This is a long weekend, and we have plenty of activities to fill it up. Friday, we had a neighborhood party. Today, we had a breakfast just for our condo at Bob Evans. Tomorrow, we’re going to a concert at Johns Hopkins to hear the Philadelphia Brass Quintet. And Monday we have a circle lunch. Woo-Hoo!

I have recovered from my blue light treatment. But my earlier recovery process and lousy weather have kept me inside this week. So I did a home automation project. When my old sump pump alarm went on the fritz, I replaced it with a Smart Home hub made by Samsung. Well the hub can do more than just one alarm. Now, when we go away for a long time, I can click one button on my tablet. That will disable the garage doors and make the overhead lights turn on and off at defined times. That’s pretty cool if you ask me. I also wanted to add a water sensor to detect a leak in the clothes washer. Unfortunately, the sensor was defective so I’m waiting for a replacement.

Our ceiling fans have lights. These are unusual lights that one doesn’t always find at the hardware store. I went to Amazon ordered LED replacement lights that are a little brighter. Unfortunately, the package was lost and I had to re-order them. They should be in by Monday. That will be very good indeed because BG&E has offered to do a free energy audit. As part of the audit, they will install LED lights for me in any fixture I request. We have one fan and one ceiling fixture that are on a 20-foot high ceiling. They won’t have the speciality bulbs, but I will. So we’ll get new bulbs in those 20-foot high fixtures. There’s no way I would consider using a ladder that high, and it would cost at least $100 just to have an electrician visit the house. This is a very good deal for us.

Here’s a picture of an icicle we had hanging from the furnace exhaust pipe. It was nearly 8 feet long. We had some warm and rainy days and it’s all gone now. It reminded me of living in Omaha when I was about 10 or so. I remember houses would have snow blow almost as high as the roof. Other houses would have an icicle wall off one side of their porch. We didn’t have anything like that. But the icicle was pretty impressive for a while.

That’s all for now. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

The winter of 1977-78 was very cold. The bay froze over. People were walking across the bay under the bay bridge. The northeast experienced shortages of salt (for the roads) and coal (for electric power plants). For Baltimore, ships couldn’t get up the bay to deliver supplies. There were plenty of supplies in the railroad yards, but the hopper doors were frozen shut. They had to build fires to melt the ice so they could unload the cars. This understandably slowed the unloading of supplies. It’s not that cold this year yet. But it will be if low temperatures continue. Lows are well into the single digits. Highs are below 20. Icebreakers are patrolling the bay. Our furnace is not quite capable of meeting demand. It turns on at night and runs continuously, leaving the house at 65 — 3 degrees lower than the set point. Today there’s plenty of sunshine, but we’re still 2 degrees short of our desired temperature.

The temperature has a profound effect on our electric car. Last Sunday was a 5th Sunday. We took the Leaf to Miss Shirley’s Restaurant for breakfast, in the Inner Harbor. As we drove up towards Baltimore, it became evident that the Leaf has 1/3 to 1/4 the range it has in the summertime. We made it home fine, but we decided to turn the heat off and use that electricity for a little more driving range.

There were a few more niggles this week. On Monday, I hurt my back while lifting my razor. It’s a Gillette Trac-3, with 3 steel blades. I just might be the first person ever to hurt their back while lifting one of these babies. I spent a couple of days hobbling around the house.

Yesterday, I got a “blue light” treatment for my face. The doc says this kills off precancerous growths. It feels exactly like a severe sunburn to me. But I’m just a lay person. My face is so sore I won’t even think of getting into the shower. And I’m not lifting that Trac 3. I’m not allowed to be in sunlight for two days. Danita and I can go out for Sunday breakfast, provided we get back before sunrise. (That’s pretty easy for us.) But I won’t be able to go to Church. Our church is having a dinner Sunday. Danita and I usually volunteer to serve. I’m staying home and Danita is going just to eat, along with a few other people from the neighborhood. They’ll bring me a take-out meal for dinner.

Monday it’s my turn to bring donuts to Men’s club. I plan to get the donuts early in the morning, drop them at the clubhouse, and come home. Technically I can go out Monday if I’m wearing sunblock. But my face is quite sore and I’m pretty sure I won’t want to walk back and forth to the clubhouse in the sunshine.

All the Christmas decorations are put away. We’re blissfully tracking plastic pie tree needles around the house. We should have the last of those picked up about the same time the house gets up to 68, in a month or so.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

This was a busy week. Our community has a database with the passcards issued to each resident. We also have a paper 3-ring binder “pool book” with pictures of about 500 residents who have pool passes. These pictures are taped onto pages which slide into plastic sleeves, like a photo album from the 1966. The database and pool book are managed entirely separately. Our property manager pointed out this represented a lot of duplicate work for our office manager. So I created an electronic pool book which can be printed on paper if desired. I had the office manager scan the pool book pages, and I pulled photos from the scans. All 500 are loaded in the database. Whew. In the process, I found that photos for residents in over 40 of our houses are for people who have either moved out or died. I can see that in most cases, new people have moved in. But we don’t have their photos. We have several hours a day when the pool is open without a lifeguard. These hours are “residents only”. The county requires that we verify that everybody swimming during this time is a resident. So now the board has a great crisis. Do they try to get the photos for these folks? Or do they give up on the pool book and use another way to identify residents? Time will tell. No matter what they do, there will be less work for the office manager next year when the pool opens.

We also booked the majority of our France trip. I booked all our hotels. I spent so much money so fast that I triggered the credit card fraud flag. Citibank contacted me with a computer-driven phone call. The caller ID came through as “unknown”, which is usually a junk call. I almost didn’t answer it. I had to verify the purchases. Then I had to call Expedia and verify the charges went through.

I also purchased the air tickets to get to France. That took quite a long time. I know that airfares are not rational, but this is ridiculous … we can fly from BWI to Paris for $300 each. The flight connects through either Detroit or Atlanta. Or we can fly direct from Dulles airport (west of DC) for the same price. A third option I considered was getting to Atlanta ourselves and taking the direct flight from Atlanta to Paris. That way we could spend the night in Atlanta and avoid a 12 hour flight. We decided not to do that when we saw the airfare leaving from Atlanta was over $600. How is it possible that we can save $300 each by flying from BWI to Atlanta? This is on Air France, a major carrier. If you figure it out, please let me know. We ended up opting for the direct flight. The hassle and expense of getting a ride to Dulles is more than offset by saving 5 hours on the flight, not to mention the risk of missing the connection or having bags lost in the plane transfer.

The next big thing is to reserve tickets for our cave tours (to see the 40,000 year-old cro magnon art). This is important because the demand for cave tours exceeds the supply. Tickets will become available Tuesday. Another thing we have to do is get ourselves from NY, where the ship docks, to home. This was another surprise. We can take the train for $85 each, which is much less than the cheapest airfare. Even the Acela (express train) is cheaper than flying. We’ll probably cheap out on the tickets and take the extra hour to get home. I didn’t buy the tickets because it appears that Amtrak doesn’t discount tickets under any circumstances. Every ticket on every train is exactly the same price, as far out as their schedule shows. We just might wait until we’re at the train station to buy the tickets.

For New Year’s Eve, we’re going down to the basement and watch a movie. Cashews and red wine might be available. We won’t have to fight a bunch of drunks driving home. We won’t have to try to talk in a noisy party. We can go to bed whenever we want. Heck, the recliner chairs are comfortable enough that we don’t even have to walk upstairs when we decide to go to sleep. And we just happen to know that if we fall asleep in the chairs, the TV will eventually turn itself off. It doesn’t get any easier than that.

Here’s wishing everybody good health and good times in 2018!

It was an easy week here in Columbia. We had our first snow fall, with an inch or so of snow. The streets were clear, but we decided to have our first “snow emergency”. (Red wine goes good with snow!) We also spent some time getting ready for Christmas.

Our community’s property manager proposed a change in our database that would make it easier for us to manage our swimming pool passes. Incredibly enough, we got everything approved in a one-hour meeting. I spent a lot of time this weekend updating the database. The hard part of the changes are made. I have to add a couple of reports and smooth the rough edges. After that, there will be several hours of grunt work while I load 1,000 photos into the database. I’ll start next year and do a little at a time. I should have it done in a couple of months.

I hope this finds everybody doin well.

It’s exciting times here in central Maryland. It’s snowing. So far, we’ve had a light snow that doesn’t stick to any paved areas. But we know it’s a major event, because Howard County closed all their public buildings and cancelled all activities therein. That includes Centennial High School. And it includes the Jazz Ambassadors, the Army field band that was going to perform there today. And that means the Chaprnkas won’t be coming to the concert, and we won’t have dinner for them.

Given the obvious severity of the weather, there was only one option. But we didn’t have any snow emergency kits. Shame on me! I got out early enough that the stores weren’t crowded and made it back unscathed. Danita mailed the last of her Christmas cards just before lunch. Now the hatches are battened, and we’re ready for up to three snow emergencies.

A few things happened besides the snow. We took Mark out to breakfast Sunday and met his girlfriend Jiajia (pronounced “Jay Jay”). She’s a delightful young lady, working as an associate professor in physics at Bucknell University.

Thursday, we went to Bob Evans and did our Christmas shopping. (Sadly, they closed the Mimi’s in Columbia.) We wanted to have everything ready to drop ship. Unfortunately, a couple of the things we selected didn’t have gift wrapping available. We think we selected a wrong option while we were on Amazon. We had to ask Jul to do some wrapping for us. We’ll try to do better next year.

Our other activity was a neighborhood party at the clubhouse yesterday evening. There was plenty of food and lots of libations, but for some reason the people were louder than normal. We were able to talk, but it was hard to hear.

Fortunately or unfortunately, that’s the big news of the week. I rode my bike. Danita went to exercise classes. We did our chores. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

This was a big week, at least for us retired folks. In chronological order:

We’re going to France. We’re not sure when we’re leaving. We’re not sure what we’re going to see. But we know for sure when we’re coming home. We will take a repositioning cruise on the Queen Mary from England back to the US in October. The general plan is to fly to Paris, take the train to Provence, drive up to the Loire Valley over a period of weeks, then turn the car in and take the train back to Paris. (I’m not crazy enough to drive in Paris!) We’ll stay in Paris for a while, then take the chunnel train to London. We have our ticket for the return cruise. I thought we were reserving well ahead. But our first choice of rooms were all booked. We had the choice of stepping down one step, or going up. We said “What the heck” and stepped up. It was a hard decision, mostly because we had trouble paying for a balcony to cross the Atlantic in October.

I’ve been having a little trouble with vertigo. It’s a re-occurance of what I had about 35 years ago. Back then, I saw a GP, an ENT, and a neurologist. The neurologist knew what my problem was and knew I could do rotations to fix my problem; but he never gave me a name for my condition, and his description of the rotations left a lot to be desired. I finally got better after a month or two. This time my doctor’s assistant knew I have BPPV (Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo). She recommended a place to go to get the rotation done. That didn’t work out, but there’s lots of information on the web. I did one Epley Maneuver and kept my chin up for one day and two nights. That set me straight. BPPV is caused when calcium stones in your ear get stuck in your ear canal. I’ll never know what caused the first occurrence, but apparently once you get BPPV, it is more likely to recur. I’m thinking that going to Yoga 3 times a week may not be the best idea for me moving forward. There’s too many downward facing dogs.

“plique-a-jour” bowl

Today we went to the Walter’s art museum to get a free brunch for 20-year plus members only. Who says there’s no advantage to getting old? While we were there, we toured the Faberge exhibit. What caught my eye was a “plique-a-jour” bowl. This has enamel is applied in cells, but with no backing in the final product, so light can shine through the enamel. I didn’t have my camera, but here’s an example I stole from the internet.

Tomorrow we’ll take Mark out for breakfast for his birthday. It is said that we will meet his girlfriend, Jia Jia.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We had a small Thanksgiving this year. It was Ed, Lynne, and Bud. Danita had to do some recipe downsizing. She was quite successful. We had a wonderful dinner with all the normal stuff, but not too many leftovers. Ryn’s cheese was a big hit. It’s really good cheese.

Our decision to join the Columbia gym seems to have worked out well. Danita’s going to 5 exercise classes a week, most of them in the pool.  Plus we do yoga 2 or 3 times a week.

The standard joke is that we had the biggest holiday of the year — black Friday. I think it’s mostly turned into an excuse to spend money we wouldn’t otherwise spend. But we actually made a black Friday purchase this year. Center Stage offered half price on theater tickets. We’ll be seeing “Lookingglass Alice” next week, and “Skeleton Crew” in late January.

We’re going to the Sabiston’s this afternoon. We missed Dot’s funeral (we were in South Dakota). Dot was big on Christmas decorating. She had the entire house covered with Christmas stuff. Dwane and the daughters decided to have a Christmas decorating party. We’ll be spending a couple of hours finding places to put all the Christmas things Dot has collected. And we’ll be doing some eating also.

That’s all there is this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I spent most of this week in West Palm Beach with Mom. We took her car to a shop to get a leak fixed, we went to the lawyer and reviewed her documents, and we did a few things around the house.

Mom wanted a new ceiling light fixture for the hallway. We went to Lowe’s and picked out one she liked. It said “LED” which I figured was marketing. I installed the base unit and realized the parts needed to screw in the light bulbs were missing. Then I realized there was no provision for running wire through those parts, even if I had them. Before taking everything back to Lowe’s, I tried turning the lights on. Low and behold, a dozen very small white LEDs illuminated. When I installed the globe, it looked like a regular light fixture. Now I understand why Lowe’s gave a five year warranty. I showed Mom there were no lightbulbs and explained why she should hold onto the receipt for 5 years. It’s a neat concept, but I think it’s a lot easier to replace a burned out bulb than it is to replace a defective ceiling fixture. We’ll see how it goes.

While I was at Mom’s, Danita took her dad to the doctor. Bud pulled the emergency cord one evening while we were visiting Ryn. Bud spent a day in the hospital. He couldn’t remember anything, nobody could find anything wrong with him, so they sent him home. The working theory is that Bud accidentally took too many Ambien. The doctor switched him to melatonin, which is probably an most excellent idea.

I got back Thursday evening. Mike Bertch’s funeral was Friday. It was a nice ceremony followed by a wonderful reception. Mike was cremated, so there was no graveyard ceremony. They had an hour of gathering time, then the funeral mass, then a reception in the church hall downstairs. The funeral was at St. Johns, the church we used to attend when we lived in Kingsville.

The weather folks said there was a good chance of rain mid-afternoon today. I decided that gave me a perfect window for a nice bike ride. It started spritzing, so I cut the ride short. After I got home, the weather improved. As of 2:45, it still hasn’t started raining. I’m not impressed with the forecasters.

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

There are lots of pictures this week.

Cheese Production

Kathryn is at Cricket Creek in Williamstown, MA these days, making cheese. (The $24/pound kind. We’ll have some available for Thanksgiving dinner). We took a 4-day trip to visit. Tuesday was mostly driving up. We arrived mid-afternoon, and had a brief view of cheese production. We saw cow milking, milk storage, the cheese aging room, and lots of stainless steel.

Shaker Village; round barn in the background

We were discussing where we wanted to eat dinner. I suggested visiting the nearby retirement community. We would say we were thinking of moving up here to be close to our daughter. If we got there about 4, we could probably get a free dinner so we could see if we like the food. I thought it was a great idea, but cooler heads prevailed. We had an excellent Mexican dinner at Coyota Flaco.

Pie Oven – The main dish for most dinners was some kind of pie

Wednesday we visited the Hancock Shaker village. We had seen the Canterbury Shaker Village many years ago. The Shaker’s were a large utopian society with several prosperous villages. Their most striking characteristics were the unique dance they did during worship, and their insistence that all members remained celibate. At it’s largest, this village had about 100 people.

Window detail. Note the thumb screws. It’s easy to lock the window open or closed; or to remove the window for cleaning.

Visiting Hancock was quite interesting. There are *very* enthusiastic docents giving talks on many subjects. While the docents were always interesting, they would let their talks run way over the allotted time, which meant we had to leave one talk before it was over so we could see another talk on another subject. We found it striking how often docents bemoaned the large number of buildings the Shakers tore down. The non-profit that took over the village is interested in preserving the past as much as possible. This was in direct contrast to the Shakers, who were forward-looking and practical. They readily adopted new technology and were interested in the most efficient operation possible given the size of their community and the technology available to them.

Round Barn

The Shakers kept their property spotlessly clean and well-organized. They had many clever ideas to make their facilities more practical. The signature building is the round barn, which was used for hay storage and cow milking. But when better methods of milking cows became available, the Shakers promptly built new facilities for milking, leaving the barn useful only for storing hay.

Workshop Lathe

They had a reservoir above the village. They installed a 16″ water pipe with a turbine to generate water power for their workshop. It still works today. There was a second turbine at a workshop for contractors, and a third turbine to run a ceiling fan in the Trustee building.

Atwater Kent Radio

Thursday we visited the museum in Bennington, VT; and the Clark art museum in Williamstown. The Clark is a traditional art museum. The building is very large and modern. The collection is surprisingly large. I enjoyed the Impressionist exhibit, and spent all my time there. The Bennington museum has a large collection of Grandma Moses paintings, as well as several artifacts collected from the area. I especially enjoyed this rare Atwater Kent radio. These were made mostly in the 1920s, before the invention of superheterodyne receivers. Atwater Kent was known for innovations in their electronics, excellence in performance, beautiful styling, and very high price.

Ryn-hand-made Shoes – on her own feet!

Ryn is interested in making things by hand. She slaughters and butchers all manner of animals. She has blacksmithed, made butter churns, built her own smoke house, and more. Lately she has been learning how to make shoes. She made these shoes by hand.

TV in the  ShakerTrustee Building

Our last dinner was a pot-luck that the people at Cricket Creek have every Thursday. The workers at Cricket Creek may not make a lot of money, but they certainly eat well. We had an uneventful drive back Friday. I’ll close this with a picture of a TV in the Shaker Trustee house. I hope this finds everybody doing well.