We had a busy week. Bud will be needing memory care before long. When he goes to memory care, we will move him to a facility that is closer to Danita and Ed. Way back when, Bud chose Riderwood because it was close to his church and his old neighborhood. Riderwood is a bit of a drive for Danita, and it is a heck of a drive for Ed. We spent the week visiting memory care providers that are close to Danita and a shorter drive for Ed. It was a rough week for Danita. We found two providers that look like a good fit. That’s good news. We wrapped up the week on a lighter note with a neighborhood party last night.

My second cataract surgery was last Monday. Everything went well. I was driving Tuesday. My vision is much improved.

Schools are out or will be out soon. The weather is warm. The days are long. It’s the summer season. We attended our first outdoor concert at Lurman Woods last Sunday. It looks like this weekend will be rainy and mushy. We probably won’t go this weekend. But we’re looking forward to hearing the US Navy band Sea Chanters, performing indoors Sunday.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Sunday ushered in days of perfect weather, so naturally I spent a good chunk of the morning locked in a windowless basement room counting money. Afterwards I spent the afternoon driving. We went down I-81, enjoying the scenic Blue Ridge mountains on the way to Roanoke. Roanoke was a very good destination because it’s on the way to Jul’s house, Bryon was being confirmed Tuesday, … AND … there were negative COVID tests all around. Woo-Hoo. For dinner, we enjoyed al fresco dining at a very good Mexican restaurant next door to our hotel. The weather was still picture perfect. The food was plentiful and good and cheap. We topped our dinner with large fried ice creams. Back at the hotel, the indoor pool was filled with kids and Moms. Danita wisely chose to use the pool early Monday morning, and had the pool all to herself.

We got to Jul’s on Memorial day. This was an unusual visit. We hadn’t been there since COVID. It was the tail end of a holiday. We weren’t taking the grandkids on any adventures. But we managed to get into the swing of things eventually. Bryon’s confirmation was at 7. The priest gave a very good homily about the sacraments in general and confirmation in particular. When Jul asked Bryon what kind of cake he wanted, he said he wanted Chick-fil-A nuggets. So we that was dinner. I was surprised how good they are. Jul picked up a cake at the last minute. Bryon has an unusual name with unusual spelling. Based on past experiences, Jul decided it was better to leave the inscription to just “Congratulations”.

We took two days going back. Going up I-95 was less scenic and had heavier traffic, but it let us stop at Bud’s on the way home to drop off clean clothes and pick up dirty. We stopped overnight in Richmond. The hotel wasn’t nearly as nice. But we took the opportunity to visit the Edgar Poe museum and we found a pleasant restaurant for dinner. We were back in town, safe and sound Thursday.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Mom had a CD in her trust at Chase Bank. The CD matured recently. Chase send a letter saying if we didn’t want to roll it over, we could call or visit a branch. We wanted to sell the CD and move the money to Mom’s Chase savings account. We called. The customer service rep could not sell the CD. So we went to a “local” branch, about half an hour away. Not counting the driving, it took them two hours. As an apology, they gave us a free cloth bag. It isn’t very sturdy. I can’t imagine a bank that is harder to do business with. As a topper, I checked the account today. The CD is gone. The deposit to savings is marked “pending”. Pending what? Its moving money between two of Mom’s accounts. I can’t imagine why the transfer is pending.

The construction on the back of our house is finally done done done. I spent some time cleaning up some junk behind the house. A few years ago, I tried to paint the porch. I did a terrible job. We hired Pete to paint it for us. It looks great. The contractor will be doing a few days of work on the front of our house, probably starting next week. We won’t have access to our garage during the day, but they move the scaffolding away every night. That will let us charge the Leaf. The contractor will be working on the other buildings most of the summer. After this is all done, we have a huge mud field behind our house. All houses have to be cleaned and painted. Our road needs some work. Some people have stone falling off their walls. There’s probably a bunch more. I know everything will be put in good shape eventually. Still, it’s destressing to think about.

The yard junk put a big dent in a 55 gallon trash bag. In addition, plastic drain pipe was brittle from 10 years in the sun. That filled the rest of the bag. I also had a huge foam block that used to be in our Honda’s trunk where the spare tire is now. I put all this together today and made my first dump run in many years. I still miss Car Talk.

Our big excitement was last Sunday. Joe and Toni were up from Texas to attend a friend’s wedding. All the Schmauses got together at Ed’s house for lunch. The food was good. The conversation was better. There are a few pics on the website.

The big news was a visit to Jaijai, Mark, and Mira. Mira has advanced in every way since we saw her last. She has a good vocabulary of spoken words and obviously understands a lot more than she can say. She frequently understands normal adult sentences. It was supposed to be rainy, but mostly we lucked out. We were able to visit a playground Saturday. We had a couple of very nice meals out, including one of the best tasting curry I have ever had. Adding to the peaceful atmosphere was a Buddha fountain and a most intriguing tree. I even took a posed picture, but somehow I lost the picture. After that lunch, we took an impromptu walk to another playground which turned out to be Mira’s highlight. The playground had a tall slide with gentle humps. Mark sat her about half way up and helped her down the slide, with Jiajia at the bottom to catch her. As soon as she went down one time, she immediately said “more, more”. She probably went down a half dozen times before she had enough. You can see that pic and more by visiting the website.

Mom asked me to take her to Home Depot so she could look fort a new light. We found one she liked for $44.97. It was out of stock. So we went back to her apartment and went to the Home Depot website. They had it available, same price. When I went to order it, I got a large pop-up that we were just $.03 short of the minimum order for free shipping. Otherwise, we could pay $9. That was too bad … for Home Depot. Don’t they realize they aren’t the only game in town? After that bit of rudeness, Mom was quite amenable to looking on Amazon. We found one she liked equally well. Shipping was free, thanks to my Prime membership. And it was a few bucks cheaper. Wake up and sharpen your pencils, B & M. It’s a new world out there.

Today is Preakness. It just might be the hottest Preakness ever. The high temperature is supposed to be 95, with plenty of humidity. Tomorrow is almost as hot as today. I decided this is an excellent time to take a day or two off from biking.

I had surgery on my right eye Monday. Everything went fine. I’ll get my left eye done in 3 weeks. That’s all for this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Monday featured my first 45 mile ride of the year. It was hard. I took 6 hours doing it. Tuesday we visited the Mormon temple in DC. It was open for visitors for the first time in 50 years. Also my budget database came up with a bug. It took me four hours to find and fix it. Wednesday was cleaning the porch in preparation for painting. Later on today (Friday) we will drive up to Lewisburg, PA to visit JAMM for the weekend. While we’re there, we’re hoping Pete will be able to paint the porch. Throw in normal activities and a little pickle ball and it feels like quite a busy week.

We even have a little drama for a topper. The neighborhood brings in dumpsters once a year. They’ll be here this weekend. I’m hoping they come before we leave. I have several long lengths of piping that the previous owner installed for drainage. With all the construction, I removed the piping and found it was creating problems rather than being helpful. I would love to get that piping in the dumpster, if the dumpster is set up in time.

After spending a day taking care of a bum tire on the Leaf the other week, I decided we should have a spare tire for the Honda. Honda offered a spare tire when we bought the car. At the time, we decided to save the bucks, but now I think that wasn’t the best decision I’ve ever made. The tire came in, but the jack is delayed. Hopefully we’ll have an uneventful drive to Lewisburg. At worst, we’ll only need to borrow a jack from a good Samaritan. When I ordered the tire, the parts guy wasn’t sure how well it would fit, due to the hybrid battery. The parts guy wanted to come out and see how it fits. He swung his legs onto the parts counter and slid under the plastic COVID shield all while holding the tire in one hand. Young people are such show-offs. The tire fits fine.

When we get back from Mark’s I have cataract surgery Monday. I’ll have a couple of days of restrictions. I’m looking forward to getting normal vision in one eye.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Last week I forgot to mention we watched a delightful movie last week. It’s “My Cousin Vinny” (1992). If you haven’t seen it, it’s a hoot.

I help count the collection for our church once every four weeks. There’s been a strong push to make the count exact. The collection is comprised of many separate collections (regular weekly, Easter, Missions, etc.) We count each collection separately, recording results in an Excel file, one worksheet per collection. Then we throw everything into one pot and count the whole enchilada. Cash is tedious but fairly straightforward. Checks have been troublesome. Checks can have any value. We can’t bin them by check value because we don’t know ahead of time what all the values will be. With no bins, we don’t have a way to focus on where an error is. Last week’s count was $30 off. We had been working for four hours. It was 2:00 and there was no way we could re-count all the checks again.

This week I wrote a new worksheet that reads all the checks, bins them, and prints the sorted result. We ran the new spreadsheet against last week’s file and quickly found the error was in a small subset of all the checks. The next time this happens, we should be able to quickly find and correct the discrepancy.

The worksheet consumed me for most of the week, but it was a lot of fun. I have done a lot of this kind of work with Access and Word but not with Excel. Plus I have forgotten much more than I remembered. I had two screens. The left screen was for Google searches. The right screen was for the spreadsheet. I spent more time reading than writing. Now it’s done, it works, and it should be a big help going forward.

Danita ran into an unexpected obstacle when visiting Bud this week. Because there is a COVID case in assisted living, visitors have to have evidence of having passed a COVID test before entering. Visitors can go to the medical suite and get a test, but that would take a lot of extra time. There were several people trying to get in and much confusion. One couple decided to do a “window visit”. The weather was nice and their parent is on the ground floor. The parent didn’t know how to open the window, so the they used their cell phone to called the parent. It was a kind of low-tech Zoom.

Danita happened to have a picture of the results from our Easter test on her phone. She offered that and was admitted. She was lucky to get in because the entry clerk can swipe up and see the date the picture was taken. Moving forward, she will take a test at home before she visits Bud.

We were supposed to have the “Greek on the Street” food truck Friday. This is one of the better food trucks that visits. The Joneses and we were planning to have a food truck dinner together. Unfortunately, the bums cancelled. We decided to do a carry out dinner instead. Cheese steak sandwiches aren’t very healthy, but they’re no worse than Greek French Fries with Feta cheese.

That’s a lot of news for one week. I hope everybody is doing well.

This was a quiet week. I passed my pre-surgery physical. I’ll good to get cataract surgery in a couple of weeks. Danita had her pool training. She will have her first pool duty day tomorrow. An experienced operator will be with her for her first duty day.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Wednesday we got new blinds for all the doors and windows on the back wall. Drapes left by the previous owners had done their job, but they were definitely past their prime. Several had fallen off the wall, either because of poor mounting or failed hardware. We didn’t want new blinds until the builder had finished banging on the back wall. We were supposed to get new blinds before Easter. Unfortunately, Rin and Racheal didn’t get blinds for their bedroom. It’s not a serious issue. There is nobody living behind our house. The bedroom is on the second floor, and there is quite a hill behind the house. Still, it would have been nice to get the blinds in time. It worked out well in the end. We really like the new window treatments.

Construction on the back of our unit is almost done. The builder cleaned up all their trash from behind our building. They decided to replace the vinyl trim around our deck, which made us quite happy. The builder has another couple of hours of work to wrap that up. This phase of construction is down to parts of three buildings. The HoA board decided we should get new flashing on the front and sides of the buildings. This affects every building in the neighborhood. They will be working on this most of the summer. There’s also a matter of the mud behind our building. The board has not decided what to do about that.

Danita and I have been discussing the second COVID booster. Our understanding is that the booster gives two-stage protection. First there are about 8 weeks of antibodies, which prevent one from getting COVID. Then there are 6 months of T-cell protection. These don’t prevent infection, but they prevent an infection from being severe (hospital visits). It’s been about 6 months since we got our first booster, so a second booster made sense to us. We went out yesterday to get our boosters. We arrived at 11:00 when they opened. Another couple arrived at about the same time. Danita and I had trouble filling out the electronic form. The other couple had problems because the administrator couldn’t locate their original vaccination, which they got in Delaware. (Remember people driving all over the place to look for a vaccination?) After all this, the other woman was denied the booster because she wasn’t 50 yet. All in, we spent an hour and a half getting boosted. But it turns out we were far from done. Driving home, I hit the curb.

There was a huge gash in the side of the tire. Cars don’t come with spare tires any more. Our car insurance includes towing. We called. We answered questions such as “What is the VIN number of your car?” We got cut off. We called again. Answered questions again. Waited a couple of hours for the tow. Fortunately we were close to home. Danita walked home and made me a nice lunch. When I got to the tire place, they had several other cars in front of me. It’s only a mile and a half to home, so I walked home and awaited their call. We were all done by 4:30. Fortunately we had really nice weather.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We have a fabulous Easter. Jul was a sweetheart and drove up from NC with Bryon and Elizabeth. They arrived in time for dinner Friday. Saturday morning we visited DoodleHatch. This is impossible to categorize, but it’s a kind of art / imagination / fantasy place for children, merged with a woman’s clothing design, manufacturing, and sales. We had such a good time that the owner promptly put us to work. They want a 20-foot robot made of bamboo poles, old furniture, zip ties, and miscellaneous junk. Later on Saturday Rin showed up with Rachael, a colleague on the farm. Of course Rin had the very best self-made clothing item — a way cool vest that everybody admired. After Church Sunday Ed and Lynne drove down and I picked up Mom for Easter dinner. With all the construction mud, an egg hunt was out of the question, so Danita made a treasure hunt that lead to Easter baskets. Addie and Suzanne were with Ed and Lynne Monday, so after Rin & Rachael left, we drove the kids up up to Ed’s for a “cousins day”. (Julia had to work.) Ed and Lynne surprised us with a real egg hunt, which was probably the highlight of the holiday for the kids. Today we went back to DoodleHatch. This time, in stead of paying admission, we were building robots, fantasy chairs, and admiring “Bear Bare Beer”.

If it sounds busy and confusing, it was also a lot of fun. I did a lousy job with pictures. I didn’t get shots of the adults. But you can see a few pics on the website. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

They finished construction on our unit. The porch is clean. The furniture is outdoors. When it warms up we can sit outside and contemplate the field of mud. We have the steepest hill in our condo. More than one neighbor tried walking behind our house, being lookie loos, and ended up falling down in the mud.

We are trying to buy new blinds for all the doors and windows on our back wall. The blind company has an excellent reputation, but we keep on getting different stories about when we will actually have the blinds. They sent a man out to measure everything, and promised to call within two days. That was 4 days ago. Bummer. After they call, we will pay for the blinds and they will submit them for manufacture. It’s supposed to be a two to three week process, but it’s going super slow so far.

During the pre-season, we open our pool for residents only. Life guards are there only on weekends. We use resident volunteers to keep the chemical levels correct and scoop out the dead critters. This year, Danita volunteered to help with these chores. To meet county requirements, volunteers have to be CPOs (Certified Pool Operators). To be a CPO, one takes a test that covers everything from pool construction to hot tubs. Danita took her CPO exam Friday. She passed, of course. She had put a lot of effort into preparing herself for the test. It’s no surprise to me that she was the first person to complete the exam. She’s certified for five years. After that, she would have to take the CPO exam again, but that probably won’t happen. She plans to retire after one 5-year stint.

Easter is coming. So is company. It should be fun. I hope this finds everybody doing well.