Not much new is happening here in Columbia. The food truck was a success. Instead of eating in our driveway with a few neighbors, we moved the cars and ate in the garage. With cooler weather, it was good to be out of the breeze. It was also nice to have the garage lights to counteract the earlier sunset. Unfortunately, the free ice cream was a dud. The freezer in our clubhouse stopped working. Instead of ice cream, we had melted goop. Fortunately, I was able to buy a key-lime-pie-in-a-jar. We also enjoyed an evening of wine, snacks, and conversation with the Jonses this week.

Other than that, we’re watching educational Zooms. I’m bike riding. Danita’s walking. We’re reading. We even watch a little TV.

I hope this finds everybody well.

I reached a milestone this week. To my knowledge, the house works. I’m sure that means I’ve overlooked something. But for the moment, I’ll accept my false sense of accomplishment.

Danita is the queen of interesting stuff. We are taking our Osher course on Hemmingway and Fitzgerald. We are taking a course on jazz, taught by a Peabody professor. We are taking a course on Maryland music, taught by another Peabody professor. This week we start “Quantum Sensing for Everyone”, taught by an APL PhD. We have prep work for Quantum Sensing. The first class will be about error estimation. There’s no math in this course, just general concepts. I think starting with error estimation is an excellent beginning. It’s a far cry from college. But it’s good to keep the mind active. We’ve never benefited so much from being Hopkins Alumni. As an extra bonus, UMBC has a twice a year lecture series that is available through video streaming this time around. We will attend a lecture about Cleopatra.

I’m enjoying an almost embarrassing level of good food this week. Danita made meatloaf last night. That means meatloaf sandwiches for lunch. Plus we had our big Sunday breakfast — from Bob Evans this morning. Plus we have a neighborhood food truck dinner this evening. Danita and I will be ordering from the seafood truck. Danita is looking forward to crab cakes. I want the shrimp salad sandwich. They also have Key Lime Pie in a jar. It is quite tasty. And the neighborhood is giving out free ice cream — Nutty Buddies or ice cream sandwiches. By the end of the week, I’ll be waddling around the house.

This is the last day our pool is open. Danita has been going in the afternoon after temperatures are 65 or so. The pool has a heater, but it isn’t keeping up. Danita plans to try walking for exercise next week. I’ve been riding in the afternoon to catch warmer weather. It’s going to be a long winter. We’ll be finding lots of ways to keep our spirits up.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There’s been a lot of activity on Endless Ocean Way this week. The new storm door is installed. The contractor did a great job, but I’m pretty sure they lost money on the deal. When they measured for the door size, they decided a 36″ door would work fine. Actually, the trim on our house was a little smaller than they thought. The installer had to saw 1/4″ off the trim for the entire height of the door. It took two men 4 1/2 hours to do what is normally a 2 hour job. The end result is wonderful. We really like the new door.

Speaking of doors, the condo association finally decided to order the new sliding doors to go out to our decks. We had 3 days to get our order in. That wasn’t much of a problem for us.

We had a plumber replace our old sump pump. In the process, he broke the backup pump. We use a water-powered backup pump. Very reliable. Needs no electricity. Has one moving part (the on/off float/valve). The plumbing company said they don’t install water powered backup pumps. What? A plumber won’t work on a water powered pump? We got another plumber in to install a new backup pump. There’s a switch that sends a message to my phone when the backup pump kicks on. It doesn’t send the message. Hopefully I’ll get everything working before something else breaks.

Danita is a genius at finding Zoom presentations. Of course we’re still taking our Fitzgerald/Hemingway class. We’re also watching a several-week series about music in Maryland. Danita is watching a series about tools for care givers. We have seen several presentations about various interesting topics, and we have 4 more coming up this week.

Our community decided to keep the pool open another week, so Danita will be able to use the pool next week.

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

The week started off wonderfully. Our neighborhood had three food trucks Sunday evening (BBQ, Mediterranean, and Gelato). The food was good. The weather was perfect. A few neighbors joined us in our driveway. It was an extremely pleasant evening. This is the last social activity for our neighborhood this year.

We had our first class Monday. We covered a brief biography of Fitzgerald and Hemmingway, followed by a discussion of the first half of “The Great Gatsby”. There are over 80 people registered for class. 72 showed up for the first class. The Zoom servers seemed to choke. Things got better after most students turned off their video. The instructor encouraged comments from the class, but of course with such a large class, only a small number could offer comments. The instructor has an interesting way of handling comments. He puts on a thoughtful face and lets the student have their full say. Then he generally says something like “I agree” or “That’s insightful”. Immediately after that, he extends the comment to include other points. Sometimes he says something like “That’s an interesting reading”, following that with a viewpoint that is more plausible. We learned quite a bit.

We found two presentations from the Walters Art Museum. One was about Islamic metal work. The other was about ancient glass. Both were quite interesting. Unfortunately, the ancient glass was immediately after lunch. We used our very comfortable setup in the TV room with our reclining chairs. I had a predictable reaction. I still managed to catch enough that I knew the answers to the questions the audience asked. The presenters faced quite a challenge because until a few days ago, the building was closed. They had to do their presentation from photos that were taken pre-COVID.

Danita started a virtual class for people who are care givers for parents.

I did my fall cleaning of the deck, porch, and garage. That’s a 3-day job for me these days.

Thursday Bluetooth stopped working on my Dell laptop. It was particularly irritating because I had just cleaned my desk and removed all nonessential wiring. I had to go back to a wired mouse. This happened precisely 17 days after my extended warranty expired. How do they time these things so precisely?

Mark asked us what our plans are for Thanksgiving this year. That triggered a discussion we had been putting off. We finally decided to celebrate at home without visitors. Usually Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It certainly won’t be a traditional Thanksgiving.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We had a little more activity this week, but it still felt quiet. We attended a Zoom orientation for our upcoming classes at Osher. The maximum number of attendees for a Zoom meeting is 300. They filled the session to capacity. I was surprised how hard it was for the presenters to get attendees to mute their microphones. Who can attend a 300-person Zoom meeting and not realize that their background noises and side-bar conversations bother other attendees? The presenters talked for 45 minutes. We will get Zoom links for the class one business day before the class. We will get a link for the class syllabus and other handouts. They could have sent a two-paragraph Email. But we got to check out our new setup for watching Zoom on our TV. It worked fairly well. We can’t read the chat messages on the TV because the print is too small. I noticed the video occasionally froze on the TV when it was not frozen on the computer. But the audio was very good. The Bluetooth speaker worked very well. Class starts tomorrow.

(I held my small laptop in my lap for the camera and connected video the TV through what Microsoft calls Miracast. This is a WiFi-direct technology. I used WiFi to get the Zoom video, then Miracast to forward the video over WiFi to the TV. I used WiFi channel 165 in the 5 GHz band because I can pretty much guarantee none of my neighbors use it. Routers bind 4 channels together to get faster data rates. There are 9 channels. That’s two groups of 4, plus one left over. I used the one left over.)

We had a plumber come in to take care of several small things. The biggest was to replace the 10-year old sump pump. Unfortunately, we’re not done with the plumber. He broke the backup sump pump. It’s probably just as well. The sump water was quite dirty. The backup pump is simple. (It’s powered by water pressure.) But it still has valves and seals that probably would need replacing soon. The plumber will have to come back.

We had a condo board meeting. There was lots of talk about sliding doors to the deck, and people who have decks that need repairs, and houses with a leaky balcony. It sounds like we won’t get our new doors this year. We’ll see.

I got a shingles shot. I felt under the weather for one day. The next day I did a 45-mile bike ride. We had an evening with the Jonses.

This evening our neighborhood is sponsoring food trucks. We will have three trucks — BBQ, Mediterranean wraps/salads, and Gelato.

Next week the pace will pick up even more. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There’s not a lot going on here in Columbia. In honor of the holiday, we’ll be eating hamburgers and chips. Grandma Utz’s hand dipped potato chips, of course. There is simply no reason to eat mediocre chips.

We got approval from the condo to change our screen door. That took 5 weeks. Our existing door is a “full view door”. The new door will still be full view, but it we will be able to switch between screen and glass simply by pulling a handle. On our existing door, I have a lot of trouble managing the heavy glass and removing the snap-in inserts that hold it in place. The new door was controversial because it has a thin horizontal bar across the center of the door. Never mind that several other house have done the same. It had to be thoroughly discussed.

Danita and I are going back to school. We have signed up for a class at Osher. This is a program from Johns Hopkins targeted to retired people. I think the entertainment aspect is probably as important as the academic content. We will start with Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby”. We’ve already started to prepare. There are two movies. We watched them both. We wanted to attend the 2-hour class in the comfort of our TV room. When I tried it, I could get the picture on the TV, but the sound came from the laptop. That is very sub-optimal. So I bought a Bluetooth speaker. I was planning to test it all out on the Men’s Club Zoom this morning, but I forgot until Men’s club was half over. Oh, well. I’m sure it will be fine.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There’s not much going on. Danita’s enjoying the pool. I’m enjoying the bike. I saw an aggressive driver while I was riding the other day. You know — breaking hard, accelerating hard, switching lanes. That wouldn’t be all that unusual, except one of their rear tires was flat. It was making a heck of a racket. The rubber was flopping around. It look like it wouldn’t be long before large chunks of rubber would be flying off. I don’t see how the driver could not know that something was wrong. Fortunately, the driver went one way and I went another. I’ll never know what happened next.

We spent an evening at the Jones’, staying 6 feet apart.

I don’t know if I mentioned this, but I’m losing weight. I’ve been between 180 and 185 for the last 5 years. Almost exactly a month ago, for a reason I don’t understand, I weighed 179.8. It probably has something to do with not having neighborhood parties. That’s the first time in years that I was under 180. I took that as an opportunity to get back to my old weight of 169. According to some weight chart I found decades ago, that’s he highest weight that wasn’t considered obese. I’ve done pretty well. I’m down to 171. Just two more pounds to go.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We had some wonderful weather this week. It was not too humid, and temperatures were a little below average for August. Cold temperatures make my bike rides a short in the winter. Usually I start building up more endurance in the spring. This year when we got back from vacation everything was shutting down. That includes public toilets in libraries, senior centers, and even the spot-a-pots in county parks. That limits options. When parks opened back up, it was outrageously hot and humid. But I did what I could. My favorite endurance ride goes to Glenwood. It’s a beautiful 45 mile route that runs through Howard County farms and rural areas on excellent cycling roads. It’s largely an easy ride with a few moderate hills for a little zest. The sandwich shop at the terminus went out of business. Libraries and senior centers are still restricted. But the nearby county park is open. This week I did the Glenwood ride for the first time this year. It was fabulous.

A couple of days later I was doing my favorite hill ride. I was surprised to see a road was recently closed. Too bad, it’s a well shaded road that has a moderate grade to the top of the hill. I decided to take the alternate road up Ilchester Hill. This is the toughest paved hill in Howard County. Young men with too much testosterone hold time trials up the hill for bragging rights. Any one of them would drop me in a moment. But I made it up. It was a fun challenge.

Danita found an interesting presentation put on by the Walter’s Art Museum. It was about pre-Colombian art. The conservator was investigating the sounds made by some of the objects. Here’s an example on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4fsnl-SBWU. Here’s another YouTube with modern versions. https://twistedsifter.com/videos/inca-whistling-water-vessels-mimic-animal-calls/

Other than that, it’s life as usual. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

The weeks are getting very quiet. We got Bud to the last of his doctor appointments. No more doctors for Bud for months! Hurrah! We went over to the Jones one evening. We’re both getting our exercise — me on the bike and Danita at the pool. Other than that, we’re staying in and staying un-infected.

The ants are gone! Woo-hoo.

Celebrations aren’t the same these days. Danita got herself takeout Chinese for lunch today. And something yummy from the bakery for after dinner tonight. She didn’t want a take-out dinner. She’ll be going over to the pool today to spend an hour checking that folks entering have their super-secret wrist band. Happy Birthday Danita.

I’m still playing around with computers in our clubhouse. Hopefully I’ll be done next weekend.

As most of you know, we have a deck in the back of the house, and a porch below the deck. In 2012 we turned our deck into a roof. When it rains, I can sit on the porch and supervise the rain. As part of the project, we put a super fancy floor on the deck so it never has to be painted again. Now the condo is repairing water damage to the houses. The question was, will they have to tear up the deck to repair water damage on our house, and if so who will pay for replacement? The engineer our condo contracted with visited our house this week. They won’t have to tear up the deck. That makes everything very easy. Our doors to the deck have water damage, so we will be replacing those. We had a choice of wood or fiberglass doors. We chose fiberglass. They’ll be plenty good enough for the time we’ll be in the house. Consumer Reports actually rated the Pella fiberglass as more waterproof than the wood. And they’re quite a bit cheaper. We could have had our doors “repaired” at no cost. But that would only ensure they don’t leak water. The damage to the door would still be there. And since we are spending no money traveling and precious little on birthday parties, we won’t have problems paying for new doors.

We were supposed to take Bud to the doctor Tuesday. During the tropical storm. It takes several minutes to transfer Bud between the wheel chair and the car. There is no under-cover parking at this doctor. The doctor was very kind and postponed the visit to next week with no penalty.

That’s it for this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.