I don’t usually write about the future, but this week it’s too good to keep.

Our condo decided that our balconies need significant attention. The crews are doing two hoses at a time. We are the second house. They started out full of vim and vigor early Thursday morning. The hope was that the work would take one day. The crew supervisor told me it would be at least a day and a half. So far, after two days of work, our balcony is still not done. It’s safe to say our balcony should be done sometime Monday. Fortunately we have the key to Mark’s car. We moved it well out of the construction zone.

Tonight we have a neighborhood concert plus snacks. The musical duo comes with great reviews. We’re looking forward to it. If this follows the precedents of earlier events we have had, the snacks will be substantial enough to provide our dinner.

Moving ahead to Thursday, Charlestown (where Mom lives) is having a hamburger cookout luncheon. Both Danita and I plan to enjoy the cookout with Mom.

The very next day Danita and I will get on the airplane and fly to Chicago, then switch planes to go to Barcelona. We’ll wonder around Barcelona for a couple of days, then get on the cruise ship. We’ll have three weeks of cruising. With free laundry! Woo hoo!

So … altogether it’s a lot of excitement. The best thing is that we were home when the crew was working on our house. The crew is pretty good. The say it is OK to leave a car in the driveway. But I felt better getting our cars far away from any potential drops.

I hope this finds everyone doing well.

We started our weekend with a Food Truck dinner. Two of our neighbors joined us. For a special treat, Danita offered chocolate swirl cake topped with ice cream. It was fun, but just a starter.

JAMMM stayed overnight. The are on a 4-week tour, the first leg of which was a flight out of BWI. There was lots of excitement, gymnastics, story times, and general running around. Mother Nature joined in the fun by offering a most dramatic thunder storm. We enjoyed the show on the dry side of our deck door. For dinner, the adults enjoyed a dinner of Indian curry while the two young munchkins devoured 9 1/2 fish sticks. Then they did a very credible job of removing every last bit of ice cream from their desert bowl. Safe travels!

We are in a drought period. Last week with high temperatures with a “real feel” of up to 110. Then we got rain. I know we are in a drought, but we’ve had plenty of rain, rain, rain. Enough already! The weather finely turned today. We are looking forward to a week of nice weather.

We haven’t done much this week. We had a food truck Thursday. A neighborhood party Saturday (bad hamburgers, sides and deserts provided by attendees). Tonight we will go to a Jimmy Buffet tribute band in Catonsville.

I sold my recumbent trike. I still had a bike carrier designed to let me haul the bike on the back of our car. It is large and heavy. It’s so heavy that it comes with wheels. That’s a good thing because there is no way I could pick it up. I put the carrier on Craig’s List. There was no response. After two weeks, I re-listed it. Again it drew no response. In desperation I put it up on our local Facebook group, offering it free to anybody living in our neighborhood. The very next day, a guy in Virginia called. He drove over hour to get here. We played around with it until he was satisfied it was OK. He paid cash. That’s a good thing. It’s not a ton of money, but it’s good to get a little cash. What’s much more important is that he wants to use it. He likes to drive to a group ride, take the bike off his car, and ride with his group. It’s good to know the carrier will be used. Also it gives us a little more room in our very cramped garage. Yea!

That’s it for this week. I hope everytbody is doing well.

It was a quiet week. Last Sunday we went to Essex Community College to se the musical Xanadu. I am always pleasantly surprised at the quality of their presentations.

Unless you are living under a rock, you know that this weekend is the 250th birthday of our country. There was music, fireworks, and amusements all all kinds. That made this weekend an ideal time to stay home. There had to be some pretty heavy and widespread partying. We had about half the normal number of people at Mass this morning. We went to IHOP for our Sunday breakfast. It also had notably fewer patrons. No doubt aspirin consumption this morning was off the charts.

I hope all are fully recovered from your celebrations and all are doing well.

IT was a big week. We started things off with an invitation only event. Ed & Lynne and Rick and Suzy came to our house for a BBQ dinner. We had a special guest, Marie, Suzy’s Mom.

Moving to the bicycle front, I have been riding a recumbent trike because my neck bothered me on a conventional bike. These days I am riding fewer days and taking shorter rides. Riding a 2-wheeler is more fun. I wondered if I could go back to a 2-wheeler. I went exploring and found Trek did a great job with their Verve 2 bike. It’s known as a hybrid, which has a more upright riding position. Every bike manufacturer offers a hybrid bike, Trek did a terrific job.

I can only own one bike at a time. (Our garage is that small.) I put the trike up for sale and sold it in two days. With a nod to my advancing age, I chose Trek’s step-through frame. I’ve had a couple of rides so far. No neck pain! A new bike means new accessories. Over the coming days, I will get new pedals, a rack, and a few other odds and ends. What a great new toy.

Old people have lots of nostalgia. This bike is almost the same color as our first new car — a 1975 Datsun B210 “Honey Bee”. The Honey Bee was an entry level car for sure. It had a heater but no AC. We paid extra to get an AM radio. We got great service out of that car. So here’s my nod to nostalgia. Trek Versa 2, I dub thee “Honey Bee”.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We went to a play at Essex Community College. It was a very good one-act comedy.

The Greek food truck came on Friday. Three of our neighbor households came over to enjoy a food truck dinner with us. Lately we’ve been thinking about how good it would be to have one of Danita’s homemade cheesecakes. Unfortunately, the two of us couldn’t eat an entire cheesecake. Fortunately, Danita was inspired to use our neighbors to help us with our task. Oreo Cookie Cheesecake. Yummy.

I hope all are well.

Bryon graduated from high school. For the celebration dinner, Bryon Liz and Pat decided to share a 60 oz steak. No, this is not a typo. You can see the steak in the pic. They ate it all.

– 60 oz steak

Here’s a pick from the graduation.

I hope all are well.

It was an uneventful week, but we had a nice time today. The Baltimore Museum of Art had three Matisse exhibits at the same time. We had breakfast at the Paper Moon Cafe, then visited the Matisse. The exhibit I enjoyed the most was about his painting of the Stations of the Cross. The Stations depict 14 scenes from the last days of Jesus’ life. Matisse spent 3 years learning about the Stations traditions, making dozens of drawings for each station panel. When he was satisfied that he could create the panels by heart, he painted his drawings on the wall of the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, using chalk attached to an 8-foot bamboo pole.

I don’t have any pics of the art, but here’s one of the diner. It’s just as weird as ever. I hope all are doing well.

Last Sunday, we went to Ed & Lynne’s “Parkton Cup” Croquet party. All the usual people were there, including surprise visitors all the way from Texas, Rick and Suzy.

— Croquet Finals

After the eating and after the croquet, we took Mira home for a one day / two night visit at our house. This was the first time Mira was separated from her parents. Here’s Mark and Jiajia pretending to relax as we take away their oldest child.

— Mark and Jiajia. What could go wrong?

Danita did the most to entertain Mira because I drove Dani, Gayle, and Mom to Kohl’s because Mom needed some clothes. The trip was wildly successful. So was the après shopping lunch.

— Après shopping lunch

— Fun and games with Grandma. Trust me, baking a red, white, and blue cake is much more fun than magnetic darts.

After that, Dani and Gayle flew home. We took Mira back to her parents. It was a lot for one week. We may never top it. But we got this week off to a decent start. We went mini-golfing. This is a particularly interesting course, with good use of the hills, imaginative hazards, and the world’s longest mini golf hill — a long downhill with banked turns. We haven’t been to this course in many years. It’s still a lot of fun, but it desperately needs maintenance.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Everybody loves a good party. We had a a regular blowout, I was having trouble predicting how the clubhouse WiFi worked when we made changes. I finally realized what we were seeing is the router somehow changing in response to the changes in demand. Is it MIMO? Or Beam Forming? Or something I don’t know about WiFi 6e? It’s obvious I was getting nowhere. I decided to just start streaming and see how the network holds up. I was pleasantly shocked. I had the gym TV, my computer, and my phone all streaming video. My predictions were that the network would fall apart. Instead, everything worked without a hitch. I decided I didn’t have to understand why the network did what it did. I only had to verify it would do what we want.

I invited four guys to join me in the clubhouse. We all brought laptops and tablets. All together, we had 9 devices running. Our goal was to stress the network until it failed. We had many variations of Zoom meetings and streaming movies. No matter what we did, the network calmly re-adjusted itself and offered perfect service. That’s about three times more load we would normally expect to see.

The WiFi party was an outstanding success. I’ve been working on this for a couple of months. Now it’s all buttoned up. Just in time for …

Dani’s visit! Dani and Gayle are in the air as I write this, on the way to the airport. They want to take Mom shopping, and have some family meals, etc. Dani doesn’t like driving in Baltimore. So I will do the driving. As i happens, they will be here during Ed and Lynne’s annual party. Plus we will take Mira for a couple of nights for her first time away from her parents. And my counting team is doing their thing on Sunday. It’s kind of like Mission Impossible. We have a plan that will let everything happen, with tight schedules all the way through. Hopefully, it will be completely unlike the last minute SNAFUs the Mission Impossible team encounters. Every. Single. Time. Really. We all know that pros make things look easy. Mission Impossible is on the edge of disaster for the entire 90 minutes of the movie. I think we can do better than that.

I hope all are doing well.