My big news this week was a 4-day, 3 night trip to beautiful West Palm Beach, FL. Mom provided free accommodations plus plentiful and excellent food. The weather in FL was great. There was a little rain, but that ended about the time I got to Mom’s house. The rest of the time was 70 to 80 degrees with gentle breezes. Our most important accomplishment was finding a first-class restaurant. It’s called “This is it Cafe”. It has great reviews, so we went there for breakfast. I knew it was going to be good when the waitress asked if we wanted our bacon normal or crispy. The servings were huge. And the special was unbelievably cheap. We got 2 eggs, bacon, potatoes or grits, toast, *and* coffee — all for $5 each.

This trip was mostly about legal papers. We visited lawyers and banks, called financial investment firms, and visited notaries. We got it all done with a day to spare. That last day was largely spent planning TGNLT (The Great Northern Loop Trip). The TGNLT will be in late June, right after Danita and I get back from our volunteer stint at Assateague. Dani, Mom, and I are all getting together in Baltimore for a couple of days of partying. After we’ve painted Baltimore red, we’ll go on up to Maine and check out Dani’s new cabin. It should be a lot of fun. Of course, it is necessary to reserve air tickets in advance to get decent prices. That requires coordinating everybody and deciding which flights to take. It took several hours, but it’s done. We’re all looking forward to a first class hoot.

The trip home Friday was uneventful, but I was quite lucky. By Saturday morning we had 30 MPH winds with gusts up to 60 MPH. Apparently they were still landing planes in that weather, but it wasn’t exactly uneventful. One flight reported that just about everybody on the plane threw up. Schools and such were all closed. There was no “Stations” service Friday night. Our church is still closed today. They are one of some 130,000 people in Howard County that don’t have power. Fortunately, the power at our house has not been interrupted — so far. The winds should die down late this afternoon.

My other news this week is about taxes. I was all ready to file taxes early in February, but the Feds weren’t. That’s OK. It’s not really important to file taxes early in February. It’s only important to be the first one to file against my SSN. ;-)

We bought that E-car this year, which means we qualify for a $7500 tax credit. Of course, one doesn’t get the full credit unless they owe at least $7500. My goal was to adjust our income so that we would owe $7500 in taxes. I did pretty well. We owed $7516. It turns out the E-car form was the last form that was holding up our taxes. It was released a couple of days ago; the taxes are filed.

Now that we’re no longer employed, we don’t have withholding. And I don’t think we’ll be getting any more of those E-car credits. That means we have to pay quarterly estimated income taxes. Getting that all set up took as long as figuring out our taxes. Hopefully, it should be easier in the future.

That’s almost too much news for one week. It’s a good thing I’m retired so I can handle all this stuff. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

It was a full week. We had dinner out on Wednesday, taking advantage of a free entree at Houlihan’s. The coupon was for Danita’s “half birthday” (titled Halfday Birthday to You). Never mind the lame marketing. It was a great discount, and they have the best restaurant meatloaf in town. Thursday was Discovering Christ at Church, with a satisfying beef stew dinner.. Friday was “Stations” with a tremendously good vegetable soup and St. Louis’ famous grilled cheese sandwiches. Yesterday was the Chili Cook Off at Church. (Pay no attention to the rumours that I had more than one desert.) We took Mark and Jiajia out to breakfast this morning at the Silver Diner (most excellent food and delightful conversation, as always). And tonight is the neighborhood comfort food potluck. Here’s hoping somebody brings meatloaf!

But the real excitement begins tomorrow. I’m flying down to see Mom in the morning, returning Thursday afternoon. It’s a packed 4 days of nonstop activity. Don’t tell anybody, but a little birdie told me that there wasn’t room on one page for everything on my to-do list, so Mom hand-wrote the rest on the back of the page. It’s going to be non-stop action for me for sure this week — and, of course, a lot of fun also. Danita will be holding down the home front by herself this week. She’s delighted devastated that I won’t be here for 4 whole days.

I have to sign off and do some exercises to build my endurance. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Last week I talked about moving our neighborhood website. The website is moved, but I’m still tweaking things. The backups aren’t working exactly the way I want. Hopefully I’ll work that out soon. Other than that, I am quite pleased with our new host provider.

The weather folks are forecasting snow to start this afternoon and continue through the night. Everybody’s all atwitter about how much snow we’ll get. I’m supposed to help count money after Church tomorrow. We’ll have to wait and see whether I make it or not. Fortunately, we have plenty of toilet paper. We moved our Sunday breakfast out to this morning, because Sunday breakfast out is just that important.

This is Lent. One of the traditions of Lent is a small personal sacrifice. This year, we ended up with an unintentional un-sacrifice. We are attending a weekly series at Church on Thursday evenings, so we moved our dinner out night from Thursday to Wednesday. The weekly series includes dinner, so we are eating out on Thursday also. The dinners at our Church are very good. We like to go to Stations of the Cross on Fridays, which includes a good Catholic meatless dinner (alternates between fish and grilled cheese). All of which is another way of saying we are eating out more than ever during Lent this year.

The first “Stations” was last night. We timed our arrival so that we would finish dinner just before the service. When we got to Church, there was a sign on the door saying that the dinner was cancelled “due to unforeseen circumstances”. We didn’t have time to go home, eat, and come back for the service. We ended up driving out and back, missing the service, and eating at home. Fortunately, Danita had a frozen vegetarian pizza available.

The traffic was amazingly bad. We had several instances of people jumping lanes, cutting in traffic, etc. One person was in a left-turn only lane, stopped, and put on their turn signal just as we were about to pass them on the right. I did an emergency stop, then we did a reverse Mexican Standoff while we both waited for the other driver to go ahead. This incident is remarkable because the offender had a “Student Driver” sticker on their bumper, but there was only one person in the car. I concluded that person was probably a driving instructor, and they are imminently unqualified for that responsibility. I felt like I should be driving with my flashers on, a day before the snow starts.

I volunteered to offer IT assistance for CAC (Community Action Council of Howard County). CAC is the non-profit that runs the Howard County food bank. They immediately asked me to do some work that requires a software license. I found a 7-day free trial and did the work, then let them know I would need CAC to provide me a license to do more of this work, which costs $15/month. CAC is pennywise, a common trait of non-profits. They didn’t even respond. I thought that was the end of that gig.

But they came back for more help. They use program to share files with members of the Board of Trustees. It works well and it’s cheap ($10/month), but it is being phased out. They need another way to share files securely. They asked me to do some research. There isn’t a similar program that they can afford. But I came up with a way for them to meet their objectives for free. They got back with me right away saying they like my idea. The key person left for vacation. (The Email literally said, “I am leaving for vacation in 3 … 2 … 1 …”). It was kind of her to let me know. We’ll see what happens when she gets back.

I better send this off, in case our impending snow takes down all communications. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Our big news this week is that we will be volunteering at Assateague Island National Seashore. We will work April 4 through June 22. We will get one bedroom in a house, sharing the common living area with other park employees. This posting will be a little different. We will work 5 days / 40 hours a week. In addition to receiving housing, we are being paid $100 / week each.

The obstacle we had to overcome was internet access. The park is remote, with no cell phone service and extremely limited internet access. The only possibility for us to have our own internet connection is through a satellite dish. This is an amazingly expensive option. The contract is expensive. We pay extra if we use more than 10 GB/month. (That’s about 3 standard definition movies.) And we will not complete the 2-year contract, which means we will pay a hefty early termination fee. A significant chunk of our income will be dedicated to our internet access. Getting a dish installed required permission from the head of maintenance and the park chief.

In April and May, we will be working Mon – Fri with weekends off. We are told the park is booked solid with two school groups every day (one in the morning / one in the afternoon). As the school year winds down, we will transition to working weekends. We will be off May 4 – 6 so we can attend Elizabeth’s first communion.

But wait … there’s more. I manage our neighborhood website. We hired a consultant who recommended we use GoDaddy to host the site. It’s been nothing but a hassle. So I did a search for a better host provider and came up with SiteGround. The new provider is about twice the cost of GoDaddy ($100/year to $200/year), but they have a lot of satisfied customers. I expected months of delays while the board had lengthy discussions, reviews, and requests for additional information. Surprisingly, I got immediate approval. I will start the website move Monday. Hopefully it will go smoothly, solve our issues with GoDaddy, and not introduce new issues.

The weather this week has been lousy. I got only one bike ride in. But we’ve had plenty of activities. The Super Bowl was so good we actually stayed up and watched the entire game. We started a 6-week series at Church titled “Discovering Christ”. The series is on Thursday evenings and includes dinner, so we moved our dinner out night to Wednesday. We had the best Gyros in Columbia. Unfortunately, Columbia doesn’t have a Greek town. The Gyros are nowhere near the best in Baltimore. But they’re decent Gyros. Last night was a neighborhood Chinese New Year party. We have a neighborhood concert tonight. It’s a kind of Bluesy Jazz for Valentine’s day. It should be fun. Sunday we’ll go to an afternoon piano recital in Baltimore. The concert title highlighted Scarlatti, which isn’t very interesting. Fortunately, the pianist will also play Debussy, Schubert, and Liszt. We’re looking forward to a good time.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

It was a quiet week. The weather has not been good, but I did manage one ride.

The big news is that I took our Leaf (electric car) in for service. The dealer we bought the car from was very upfront about the cost and available deals. But their service department does what they can to do unnecessary service (at my expense). The car is 1 year old with 4,000 miles. The dealer changed the brake fluid. This is recommended after one year if the car is in heavy use. They also talked me into changing the cabin filter (which costs somewhere around $100 for most cars). They used the Burger King ploy — the 15K package is only a few bucks more than doing the other maintenance items separately. As it happens, the filters weren’t in stock, so they knocked about $100 of the service cost. At the last minute, they got another $8 out of me because the FOB key battery was weak. After I got home, I found that the brake fluid should be changed every other year, and the FOB key every 18 months. At least the battery wasn’t a total waste. I decided to change Danita’s battery. The batteries cost $4 each.

One of the sales features of the Leaf is that it needs less maintenance. I’ll be visiting a different dealer next time, and I’ll be armed. It’s too bad more dealers don’t treat their customers like Honda does. Honda dealers are always telling me about recommended service, but also telling me when I don’t really  need it this time around.

I got a new gig at the Howard County Food Bank, where Danita volunteers. They wanted some forms modified so they can be filled out on the computer. I was happy to help. At least some office staff use Adobe Acrobat DC Pro. I downloaded a 7-day free license. I told them that if they want more forms done, they will have to provide me with a license. We’ll see how that goes. I think this might have been a one-off volunteer gig, because I’m not donating $15/month for my own license.

Today is Super Bowl. We’re toning down the party. It will be shrimp salad sandwiches and crab soup. Our parish Knights of Columbus make the crab soup every year. It’s quite good.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We went to a wonderful play at Center Stage. Called “Skeleton Crew”, it is about factory workers in a plant that will shut down soon. The story line is realistic, the acting is great. As a super bonus, we got a free parking spot right in front of the door. We didn’t even have to cross a street to get to our car.

Our other big news this week was an interview with Assateague National Park. They are looking for volunteers to work from early April through the end of June. We were lucky. We found a time when we and the interviewers were available, and the government was open, on the first go. It can be frustrating when the government shuts down unexpectedly, but one grows to expect these things to happen when living in a third-world country. The park service is pushing to get a decision made before the government shuts down again.

We’re looking forward to another neighborhood party tonight. This one is a soup potluck.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

It was another quiet week in Columbia. But things are coming back to life.

We had a “death” this week. The cute little blue box you see here was an HP computer. I bought it for $200 in early 2012. Its mission was to stream video onto our TV set. It performed its mission briliantly and even did more than I expected. When my laptop needed repair, I was able to load a couple of extra programs on it and used it for my daily computing until my laptop returned. Recently, Microsoft released an upgrade that was so large that it wouldn’t fit on the computer’s disk. Its days were definately numbered, since running a computer that doesn’t have all the updates is definitely not wise these days. Then it started acting up. Parts to fix it are not readily available. It wasn’t worth a lot of effort to resuscitate it. It’s gone.

The Circle luncheon last Monday was nice, but not everybody was able to attend. Tina Bauman has been suffering from celiac disease attacks. She had to stay home. Her husband Bill is suffering from major league pain in his back. He was there, but he wasn’t comfortable.

I got my first bike ride of the year in yesterday. The old body felt kind of rusty. But I completed the ride.

We had a SOCA concert last night. We had a guitarist who does the senior home circuit. He’s definitely not good enough to sell CDs. But everybody had a good time, and the deserts were very good.

Today we attended a concert at the Baltimore Symphony. Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 is a great favorite. The pianist was Gabriela Montero. She definitely knows her way around the keyboard. Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra was brilliantly  performed — by far the best I’ve heard. It was hauntingly beautiful in many spots.

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

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!