It was an easy week here in Columbia. We had our first snow fall, with an inch or so of snow. The streets were clear, but we decided to have our first “snow emergency”. (Red wine goes good with snow!) We also spent some time getting ready for Christmas.

Our community’s property manager proposed a change in our database that would make it easier for us to manage our swimming pool passes. Incredibly enough, we got everything approved in a one-hour meeting. I spent a lot of time this weekend updating the database. The hard part of the changes are made. I have to add a couple of reports and smooth the rough edges. After that, there will be several hours of grunt work while I load 1,000 photos into the database. I’ll start next year and do a little at a time. I should have it done in a couple of months.

I hope this finds everybody doin well.

It’s exciting times here in central Maryland. It’s snowing. So far, we’ve had a light snow that doesn’t stick to any paved areas. But we know it’s a major event, because Howard County closed all their public buildings and cancelled all activities therein. That includes Centennial High School. And it includes the Jazz Ambassadors, the Army field band that was going to perform there today. And that means the Chaprnkas won’t be coming to the concert, and we won’t have dinner for them.

Given the obvious severity of the weather, there was only one option. But we didn’t have any snow emergency kits. Shame on me! I got out early enough that the stores weren’t crowded and made it back unscathed. Danita mailed the last of her Christmas cards just before lunch. Now the hatches are battened, and we’re ready for up to three snow emergencies.

A few things happened besides the snow. We took Mark out to breakfast Sunday and met his girlfriend Jiajia (pronounced “Jay Jay”). She’s a delightful young lady, working as an associate professor in physics at Bucknell University.

Thursday, we went to Bob Evans and did our Christmas shopping. (Sadly, they closed the Mimi’s in Columbia.) We wanted to have everything ready to drop ship. Unfortunately, a couple of the things we selected didn’t have gift wrapping available. We think we selected a wrong option while we were on Amazon. We had to ask Jul to do some wrapping for us. We’ll try to do better next year.

Our other activity was a neighborhood party at the clubhouse yesterday evening. There was plenty of food and lots of libations, but for some reason the people were louder than normal. We were able to talk, but it was hard to hear.

Fortunately or unfortunately, that’s the big news of the week. I rode my bike. Danita went to exercise classes. We did our chores. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

This was a big week, at least for us retired folks. In chronological order:

We’re going to France. We’re not sure when we’re leaving. We’re not sure what we’re going to see. But we know for sure when we’re coming home. We will take a repositioning cruise on the Queen Mary from England back to the US in October. The general plan is to fly to Paris, take the train to Provence, drive up to the Loire Valley over a period of weeks, then turn the car in and take the train back to Paris. (I’m not crazy enough to drive in Paris!) We’ll stay in Paris for a while, then take the chunnel train to London. We have our ticket for the return cruise. I thought we were reserving well ahead. But our first choice of rooms were all booked. We had the choice of stepping down one step, or going up. We said “What the heck” and stepped up. It was a hard decision, mostly because we had trouble paying for a balcony to cross the Atlantic in October.

I’ve been having a little trouble with vertigo. It’s a re-occurance of what I had about 35 years ago. Back then, I saw a GP, an ENT, and a neurologist. The neurologist knew what my problem was and knew I could do rotations to fix my problem; but he never gave me a name for my condition, and his description of the rotations left a lot to be desired. I finally got better after a month or two. This time my doctor’s assistant knew I have BPPV (Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo). She recommended a place to go to get the rotation done. That didn’t work out, but there’s lots of information on the web. I did one Epley Maneuver and kept my chin up for one day and two nights. That set me straight. BPPV is caused when calcium stones in your ear get stuck in your ear canal. I’ll never know what caused the first occurrence, but apparently once you get BPPV, it is more likely to recur. I’m thinking that going to Yoga 3 times a week may not be the best idea for me moving forward. There’s too many downward facing dogs.

“plique-a-jour” bowl

Today we went to the Walter’s art museum to get a free brunch for 20-year plus members only. Who says there’s no advantage to getting old? While we were there, we toured the Faberge exhibit. What caught my eye was a “plique-a-jour” bowl. This has enamel is applied in cells, but with no backing in the final product, so light can shine through the enamel. I didn’t have my camera, but here’s an example I stole from the internet.

Tomorrow we’ll take Mark out for breakfast for his birthday. It is said that we will meet his girlfriend, Jia Jia.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We had a small Thanksgiving this year. It was Ed, Lynne, and Bud. Danita had to do some recipe downsizing. She was quite successful. We had a wonderful dinner with all the normal stuff, but not too many leftovers. Ryn’s cheese was a big hit. It’s really good cheese.

Our decision to join the Columbia gym seems to have worked out well. Danita’s going to 5 exercise classes a week, most of them in the pool.  Plus we do yoga 2 or 3 times a week.

The standard joke is that we had the biggest holiday of the year — black Friday. I think it’s mostly turned into an excuse to spend money we wouldn’t otherwise spend. But we actually made a black Friday purchase this year. Center Stage offered half price on theater tickets. We’ll be seeing “Lookingglass Alice” next week, and “Skeleton Crew” in late January.

We’re going to the Sabiston’s this afternoon. We missed Dot’s funeral (we were in South Dakota). Dot was big on Christmas decorating. She had the entire house covered with Christmas stuff. Dwane and the daughters decided to have a Christmas decorating party. We’ll be spending a couple of hours finding places to put all the Christmas things Dot has collected. And we’ll be doing some eating also.

That’s all there is this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I spent most of this week in West Palm Beach with Mom. We took her car to a shop to get a leak fixed, we went to the lawyer and reviewed her documents, and we did a few things around the house.

Mom wanted a new ceiling light fixture for the hallway. We went to Lowe’s and picked out one she liked. It said “LED” which I figured was marketing. I installed the base unit and realized the parts needed to screw in the light bulbs were missing. Then I realized there was no provision for running wire through those parts, even if I had them. Before taking everything back to Lowe’s, I tried turning the lights on. Low and behold, a dozen very small white LEDs illuminated. When I installed the globe, it looked like a regular light fixture. Now I understand why Lowe’s gave a five year warranty. I showed Mom there were no lightbulbs and explained why she should hold onto the receipt for 5 years. It’s a neat concept, but I think it’s a lot easier to replace a burned out bulb than it is to replace a defective ceiling fixture. We’ll see how it goes.

While I was at Mom’s, Danita took her dad to the doctor. Bud pulled the emergency cord one evening while we were visiting Ryn. Bud spent a day in the hospital. He couldn’t remember anything, nobody could find anything wrong with him, so they sent him home. The working theory is that Bud accidentally took too many Ambien. The doctor switched him to melatonin, which is probably an most excellent idea.

I got back Thursday evening. Mike Bertch’s funeral was Friday. It was a nice ceremony followed by a wonderful reception. Mike was cremated, so there was no graveyard ceremony. They had an hour of gathering time, then the funeral mass, then a reception in the church hall downstairs. The funeral was at St. Johns, the church we used to attend when we lived in Kingsville.

The weather folks said there was a good chance of rain mid-afternoon today. I decided that gave me a perfect window for a nice bike ride. It started spritzing, so I cut the ride short. After I got home, the weather improved. As of 2:45, it still hasn’t started raining. I’m not impressed with the forecasters.

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

There are lots of pictures this week.

Cheese Production

Kathryn is at Cricket Creek in Williamstown, MA these days, making cheese. (The $24/pound kind. We’ll have some available for Thanksgiving dinner). We took a 4-day trip to visit. Tuesday was mostly driving up. We arrived mid-afternoon, and had a brief view of cheese production. We saw cow milking, milk storage, the cheese aging room, and lots of stainless steel.

Shaker Village; round barn in the background

We were discussing where we wanted to eat dinner. I suggested visiting the nearby retirement community. We would say we were thinking of moving up here to be close to our daughter. If we got there about 4, we could probably get a free dinner so we could see if we like the food. I thought it was a great idea, but cooler heads prevailed. We had an excellent Mexican dinner at Coyota Flaco.

Pie Oven – The main dish for most dinners was some kind of pie

Wednesday we visited the Hancock Shaker village. We had seen the Canterbury Shaker Village many years ago. The Shaker’s were a large utopian society with several prosperous villages. Their most striking characteristics were the unique dance they did during worship, and their insistence that all members remained celibate. At it’s largest, this village had about 100 people.

Window detail. Note the thumb screws. It’s easy to lock the window open or closed; or to remove the window for cleaning.

Visiting Hancock was quite interesting. There are *very* enthusiastic docents giving talks on many subjects. While the docents were always interesting, they would let their talks run way over the allotted time, which meant we had to leave one talk before it was over so we could see another talk on another subject. We found it striking how often docents bemoaned the large number of buildings the Shakers tore down. The non-profit that took over the village is interested in preserving the past as much as possible. This was in direct contrast to the Shakers, who were forward-looking and practical. They readily adopted new technology and were interested in the most efficient operation possible given the size of their community and the technology available to them.

Round Barn

The Shakers kept their property spotlessly clean and well-organized. They had many clever ideas to make their facilities more practical. The signature building is the round barn, which was used for hay storage and cow milking. But when better methods of milking cows became available, the Shakers promptly built new facilities for milking, leaving the barn useful only for storing hay.

Workshop Lathe

They had a reservoir above the village. They installed a 16″ water pipe with a turbine to generate water power for their workshop. It still works today. There was a second turbine at a workshop for contractors, and a third turbine to run a ceiling fan in the Trustee building.

Atwater Kent Radio

Thursday we visited the museum in Bennington, VT; and the Clark art museum in Williamstown. The Clark is a traditional art museum. The building is very large and modern. The collection is surprisingly large. I enjoyed the Impressionist exhibit, and spent all my time there. The Bennington museum has a large collection of Grandma Moses paintings, as well as several artifacts collected from the area. I especially enjoyed this rare Atwater Kent radio. These were made mostly in the 1920s, before the invention of superheterodyne receivers. Atwater Kent was known for innovations in their electronics, excellence in performance, beautiful styling, and very high price.

Ryn-hand-made Shoes – on her own feet!

Ryn is interested in making things by hand. She slaughters and butchers all manner of animals. She has blacksmithed, made butter churns, built her own smoke house, and more. Lately she has been learning how to make shoes. She made these shoes by hand.

TV in the  ShakerTrustee Building

Our last dinner was a pot-luck that the people at Cricket Creek have every Thursday. The workers at Cricket Creek may not make a lot of money, but they certainly eat well. We had an uneventful drive back Friday. I’ll close this with a picture of a TV in the Shaker Trustee house. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I’m sad to announce that Mike Bertch has passed. His funeral won’t be until the 17th.

Cunningham Manor

We attended an extravagant event this week. Somehow we got on the “high roller” list for Baltimore’s Ruth’s House. We were invited to an evening at Cunningham Manor. This house looks like a restored English manor house. Actually, it’s 15 years old. The owner it is David Smith. He also owns Sinclair Media, which is a large collection of TV stations and media outlets. Most of the TV stations are in the FOX network. One of David’s children is into gardens. They flew a garden designer in from England. Today, they have two full-time gardeners to maintain the grounds. They built the house on a farm (~ 200 acres) off of Falls Road. The other houses in the area are a mix of ages and styles, but they are almost all middle-class.

We arrived to valet parking. After walking around and giving the public part of the house a good gawk, we stopped at the buffet. It was straight out of Gourmet Magazine. The roast beef was thick-cut and perfectly cooked. There were also huge prawns, crab cakes, crab dip, and lamb chops. There were about 10 different fancy desserts. The chocolate covered strawberries used dark and white chocolate to make it look like the strawberries were wearing a tux. In addition, waiters walked around with almost a dozen different hors d’oeuvres (including lobster, of course). They had the only open bar I’ve ever seen that didn’t have a tip jar. And the wine was really good. After the speech, the Smiths gave House of Ruth $75,000. The executive director is really good at looking overwhelmed. There was no way we belonged in this event. But we had a fabulous time. And we’re not going to ask to be taken off the “high rollers” list.

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the condo wants us to improve the drainage of the sump pump and rain gutters behind our house. Everybody was asking who owns the land behind our house. I called CA (Columbia Association), and said the words “Open Space Land” (which was a pure guess on my part). It was a bulls-eye hit. Early in the process, we were told that open space land had to be kept in a wild condition and couldn’t be mowed. But things got better after that. The condo has a landscaping easement on the land. Nobody has found the actual copy of the easement, so we’re still not sure what rights we have. But it’s pretty certain we can mow. The people at CA are open, friendly, and professional. I think I have our property manager convinced that the condo should make a deal with CA, instead of each unit owner trying to do something slightly different. I figure this issue will take years to straighten out, which is fine with me.

Here’s my panic of the week. We bought an E-car, which entitles us to a $7500 federal tax credit. We arranged for our income to be enough to generate a $7500 tax bill, which nets out to $0 owed. Under these conditions, we didn’t have to file quarterly taxes. Now Trump’s proposed tax bill will eliminate the credit. For our travels next year, we will volunteer at a national park and visit France. Or maybe we’ll get free room and board, courtesy of the federal government penal system. What a bother first world problems are!

Danita and I are looking forward to our trip to Cricket Creek, MA next week. We’ll be visiting with Ryn and seeing how cheese is made. It should be a lot of fun.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Prize Basket

It was quite an exciting weekend here in Columbia. We started with a Yoga class Saturday morning. Our objective was to meet a new instructor. Unfortunately, they had a substitute — an instructor we had already met and don’t particularly like. Immediately after that I took my bike ride. I got home just in time to get ready for 4:30 mass, after which we had neighborhood bull and oyster roast Saturday night. There was lots of food and lots of people.

Rebecca, Lynne, Pete, Mark, Ed, Addie, Susanne

You might think Saturday was pretty full, but we actually had even more than that. When we went to the Senior Expo, Danita and I stopped at several booths for a chance to win a prize, or spin a prize wheel, or whatever. I got a nifty pocket flashlight and a T-shirt. Danita got a water bottle. Saturday, one of the audiologists called. I was telling them we weren’t interested when they interrupted me and shouted “Don’t hang up, don’t hang up”. They were trying to tell me Danita won the basket. It was a good one, filled with crackers and snacks that we used Sunday.

Lynne, Pete, Rebecca, Addie, Ed, Danita

Sunday was the fifth Sunday of the month. We like going to Miss Shirley’s for breakfast because the food is very good. We dislike it because it’s a long-ish drive (to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor) and because it’s expensive. So we go there only on 5th Sundays. We both had a great breakfast. It was raining pretty heavily, so the parking garage and elevated walkway came in quite handy.

Lynne, Bud, Mark

Sunday evening we had our fall sour beef dinner. It covers a family dinner, Oktoberfest, and Bud’s birthday.

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

Getting the bad news out of the way first … Mike Bertch is doing worse. Most of the time, he is too weak to swallow. Our Circle group plans to have a lunch at Mike’s hospice Tuesday. They might have to roll Mike’s bed into the room we’ll be using because he is sometimes too weak to use a wheelchair. A couple of Mike’s friends visited Mike last week with a bottle of Jameson whiskey. They found Mike couldn’t swallow, so they used a pad to put some on his lips.

I’m feeling like I’m back to normal life. The sump alarm appears to be working. I’ll give it a full test next time it rains. I did this alarm with a technology called Smart Home. I’m using a hub from Samsung. It takes a while to figure out, but it’s incredibly flexible. What surprises me is how dependent this technology is on the cloud. The idea is simple. If the float switch indicates the sump is full, send a notification to my tablet and an Email to me. Perfect operation requires my WiFi is working, the Samsung server is working, and the Google server is working. It’s cool technology and a lot of fun to play with, but not nearly as reliable as a device that dials my phone number through a land line. It’s really too bad the old alarm died.

I took my bike to South Dakota with us, but when we got out there, I didn’t like the roads and decided not to ride. We had plenty of physical activity, but that’s not equivalent to riding a bike. When we got back home, I found that somebody had jacked up all the hills. I’m making excellent progress on that. I’m doing most of my rides as well as I had done them before we left. I haven’t tried my toughest ride yet, but I should be ready in a week or two. I’ve been lucky to have beautiful weather. Highs are around 70 and most days are sunny.

After two drives across the country, our car was a mess. I decided to get it detailed. The guy worked on it about 4 hours. When he was done, the result was amazing in almost every way. The only problem is that now that the bugs and dust are removed, it’s easy to see the paint chips.

The project I just now finished is to banish Microsoft Outlook from Danita’s and my life. I used to like Outlook because of it’s calendar view and contacts list. I could see personal Emails as well as emails to our neighborhood’s “Webmaster” all in one screen. One could have categories and assign colors. One could have groups and send an Email to many people. Outlook had a nice feature set without being overburdened with a lot of junk. Of course,Email, calendar, and contacts are available online directly from Google. But back in the day, “contacts” was just a list of the Email address of everybody to whom you ever sent an Email. It couldn’t be edited, and there was so much junk in it that it was worthless. Colors weren’t available. Neither were categories. Most importantly, one couldn’t see any of this when not connected to the internet. But it was getting harder to keep all our laptops and phones synched. I took another look at Google’s web services. They have improved immensely. They don’t work exactly the way I would like, but they meet every last one of my needs. That is, once the options are set and the “Offline” helper is installed and configured. It was a little work, but our lives for Email, calendar, and contacts are significantly improved.

Backyard water drain egress

The project I’m working now on is related to our condo. The previous owner connected the sump pump and roof gutter to pipes, buried the pipes under ground, and ran them 20 feet down the hill behind our house. Seven years later, the association decided that needs to be changed. They want me to run the pipes all the way down the hill, almost 60 feet. At the bottom of the hill, they want me to dig a gravel pit. This will do nothing to improve the drainage from my house. And most of the 60 feet of land is owned by Hughes Corporation, not our condo. And water will be dumped right at the border of land owned by Howard County. The board doesn’t seem to understand that one should receive permission from property owners before building things on their land. All of this is to avoid a small hole in the ground in an area where nobody walks anyway because the ground is always wet and it’s on a steep hill. But the board is sure they want the gravel pit to have brown gravel. The board is nuts.

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