The adventures didn’t do as well today. We went to a recycled tire playground in Patapsco Park. The spider eating a butterfly and then encasing it in silk was way cool. The rest of the trip was a dud. An invitation to swim usually is greeted with great enthusiasm and a prompt change into swim clothes. Today neither child was interested. The movie, “Pete’s Dragon” was successful, even if Granddad was grumpy about the increased cost of theater tickets. Much of the day was spent on silliness, including this video — the second video I ever made and the first I successfully posted on the web.

We also made secret messages for Nanna. Here’s how to make your own secret messages. Buy pens with Frixion ink. Buy one set for each child. While Nanna is cooking, have the kids “sneak” Nanna’s hair dryer downstairs. After the message is complete, use the hair dryer to make the ink invisible. Let the children proudly present Nanna with blank sheets of paper and ask her to put them in the freezer. When Nanna serves ice cream after dinner, she will find the papers and be amazed to see the secret message revealed.

There are pics today.

Player Piano

We wrapped up our visit to Lancaster today. The payer piano was a big surprise, and at $1 the best entertainment bargain of the trip. We stopped at the Amish Village to learn about the most famous religious group of the county. On the way home, we visited the Oregon Ridge Nature Center in Hunt Valley. It is conveniently located on the route home, with bathrooms, picnic tables, and plenty to explore. A video and a visit to the pool finished up the day.

Amish Village

There are pics today. We went to Lancaster, PA. We started by riding the Strausburg RR. It has the only place in the US where two steam-powered passenger trains pass each other. It’s as much fun as ever. They haven’t changed their spiel one bit. There is a new entertainment farm near the picnic stop that is very developed. Other than that, it’s the same as ever. Then we went across the street to visit the PA Railroad Museum. It has a much-improved children’s area and is otherwise unchanged. The Red Caboose Hotel is fine. Our caboose is clean and in good shape.

Here’s several pics with a special activity. Cut them out and make your own flip-book!

The key to a good week with the grand kids, at least so far, has been flexibility.

• Unfortunately, Danita broke her foot. It turns out she can hobble around pretty well, but it still eliminated any activity that requires a lot of walking.
• Unfortunately, Elizabeth got an ear ache. Jul was still here, took E to the doctor, and got the meds. But it imposes serious limits on the amount of underwater time at the pool.
• We planned to have Pete, Rebecca, and their girls for dinner Sunday. The girls would stay overnight and be picked up Monday afternoon. That would make it an easy time for us, since all we would have to do to keep everybody happy is offer food occasionally. Unfortunately, at the last minute, they discovered the girls had lice. Plus, it was rainy in the afternoon and evening, and the pool was closed.

At Ft. McHenry

That required us to do some major last-minute adjusting. I pulled out two emergency activities — a computer puzzle and a Spirograph. The kids solved the computer puzzle much more quickly than I though they would. They made it to level 10 in just a few hours. At that point, the puzzle got to abstract for them. It turns out the Reeds already have a Spirograph, but it was enough to get us through Sunday — with the help of Amazon Prime and the movie “Free Willy”. The movie is an oldie (1993) but a goodie (both kids were entranced for the entire movie). And it is free with Amazon Prime.

Bryon and Nanna at the pool

Today, we visited Ft. McHenry. It was a beautiful day — warm, sunny, and not humid. We got there just in time for the flag raising. Unfortunately, the memory card in my camera was not properly seated, and I didn’t get those pics. But you can see them doing a Junior Ranger project in one of the rooms of the fort. The harbor was spectacularly beautiful. After the fort, there was some pool time.

Try to pretend you’re having a good time, please

After dinner, we’ll be packing. We’re driving up to Lancaster, PA tomorrow. We’re staying overnight at the Red Caboose Hotel. When our kids were young, this property was the best idea ever. But the original owner started slacking off on some maintenance as he got older. Now it’s under new ownership, and we have high hopes.

Here’s some pics from the wedding. It was low light, and most were taken f rom across the room, so they’re a little out of focus.

Tony – Father of the Bride speach

Cara Chaprnka

Brady and Maribeth – first dance

BFF Club

Bryon and Elizabeth at the wedding arch

It’s just pictures today.

Penguin Feeding

A Pokemon I’ve never seen before

The difference between an antler and a horn

Look!

In Africa

Chimpanzee forest

Ride a turtle

Otter pond

Jump like …[/caption]

… a frog

What’s that?

There are no pics this week. This should be a quick note. It was a pretty standard week. As you know, Danita had excellent news from her doctor. She’s recovering nicely. The last couple of days she’s been walking over to the pool. (But she doesn’t swim. She just bounces around for a while to enjoy the water.

This week *I* missed the curb. I was on a 40-mile ride Wednesday. I saw a nice patch of shade in a grassy area and decided to take one last drink break before lunch. I drove off onto the grass. All of a sudden I felt a bump and immediately went down on my right side. I got up and started investigation what happened. Finally I found a small curb. I had to find it by feel, because it was so small and so overgrown that it was impossible to see. My right shoulder was a little bruised, and the chain had popped off. The chain was easily fixed. My shoulder felt better in a couple of days.

We finally got to Baldwin Station restaurant. We went without a reservation on Wednesday. We left early to make sure we got a table. It turned out that it was Prime Rib night. We both had the special. It was excellent.

We finished up the week with a community party Friday and Circle this evening. We’re looking forward to the Reeds coming Friday.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are two pics this week. Here are several observations and happenings. You decide whether each is profound, banal, or just silly.

Historic Ellicott City is still closed. Home owners were given the opportunity to be escorted in with 10 minutes to collect a small quantity of personal items on Wednesday — until the found two buildings were about to collapse and couldn’t be shored up. They finally got their opportunity on Friday. Today, residents and business owners will get the opportunity to be escorted in to participate in a cleanup half-day. Once the dumpsters are full, they’re done. Nobody is saying when Main Street might be open for traffic.

All of my toughest rides involve riding through Historic Ellicott City. I’m taking easier rides, and slowly turning into a marshmallow.

Ever popular senior shoe, teal with forest green accents over a white base

But I’m doing better than Danita. Thursday at 8 AM, we were at the USDA in Greenbelt to apply for our PIV (ID) card. We will need this card to use computers and get into the building at Pipe Spring. Coming out of the building, Danita missed the curb and fell. She scraped her left knee and hurt her right foot. She decided to wait and see how her foot responded to some rest before seeing the doctor. It was late afternoon by the time we learned that she broke a bone in her foot. She is sporting a special shoe and keeping off her feet as much as possible. We’ll see the orthopedics doc tomorrow.

A rather expensive pile of Hardie Board

“Nature abhors a vacuum”. The French renaissance humorist François Rabelais said that. It applies in areas he never imagined. I wrote earlier that the houses in our community have a construction defect that is letting water inside the back wall.Engineers did some exploratory work and ended up with was a large pile of left-over, rather expensive, Hardie Board. We will certainly use this when repairs are made. In the mean time, it has to be stored out of the weather. Having sold a car and not having acquired a compensating quantity of junk quickly enough, we had a rather large space available in our garage. It’s nice to know we’ll have something solid to help hold the garage floor down while we’re in Pipe Spring.

Danita’s accident brings up an unusual coincidence. Our go-to special event restaurant was Baldwin Station. It’s a bit of a drive, but a very nice place without being ridiculously expensive. When Danita retired, she received a very generous gift card for Baldwin Station. We went to dinner shortly after her retirement party. The flowers I ordered weren’t there. We got the flowers the next day, but it did put a dent in the festivities. With plenty still left on the card and looking to have a good time, we scheduled a repeat trip close to her formal retirement date of June 30. That was when Rick died. Emotions were running high. We’re old enough to know when we can’t force ourselves to have a good time, and we cancelled that trip. We rescheduled the dinner for last Thursday, to celebrate Danita’s birthday. We cancelled that trip when we found out Danita’s foot was broken. We’re beginning to wonder whether it might be unwise to schedule any more visits to Baldwin Station.

Our parish is going from two priests to one. One of the changes is that they will stop holding the 7:30 AM Sunday Mass, starting in September. We should be on the way to Pipe Spring by then. We’ll decide what to do about the new Mass schedule when we get back. We sure do enjoy attending 7:30 Mass, followed by a big breakfast on Sundays.

I usually clean our garage, deck, porch, and other areas twice a year. I won’t be home for the fall cleaning, so I did the cleaning early this year. I’m a half hour away from being done. (Some paint has to dry before I finish up.) We have more to do before going to Pipe Spring, but we’re waiting to hear what the doc says about Danita’s foot before deciding how we’ll get the last chores done. So it’s a quiet day for us today. And very quiet for poor Danita, who is bored out her mind.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pics this week.

I got a cold near the end of our trip. I felt pretty bad on the flight home and felt miserable the next two days. Now Danita is feeling miserable. I got over my major symptoms quickly. Hopefully Danita will do the same.

We have 3 weeks of quiet time. Then it’s Maribeth Chaprnka’s wedding. Family activities for us start Thursday the 18th when Jul and family arrive. Jul and Pat will go home Sunday, and we’ll have the grand kids living with us the rest of the week. I fly back with them Sat the 27th. The following Monday we start our great trek to Pipe Spring. We’re spending our 3 weeks getting ready for all of this. So far, we have temporarily lifted our lock on the credit bureaus and had fingerprint cards made (for our security clearance). We have an appointment to get access to government email. And I’m sure you will not be surprised to learn we have extensive lists. The lists are working very well. We put them in Dropbox, where we both have access. Any time we think of something to add, or get a task done, we can easily open the list and update it. Technology can be very helpful (sometimes).

Last night we had a neighborhood bluegrass concert. The band was good. The fiddler was excellent. The food was catered by Mission BBQ. Our neighborhood put an awning with roll-up sides over our patio. We ate on the patio and let the band set up in the adjoining room. We had T-storms, which cooled everything off. The awning kept everybody dry. We all had a very nice time.

While we were enjoying ourselves, nearby Ellicott City was getting slammed. Historic Ellicott City is a popular destination, but it’s also down in the Patapsco River valley. I’ve written before about how it floods once or twice a year. Like the Tigress River used to flood annually in ancient times, it was just a part of life. Normally they spend a couple of days cleaning up the mud, then they’re back to normal. But the T-storms that hit last night dumped a 1,000 year rain on EC. Water raged through the area, flipping cars around like they were toys. Two people died. There was serious property damage, including major structural damage to many buildings. The weather forecast completely missed the quantity of rain. People were taken completely by surprise. Almost 200 people had to be rescued. About half of them were at some kind of event. Residents were evacuated to a recreation center, which was re-purposed as a temporary shelter. The water receded today. Emergency crews were dealing with a water main break and a natural gas leak. All roads to historic EC are closed.

Speaking of the Tigress River and ancient times, I purchased the book “Babylon” by Paul Kriwaczek. It’s a fascinating read, and I’ve learned a ton of stuff that I didn’t know. I knew about Qun Shi Haung, China’s first emperor in 250 BC. But I thought Sargon was a fictional character. It turns out he was the world’s first emperor, around 2350 BC (over 2,000 years earlier.) I knew that somewhere around 2,500 years ago the Greeks built their temples with “entasis”. These slight curves in otherwise straight surfaces accentuated perspective and gave the building an impression of strength and lightness. I didn’t know that the Babylonians in Ur III used the same technique when they built their Ziggurat some 4,000 years ago. I also knew that the USSR had collective farms, asking citizens to contribute according to their capability, then gave out the produce according to each person’s needs. I didn’t know that Babylon, which had many different governments over the millennia, once had a similar system. The primary difference is that the Babylonians had an effective way to encourage good production on their collective farms. (You can plug the foreign words into any search engine to see pictures and get facts.) I’m going to have to put this book to the side for a while. Library E-books are coming in. I only get to keep those for 2 weeks.

That’s plenty of stuff for now. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pics this time.

We are home, safe and sound. Our travels back were thankfully boring. Here are a few observations I haven’t made elsewhere.

Going over the Atlantic, we flew the double-decker A380, which I believe is the largest passenger plane in common service. It’s a nice plane, but the new Boeings are better. Between Paris and Russia, we flew the A319, which was incredibly cramped and totally lacking in amenities such as music, USB chargers, video, etc. Air France served decent meals with complementary wine.

The Russians are spectacularly unwilling to let go of the past. They talk about the Polish invasion like it happened 50 years ago. They absolutely fixate on the German Invasion (which we call WW II). Overall, the Russians seem much more prone to despair and depression than in the US. That’s understandable, given how they hang on to bad events of the past and their tendency to drink. “Times of troubles” are fresh in the memory of all but the youngest Russians. The 1990s, when the USSR and the Russian economy collapsed, were much harder than I had realized. The retirement pension has been slashed. Even with a free house, Russians cannot live on the standard retirement pension without help from their children. (Citizens receive their apartments for free when property was privatized.) In addition, many people lost all their savings during the 90s, as banks and financial institutions went belly-up. Then and now, there is no equivalent to FDIC insurance for bank savings accounts. BTW, I saw less alcohol than I thought I would. The idea of the Russian male who is drunk all the time is much more a joke than a reality. However, on vacation as at home, we are early to bed / early to rise. We did not participate in any night life. We were generally in bed before the good folks in St. Pete had finished their dinners. Russians are certainly less well of than Americans, but the extreme poverty we have in the US either doesn’t exist or is well hidden. I didn’t know what to look for, since anybody who is homeless would certainly die if they tried to live on the street in the winter. But the people I asked said there is no homeless people. According to the people I asked, nobody tries to spend their winters in the Metro, even though it would be ridiculously easy to do so.

The Russians I met like Putin. They like having a strong central government. Putin’s overall rating is somewhere between 80% – 90%. They freely joke about Putin being the Tsar. He was inaugurated right next the the Church were all Tsars were coronated. (Even when the capital was in St. Pete, Tsars were coronated in Moscow.) The Russians have spent large fortunes restoring their ancient Churches and buildings.

The standard of living in metro areas appears to be good. Smart phones and cars are pervasive. I saw more high quality fashionable dress in Russia than I see in the US. Bicycles are used but they are not common. All the bikes I saw were heavy steel models with fat tires. I didn’t see a single road bike (carbon-fiber body, skinny tires, and drop handle bars).  Russia is cleaner than Disney World. There is no trash anywhere. I often saw people cleaning. Most citizens keep their cars very clean.

Russians enjoy much more personal freedom than they have had in the past. They know their news is censored, but minimize that. They compare their news to the “slant” that US news organizations put in their content. It is still difficult for a Russian citizen to get a visa to visit the US. When visas are denied, no reason is given.

Russians love to have the biggest, even if it s not the best. They believe their country is well behind the US in every respect. Most of them did not believe me when I told them they were only country that can send people to the space station, or that we need a Russian rocket engine to send heavy satellites into space.

The metro stations built in the 40s are very deep, The escalators are long and very fast. Danita used to find it very difficult to get on US escalators. Now she does escalators as well as anybody.

Using a tablet as my only computing device brought some limitations. Spell check works only sometimes (I don’t know why). Everything takes longer than on a computer. One needs almost twice as many clicks to do something on a tablet, and each screen rendering is much slower. I usually rename picture files to indicate what I took a picture of. Using the tablet was so slow that I quickly gave that up. Now, faced with hundreds of pictures and a poor memory, I will have a nice collection of pictures on my computer, with little idea of what they represent. I did almost no proofing, as you have certainly noticed. Somebody left a message on our phone. One of the security cameras saw the blinking light as a motion detection at night. I adjusted the sensitivity to “minimum”, but we still got 60 or more alarms every night. (I left the alarm on so that if somebody had broken in, I would at least have a picture of the perp.)