with just a little weirdness. But it took me several days to work through the unexpected limitations and find a decent solution. Most importantly, Danita and I can call each other if we get separated, and my phone will have data in case we need a mobile GPS to find our way back to the ship.

Here’s our itenerary:

2/19 – Fly to West Palm Beach
2/20 – 2/23 – Visit with Mom
2/24 – 3/11 – Cruise through the Panama Canal to San Diego
3/12 – 3/17 – Tool around California
3/18 – Fly home
3/19 – 3/20 – Four medical appointments (between me, Danita, and Bud) and a neighborhood party

It was a nice week. We watched the Superbowl commercials. We even watched the game. We had the usual assortment of foods. Our “ace” this year was rootbeer floats with rootbeer float flavored ice cream. I had my semi-annual checkup. Apparently I’m still alive. There were no neighborhood parties this week, so we went to a Shriver Hall concert held at the BMA. (The world does tend to get a little confusing at times.) We heard a flute recital. To be truthful, I didn’t enjoy the concert all that much. But it was interesting. My take-away was how hard it is to be a musician. The flutist and the pianist were both world-class musicians. The flutist was the principal flutist at the York Symphony Orchestra. The pianist was a piano teacher. If they don’t qualify for food assistance, they’ve got to be close to that line.

We had some heavy rain followed by high winds (gusts well over 30 MPH). Fortunately, we didn’t get the tornadoes and sever weather some areas west and north of Baltimore got. I went for a 3-mile walk on a paved trail after the rain stopped but during the high winds. I saw a tree fall in the woods. I was surprised how quickly it all happened. I got a good appreciation for how people can get hit by falling trees.

My success in drone flying has been less than astonishing. One of the problems I have is knowing which way the drone is pointing. When it’s a couple of hundred feet away, all I can see is a black blob. I can tell it to go forward, but where that takes the drone depends on which way it is facing. A gust of wind can temporarily affect its direction, and if it’s facing towards or away from me, I can’t always tell which way its moving. Even if it’s flying to the side, by the time I figure out where its going, make a correction, observe the drone and note that I turned the drone the wrong way, and make the opposite correction, the drone has moved a lot. And many times, I’m in trouble. I got some acrylic paint and painted the bottom of the drone. The left half is red, the right half yellow. It was a big help, but not as big as I expected. However, when I managed to fly it into the woods, the bright colors made it much easier to find. We’re expecting to have some more rain this week. That will give me time to paint the top of the drone also. Just in case it crashes upside-right.

Our big news is our upcoming trip. We’re flying to West Palm Beach Wednesday the 19th. We’ll spend some time with Mom, then sail to San Diego via the Panama Canal. This is a week of getting prescriptions filled, clothes packed, and other last minute preparations — including hopefully a much easier way to contact us. Thanks to Google’s Fi phone service, we expect to be able to call the US for pennies a minute. We’ll know for sure by the end of the week.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

It’s another quiet week. The community super bowl party was cancelled for lack of interest. We weren’t planning to go anyway. It’s more fun to eat junk and watch the commercials at home. I guess most of our neighbors agree with us. Tomorrow we’re going to a play called “The Burn”, about how the internet can be used as an on-line witch hunt.

Danita’s arthritis medicine is helping her quite a bit. Unfortunately, it will take her a long time to taper off the Prednisone.

Our trash pickup usually happens early in the afternoon. Usually Danita leaves to visit her Dad about 9:30 on Wednesday. I wheel the trash can out while she has the garage door open. This week, I heard the trash truck early in the morning. I quick grabbed the two biggest bags of trash and ran outside. The trash truck just passed our house and was rolling down the street. This was the first time I ever threw my trash directly into the trash truck. Exciting times at Snowden Overlook!

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

It’s been a good week. We started with a visit with Mark and JiaJia. Ed and Lynne joined us for lunch Sunday, then had a quick tour of the town and campus. Ed and Lynne went home. Danita and I spent the rest of the day in Lewisburg and headed back after a bang-up breakfast Monday morning. The food and camaraderie were wonderful. Mark and JiaJia have a very nice house.

We had two Chinese dinner parties — one with our condo on Thursday and one with our neighborhood on Saturday. Thankfully, Danita agreed that one Chinese dinner a week is enough. We went to the neighborhood party. They had shrimp, rice, and egg rolls. They had other stuff too, but that was enough to fill my belly. The shrimp were quite good. After dinner, we had cake and ice cream for desert.

I found that my drone fits in a bike pannier bag like a glove. I took my drone with me on a ride and stopped at a local park. One of the soccer fields was unused. I went to the center of the field and flew for 20 minutes or so. The drone is stable and easy to fly. I even got a second flight at a second location. It’s an easy walk from home, just off one of Columbia’s trails. It’s not nearly as big as a soccer field, but it’s ample.

I’ve only had one crash. The controller has these multi-use buttons. One is the flight button. If the drone is on the ground, the flight button makes it take off, get to an altitude of about 4 feet, and hover. Pretty neat. Press the button again, and the drone safely and gently lands. Amazing. Hold the button too long and it becomes an emergency stop button. I dropped it from about 6 feet onto dirt. Funny thing about drones — when the propellers stop, it falls like a brick. There was no damage. I recon’ myself more successful than the Wright Brothers. Woo-Hoo! Now all I need are dry, reasonably warm days when school is in session. Adults are sensible enough to leave me alone when I’m flying. Who knows what a parcel bored of kids would do should if they came across me.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.