There are pics this week.

Mom & Glen

Our news this week was big and bigger. The first big news was a visit to West Palm Beach. We had a wonderful time with Mom & Glen. We arrived around Noon Monday. This was Martin Luther King day and a holiday for Danita. The big activity for the day was upgrading Mom’s computer to Windows 10. After the initial shock of seeing so many changes in Windows, Mom was delighted to learn that the only real change for the way she uses her computer is how to shut the computer down. And even that is a pretty small change.

Mom & Danita

Tuesday Mom and I went out to pick up a new rug for their appartment. After that I installed a DVD player. During the summer when the “snow birds” go north, there’s not a lot if entertainment in Century Village. There’s a library very close to Century Village that has a huge collection of movies on DVD. They’re available to borrow for free, but they’re no good without a player. After the installation, we spent a lot of time practicing switching between the DVD and cable TV. Then we went to the library and borrowed “Kiss me Kate” from 1953 with Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel — an oldie for sure but a very good adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew”. For dinner, we went to a very nice seafood restaurant, Bimini Twist.

Glen and Mom (be sure to click this one to see it full size)

Wednesday we went out for lunch. We went to a hole-in-the-wall Greek place called Souvlaki Grill. It was a bit of a drive, and it wasn’t much to look at, but the food was very good. Mom and Glen weren’t up to going out Wednesday afternoon, so Danita and I went out alone to explore the South Florida Fair. Our favorite was the animal exhibits, especially the rabbits and chickens. They had an amazing variety of exotic breeds. We saw the best of the best. Every animal on display was an award winner.

Thursday we went out for breakfast. We visited a very good breakfast-and-lunch restaurant called Pete’s Place. We all had a great breakfast. Danita’s stuffed french toast was the most outstanding selection. Mom decided she didn’t like the rug we had picked up Tuesday, so after breakfast we returned it. On the way home, we stopped at a farmer’s market and bakery to pick up some honey. The market is close to Century Village and on the way home, but Mom & Glen didn’t go there often because it was run down. It was lucky we stopped because we found that a new owner had taken it over about three months ago. What a difference the new owner made. The place was popping with customers and overflowing with colorful, attractive produce. The bakery was well-stocked with freshly baked delicious treats. Glen is quite fond of apple turnovers. Mom brought some home and found them to be excellent.

Our flight home was Thursday evening. This was quite lucky for us because the great blizzard of the 2015 / 2016 season was starting the next day. Every last seat was taken. Our flight home was a little late, but otherwise uneventful. We had intentionally used up the food in our house before we left. Danita got up early Friday morning to go to the grocery store before going to work. She found Wegman’s had all hands on deck, desperately trying to keep the shelves stocked as everybody in the area laid in supplies for the big storm. She found most of what she wanted. I tag-teamed her and went out to more stores looking for those things Wegman’s didn’t have, while Danita went to work. It took three more stores, but I was able to get everything we wanted (including the snow emergency wine, naturally). UMBC closed the university at 1, and Danita was home an hour before the snow started.

Earlier this year, our power company offered a free energy saving thermostat. Its main feature is that it’s hooked up to our Wi-Fi so we can control it remotely. We decided to take advantage of this feature by setting the temperature back to 45 when we left. While we were in the WPB airport waiting to board, I used the airport Wi-Fi and my tablet to set the temperature back up to 68 where we normally keep it. It was a great idea, but it was so cold outside that when we got back, the house was only up to 50. That’s where it stayed overnight while we snuggled under an extra layer of covers. It took until 2 PM Friday to get the temperate back where we keep it. And that required running the fireplace most of the morning. I wanted to keep track of the house temperature but I was upstairs working on my computer. Running up and down the stairs wouldn’t do, so I spent much of the morning with my tablet open on the side so I could watch the temperature through the Wi-Fi.

The snow storm was our other big news for the week. It started snowing Friday afternoon and didn’t finish until Saturday evening. Depending on who you listen to, “Snowzilla” was the biggest snow  in Baltimore history. It was officially a blizzard. It dumped over two feet of white stuff. I remember “Snowmaggedon” of 2010, which dumped 3 feet of snow. But that was two storms back-to-back. I spent quite a bit of time moving snow off the deck. I was concerned that the weight of the snow wasn’t good for the deck. Besides that, snow was blowing up against the house, and I didn’t want it to start melting and leaking through the doors. Besides, what else was I going to do? Everything around here is still closed. UMBC announced they will be closed Monday. Our neighborhood streets and driveways aren’t cleared yet. If they were, the rest of the side streets around here are mostly still blocked.

We had a good time during Snowzilla. I spent a lot of time working on the new website feature. Danita spent a lot of time cooking. Last night we had a snow emergency wine and snack party. (I read that stores sell more junk food than anything else before a big storm.) We never lost power, we had plenty of supplies, we should be cleared out sometime tomorrow.

That’s plenty of news for this week. I’m off to a snow emergency ice cream party tonight. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There is one pic this week.

The high temperature in Columbia yesterday was 53. The high in West Palm Beach Tuesday will be 65. I know because I looked it up. I looked it up because that’s where we’re going to be. We have reservations at Hotel Mom. Our flight leaves 8:30 tomorrow morning. We’re returning Thursday evening. We’re checked in, and we’re TSA Pre-approved. The only thing we have left to do is drive to the airport before 8:30 tomorrow. Woo-Hoo!l

Checking in wasn’t as easy as usual. Southwest allows check-in 24 hours before the flight. That would be 8:30 AM today. From experience, I know that checking in 5 minutes late moves us from the end of the “B” boarding to the middle or end of the “C” boarding. That means the overhead bins will be full, and it may even mean we both sit in center seats on different rows. The mass we usually attend starts at 8:30. We decided to go to the Saturday afternoon mass. They have a music group. This music group is serious about their music. They do a nice job, but they sing every verse of every song. It was a long mass. On the positive side, we were at Panera for breakfast at 7. There’s a lot less people there early in the day. It was nice to have a quiet breakfast with no lines and plenty of empty booths.

Christmas Cactus (mostly buds)

Danita has the world’s most stubborn plant. She had her Christmas Cactus in her office at work. Just before the holiday, she saw that her plant was about to bloom. She brought it home so she could enjoy it during Christmas. It promptly stalled. It finally started blooming yesterday. but it’s still mostly buds. It won’t bloom until after we leave for our visit with Mom. Stubborn plant.

We saw the most amazing rainbow this week. Danita was in the basement watching TV and clipping coupons. I was upstairs working on playing with my computer. I happened to look up and there it was. It was very wide with the most vivid colors I’ve ever seen in a rainbow. I ran down to the basement and we looked at it from the back porch. Then we went upstairs to get a better view. Then we went outside and walked up to the guard shack so we could see it without the intervening trees. By then it had faded quite a bit. But it was still an unusually wide rainbow. Each color was still discernable.

The SOCA board approved the project to add resident login and a resident directory to our web site. I’m hard at work kind of working on it. (As you can see, I’m also working on being more honest.) I successfully transferred a half-dozen residents from our database to the website, along with all their related information (pass numbers, etc). That was a major milestone. I’m doing this on a test website loaded on my laptop. Of course, I went through several unsuccessful and partially successful attempts. Now my test website is full of junk. I need to delete it and rebuild it. While I’m doing that, I want to document all the settings, configurations, and whatnot so that the next webmaster will know what’s going on. (And also so I’ll know, when I come back from our trip and don’t remember anything I did.) It’s very boring work.

We have a neighborhood concert this evening. It’s a jazz group. They will have wine and desserts. The clubhouse is filled with chairs and tables, a sure sign of a full house this evening.

That’s the news for this week. I have to go back to church to help count money. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pics this week.

Near the end of the holidays, I started having severe problems keeping my glasses clean. After several days of this, I finally realized the problem wasn’t my glasses. I had floaters in my left eye. I looked them up on the Internet. I learned they are common for people my age, and they’re only a nuisance. Except for when they are a precursor to blindness. It might be a good idea to see your doctor. So I got an appointment with my ophthalmology practice. (My regular ophthalmologist was out this week.) The doctor said they’re just a nuisance, but it might be a good idea to come back in a month. Just to make sure they aren’t a precursor to blindness. I understand that after a month or so, most people learn to ignore them.

The last part of the week had some wonderful riding temperatures and no rain. But there was no riding because it was three days of continual misting. But it was good in other ways. We went to our favorite pizza place for dinner Thursday. Friday, we had a neighborhood party. Saturday we had a Circle dinner at the Sochurek’s. All that partying was really good, because Monday I’m having colonoscopy. That means I’m prepping today. My diet today makes bread and water look good. Hopefully the purge will improve my blood chemistry in preparation for blood work I have scheduled for Wednesday. Not that I’m feeling old …

My bike’s Garmin GPS has worked great for the last 5 years. It’s designed for outdoor use and has definitely stood up to some tough weather, plus even a couple of drops. I think it’s still working great — or it would be, if I could turn it on. I don’t see a way to fix or bypass the defective power switch. I decided to be happy with the 5 years of service I got from it, and ordered a new Garmin. Which, of course, is better in many ways. Including an improvement I didn’t want. Garmin licenses their maps to their GPS units, which I find understandable. But they don’t allow their customers to transfer their maps from one registered unit to another new registered unit. I found that unreasonable, but I had no option. In addition to a larger screen, brighter display, better GPS tracking, a more secure bike mount, a working power switch, and many other improvements, I now have maps that are 5 years newer.

Danita told her staff about her retirement on Tuesday. That relieved her of a lot of stress. She’s still feeling anxiety about retirement, but it’s substantially lessened.

The Christmas decorations are packed up. There are no parties this week. We are settling in for a normal week — other than Monday. If Danita’s sane, she’ll go to work after she drives me home from the colonoscopy, and stay late.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are 2 pics.

We had a wonderful New Year’s Eve this year. We went to a BSO concert that featured classical and theatrical favorites along with acrobatic performers. We saw some amazing things, including a woman who bent over backwards and rolled across the stage in what can be described as a human tire. I stole this picture from the web. I must say the musicians have nerves of steel, with performers rolling around and above them.

Larry Black owns a bike store in Mt. Airy. Every year he hosts a ride on New Year’s day called “I’ve ridden every day so far this year.” I haven’t made it in a couple of years, and decided it would be a fun thing to do this year. All rides start at Noon. I chose the 40 mile ride. My goodness it was hard. I generally ride 40 miles twice a week. But I haven’t ridden in about a week. Also, I leave earlier and include a lunch break. I didn’t have time to take a break on this ride, if I wanted to be sure of getting back before dark. Of all the people on the 40-mile ride, I was dead last within the first minute. After 2 miles, I never saw any of those riders again. At about mile 5, 3 guys passed me who left late. Other than that, it was a solo ride. I was the last person to leave the parking lot. Group rides is one time when I don’t worry about finding a “pull through” parking space, as there is always plenty of room for me when I pull out.

Fact offered without commentary

I had an unusual experience. A dog came up to me, all friendly and curious. It’s not common, but dogs sometimes follow me for a while, then go off on their own way. I once had a dog follow me for over an hour. This dog shocked and surprised me when I suddenly felt his teeth on my leg. He was careful not to break my skin, but my tights didn’t fare well. I surmise he is a hunting dog, and decided my leg would make a nice bird for his owner. If true, he was a particularly stupid hunting dog.

We recorded the Rose Bowl Parade so we could watch it together after dinner, while Stanford was busy stomping Iowa. Watching the Millennium Falcon shoot laser blasters was pretty cool, but my favorite was the fire breathing dragon.

Tonight is our parish Christmas dinner. We will serve from 4 to 7, then enjoy our own sirloin tips. Tomorrow after Church, we have a Mimi’s breakfast BOGO. Two good meals in a row eating out. No cooking. No cleanup. What a great way to end the holidays.

There are pics today.

At the Holiday Lights – Mark, Danita, Pat, Jul, Bryon, Liz

We (all six of us, Reeds and Eichenlaubs) started Tuesday with a trip to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum. Danita found a super-duper coupon that got us all in at half price. There were a huge number of amazing things to see, along with occasional surprises – an extra noise or a puff of air. Elizabeth got overloaded when she tried to climb through a tunnel, but otherwise it was a completely successful outing. That afternoon, Mark felt good enough to join us. We had some of Danita’s fabulous lasagna. We watched Kung Fu Panda 2 and did our gift exchange with Mark.

Trains in the park Greenhouse. (Click on this pic to see the greenhouse in the greenhouse.)

Wednesday the Reeds went to a children’s theater production of “Frog and Toad”. When they came back, we went to watch Kung Fu Panda 3. That’s when I learned that movie, which was promoted throughout the first two movies, will be released late in January. Amazon helped us save the day with Toy Story 3. In the evening, we went to a walk-through holiday lights exhibit at one of the county parks.

Moat Monster

We had all kinds of opportunities to play computer games in between adventures. Pat and I were talking about the old arcade games, which made me remember an old hand-held Frogger toy I got one year for Christmas. It still works, and it’s still fun to play. However, by Thursday all the adults were glad I didn’t find the game earlier. (The “splat” noise occurs frequently. It gets to be annoying after the first few thousand occurrences). All the games make noise. Frogger was just the most popular annoyance.

At the Train Garden (the kids are acting their age, again)

Wednesday was the “Second Christmas” celebration at Ed’s, with over 20 in attendance. But that wouldn’t be enough for us. We had planned to start the day by taking the kids to the theater to see “Good Dino”. This would give the Reed parents a couple of hours to go through the house, making sure all their stuff was packed up. Unfortunately, the movie flopped, and it couldn’t get even one screening when competing with Star Wars. “Alvin” was playing, but Danita really dislikes the chipmunks. So we went to the library and borrowed “Beethoven”, the old Disney classic about a St. Bernard dog. We took the kids over to our clubhouse theater for the screening. The movie was a great success.

For some reason, this model of the Baltimore Conservatory caught my eye. You can see the Bromo Seltzer tower on the left.

Our second adventure was a stop on the way to Ed’s house to see the Glen Ave firehouse train garden. Jul, Pat, and Mark chose to skip the train garden. We took the kids and left an hour earlier. There were few other people there, and we had a great time. They had a “Minecraft” area, where the kids tried to educate a hopelessly out-of-date older generation some of the fundamental “who’s who”. The Minion area was quite popular, in part because they had the Minion movie playing on an LCD panel representing an outdoor movie screen. To nobody’s surprise, Star Wars was back this year. They also had two building fires, a volcano, and much more.

Pat and Liz at Second Christmas

The Second Christmas at Ed’s was filled with people. Besides Bryon and Liz, there were 4 other children. Suzanne and Addie were there, and Toni’s sister brought her two kids. It took so long to do all the presents that we ended up taking an eating break in the middle. I think the star of the buffet was Danita’s 3-cheese macaroni casserole. Call me biased if you want. I noticed there wasn’t much left at the end of the evening. There was no way to get pictures of everybody. I’m just including a couple of shots.

Toni. In the background, you can see Toni’s parents. Bryon is on the far left with Suzanne and Addie looking on; Lynne is on the right.

Mark went home last night. The Reeds left about 5 AM this morning, Christmas is over. But the holidays aren’t. There’s plenty more to come …

There are plenty of pics this week.

Happy Meatballs

Christmas starts with preparation, and Danita is an expert at that. Here you see her making her special happy meatballs (which we will be eating tonight, as a matter of fact.) We’re enjoying a whole range of special foods for the holidays — ham, snacks, sweets. It’s a great part of the holidays. Christmas day was quiet for us. We went to Ed & Lynne’s for dinner. Bud was also there. It was just the five of us.

Opening Presents

The Reeds arrived yesterday. It didn’t take long to get around to opening presents. We finished the day off with “Kung Fu Panda”. That plus the drive up was plenty for the Reed kids on one day.

At the art museum

Sunday we played the parachute game. Then we played the Nerf gun game. Our special event was a visit to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where the kids made art inspired by the miniature rooms on display. After our happy meatball dinner, Jul and Pat will go off to visit Maribeth, while the kids stay home and watch Kung Fu Panda II.

Of course, some experiences are just better told in pictures than words. So here’s a bunch of extra pictures for your general entertainment.

Chocolate Toffee Muffins

More Presents

Checking out the Recepies

Jul

Danita’s Retirement Count-down Chain

The Parachute Game

The Nerf Gun Dance

Nerf Gun – Finer Points

There is one pic today.

Godiva Chocolates

Danita had a couple of nice things happen to her. She’s been at UMBC 15 years. That entitles her to go the awards ceremony, eat a free lunch, and get her 15-year gift. In addition to all that, she also won one of the door prizes — a large box of Godiva chocolates. We never buy Godiva chocolates because they are way too expensive. But if one gets a basket of them for free, they taste really good.

News of Danita’s retirement is still limited. It worked its way up to the VP of Research. (Danita’s boss’s boss.) Danita saw him while she was on campus. He was very supportive — much more than just “Congradulations”. He gave her a hug, told her she deserved this, thanked her for waiting until UMBC had the contract renewals, etc. There will be a meeting of the powers that be on Tuesday to start developing a plan to replace Danita. UMBC is closed 12/24 – 1/3. Most of the people in the office are taking vacation next week. The next time the entire office will be together will be 1/5. Danita will announce her retirement to the staff then. That will make her retirement public knowledge. And that will be a big relief to Danita.

Buried in the bowels of our new website is a “contact us” page that has an address for the webmaster. Those Emails go to me. There’s not exactly a lot of traffic. I’ve received less than half a dozen Emails in all so far. I got one of the strangest Emails ever on that address this week. Somebody claimed that truckers were entering our neighborhood before the gate closed and sleeping in their trucks overnight. Personally, I find this to be very unlikely. Our gate closes at 8. I doubt that truckers want to quit that early, especially as there is no place to shower. The closest restaurant is about 3/4 mile away. I don’t think many truckers would want to walk that far for dinner. (Remember, the gate will be locked when they get back from dinner.) And all our streets are just wide enough for traffic. There’s no place where a rig can park. I decided this had very little to do with our website and forwarded this urgent warning to our president.

We had strange event happened this week. One of our residents had a visitor from a family member the other evening. The visitor is on the “Frequent Visitors” list so the guard let her in. The resident didn’t open the door. The visitor became concerned that the resident might be in diabetic shock. She found the condo president. He called the police. The police came and said the fire department breaks down doors. They called the fire department. About the time the fire truck got to our gate, the resident finally woke up. She had slept through doorbell ringing, door pounding, numerous sirens, and flashing lights. Fortunately, she woke up about 2 minutes before the fire department broke through her front door. We have a list of emergency contacts. It’s on the computer (of course). One of the things the condo president did was call our Office Manager at home and had her walk him through how to get to this list. The resident had not provided any emergency contact information.

I went to a SOCA board workshop to discuss whether residents should log into our web site. And discussed, and discussed. 2 1/2 hours later, they said they would take a vote at the January meeting. A couple of days later, the president sent a very long and detailed Email which mostly asked the same questions we discussed at the meeting. I answered, providing the same answers I had already provided in the meeting. Then there was a whole round of questions and answers, with no new information. We’ll see how the vote goes next year. One of the things the proposal will do is make the emergency contacts available to the SOCA board members any time, just by logging into our web site.

I like toilets. They are one of the great conveniences of our lives. Until they don’t work. One of our toilets started leaking about a year ago. I put in an all-so-cool dual flush flusher. (Small flushes for #1, large flushes for #2.) Except it never worked right and I had to hold the flusher in for 2 seconds on a #1 flush. We joked about this at Men’s Club and came up with a bunch of remedies. My favorite was a page of instructions and warnings on the bathroom wall, with a second page in Spanish. This week the new dual-flusher stopped working. I decided to go back to a standard flusher. But that meant I had to replace everything down to the flush handle. I had the water tank disassembled from the toilet with rags, parts, and tools all over the floor. But it’s finally done. And it’s not leaking. Maybe this time it will last longer than a year.

We’re just about ready for Christmas. All we need is people — and maybe some toy parachutes for the kids to throw off the balcony. Ed and Lynne are having a Christmas party on the 25th and a second Christmas party on the 30th. We’re looking forward to having Mark and the Reeds stay with us several days of Christmas week.

Amazon offered me a bonus code to buy Kung Fu Panda for free. We would be able to stream it over the internet whenever we want. It’s just in time for Christmas, so I jumped right on the deal. Only the code didn’t work. I called Amazon and the offered me a $15 credit against my next Amazon purchase. That’s enough to buy 2 movies, and it’s a very nice gesture. But now I don’t know what I want to do with my credit. I started out with a free movie for the grandkids and ended up with way too many choices. We have so many first world problems …

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pics this week.

We are having unbelievably warm weather. The high today was 70. It’s more than 20 degrees warmer than usual. This isn’t a one-day fluke. We’re in the middle of a solid week of this. I’m riding my bike in shorts and with no jacket. In mid-December. Remarkable.

I’m not doing anything “special” this week. After all, I pretty much do whatever I want every day of the year. Houlihan’s offered me a free entree. So we went to Houlihan’s for our Thursday dinner out night, and I got free meatloaf. They put a lot of food on the plate. I always bring enough meatloaf home for a nice sandwich. It’s still in the fridge, patiently waiting for me.

Danita told both of her bosses she is retiring April 1. They’re trying to figure out what to do. This is the first time in many years that Danita hasn’t given them the answer. We also visited our financial guy. Danita’s UMBC savings plan is with TIAA-CREF. They offer free financial advice. Our guy is pretty good. Basically, we’re not likely to have financial troubles in retirement.

Friday we had a neighborhood party. Today Danita made sweet Italian sausage sandwiches for lunch. Then we went to hear a Christmas concert given by the Army’s Jazz Ambassador band. I’m not sure exactly what’s for dinner, but Danita’s cooking. I saw garlic and onions. What more does one need to know?

I’m looking forward to presenting a proposal to give everybody in our neighborhood the ability to sign into our web site. If we do that, we can have a neighborhood directory, and allow board members to search our resident data, and replace our silly pool book, and manage weekly and monthly Emails from our website. The demo is working. I don’t want to break it by changing things. So I decided to write a program that pulls data from our existing database. That will let us automatically populate the database in our website. It was a fun little project.

That’s it for this week. Dinner should be ready soon. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pics today.

We had a wine and snack party last night. Danita has two research groups and hence two bosses. She told one of her bosses that she will retire April 1. Retirement is a big deal for her because she worked at UMBC so long and because she has so much of herself invested in her job. She came home all worked up. So we had pizza for dinner and then drank a bottle of red wine and ate nuts while watching TV. She plans to tell her other boss Tuesday. We won’t be having a wine night Tuesday because that’s Yoga night. As good as we are at drinking wine, we can’t do it while doing “Downward Dog”.

After several days of rain, the weather turned nice. I enjoyed good rides Thursday and Friday. But the best day was today. Danita wasn’t sleeping. So when I got up at 5, Danita got up also. We went to IHOP for breakfast. We used our coupon for free pancakes and split an omelet. After breakfast we went to Toys R Us and bought our Toys for Tots. Then we went to Target and got a boy’s sweater for our church’s Advent Giving Tree.

I got a nice long ride in after that. When I got to Glenwood (my destination), I found long lines of cars, police out, shuttle busses running people back and forth to auxiliary parking — in short, a total mess. The place I usually buy lunch had long lines. I didn’t even try the other two restaurants nearby. Instead, I went to the library and got a pack of chips from their vending machine. But while there were long lines of traffic in the parking lot and while I had to wait my turn like everybody else, drivers were mostly calm and always at least sane. It was a very nice ride. It was a great day, and dinner is still to come. Danita’s cooking, so I know it will be good.

We have a special chore next week. One of our neighbors, Jeff, is going to Denver for a few days. They ordered a bunch of stuff on the Internet. But they have no idea what they ordered or when it’s coming it. Our job is to bring any packages in so they don’t disappear. I asked if there was anything coming that I would enjoy playing with. Jeff said yes, if I enjoy playing with toys for grandkids. I said that’s my favorite kind.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There is one pic this week.

I had a very strange experience Wednesday. I came down the stairs and walked toward the kitchen. Right behind me, I heard a crash. I turned around and found a window drape on the floor. There’s a window above our front door. Just a few seconds earlier, the drape had been above that window, up near the ceiling, 20 feet above the floor. You can see Mark holding the fallen drape in the pic. I got out the binoculars. The screw was still in the wall. A plastic collar broke. Now we have a phillips-head screw visible on one side of the window, and a wooden drapery rod holder on the other. The drape and it’s wooden rod didn’t weigh much. There was never any danger. But just for a second, I felt like I was in one of those B-horror movies where the chandelier falls and just misses me because I made an unpredictable move. With the drape 20 feet high, it’s for sure nobody has been disturbing the drape. Who knows? Maybe there are poltergeists.

We had a nice quiet Thanksgiving. There were six — Bud, Mark, Ed, and Lynne joined us for dinner. Danita took Wednesday off to cook because she has always done that. But she admitted it wasn’t really necessary this year, because the dinner was so small.

One of our family traditions ended this year. Ever since the kids were all in school, Danita and I took off the first Friday in December for Christmas shopping. Danita would have suggestions for everybody’s presents. We went out to breakfast as early as we could and reviewed the list. Then we hit the streets to buy all the stuff. (Or as much of it as we could.) It worked out well. The stores weren’t too crowded, and we had the whole day to shop without kids. When school was out, we would pick the kids up and go out to dinner. The kids didn’t even know all their Christmas presents were in the trunk as we drove to dinner.

This year, Danita didn’t want to take another day of vacation. She had missed two days from having her cold, and was behind at work. Her suggestions were ready, so we did our Christmas shopping Saturday. We went to Bob Evans for an early breakfast. We reviewed the list and bought almost all the stuff. Crowded stores weren’t an issue, because we bought everything on-line. I had my laptop with me, and we bought everything while sitting at the breakfast table. We were totally done well before 9 AM. Everything should be delivered by mid-week. And … we ate breakfast out 2 days in a row. (We don’t skip Sunday breakfast out justs because we went out Saturday!)

Last week I was concerned because only one person from the web posting class was posting on our web site. I am pleased to announce that our web posters are all busy posting away.

Today we saw the James Bond movie Spectre. We went to an 11:30 AM show, as usual for us. The movie has been playing for several weeks. We expected the theater to be almost empty. We were quite surprised to find the theater full. It wasn’t packed, but it was full. The movie was great fun.

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