Mike, Tony, me, Tina, Mary, Chuck, Rose, Bill, Donna

Saturday evening we split up. Danita had signed up for the neighborhood crab party. It was all you can eat steamed crabs for $20, which is a very good deal. She ended up eating with our next door neighbor. I’m OK with crabs, but I don’t find them to be all that special. I had decided not to go to the crab party. So I represented us at a dinner with Circle. Danita even made our desert. I thought you might enjoy seeing this picture of us.

Chihuly Forest

Our flight Sunday was unremarkable, which is a very good thing. We arrived at our hotel at 1 pm local time. The Fairmont is very nice. It’s not worth what they charge. But we got the room as part of our cruise, paying just the taxes. It amazes me that less expensive rooms included free breakfast, free coffee, free snacks in the evening, and free internet. Expensive hotels charge to check you into the room (the bellman tip). Unfortunately, I “didn’t understand” the system and “accidentally” took our suitcases up to the room. I felt I coup when I scored a free map of downtown and a free paper this morning.

Big Crabs

Chihuly Glass

We visited the famous food and flower market. We experienced a lot of good energy and a funky vibe. The market’s fame is well deserved. And yes, we saw the “flying fish” stall, which had a good quantity of excellent-looking, very large crabs. We also saw the first Starbucks. The market was well populated but not crowded. But there was a long line outside the original Starbucks. I never felt their coffee was a particular bargain. We managed to survive the afternoon without a sample of that shop’s drinks.

Chihuly Glass

As you can tell from the pictures, the highlight of our day is certainly the Chihuly glass exhibit. This is a permanent display of Chihuly’s art, located at the base of the Space Needle.

Chihuly Glass

For dinner, we went to a restaurant just a few blocks from our hotel. We had a small pizza and a pasta dish with sausage, bacon, and a zesty white sauce. The pizza was the best we have had in many years. The pasta dish was the best pasta we have ever had.

They’re bent — maybe we can get a discount

The day was a total delight. We leave the hotel at 11 am Monday for our transfer to the ship.

Chihuly Glass

Chihuly Boat

There are pics.

Comfy Chair

When Ryn visited Twin Oaks, she sent me a genuine Twin Oaks hammock chair. It is made with rope and oak. It is quite handsome looking. But sitting in the box, it didn’t look very comfortable.  When I got it hung, it still didn’t look very comfortable. But when I sat in it, I came to appreciate the genius of the person who designed it. This is a very comfortable chair. I sat in it for a couple of hours today while I was breaking our new website. Thanks for the very cool chair, Ryn.

The thing I didn’t like about the chair was their suggestion for how to hang it. They provided a large lag screw and suggested drilling a deep 9/16″ hole in the overhead joist. My joists are “two bys”, which are about 1 3/4″ wide. I didn’t want to remove all that material from the bottom of the joist because the bottom is in tension and needs all of it’s material to keep from pulling apart. My solution was to get a couple of eye bolts and drill a hole through the center of the joist. (One can remove great gobs of material from the center of a joist without affecting its strength.) Just to get some overkill, I used two adjacent joists to split the load. And I used carbides with screw-closures, which are much stronger than S-hooks and also keep the forces aligned with the center of the chain. Now my comfy chair will never come down, and neither will the deck.

That bit about breaking our website … I added a new tool, called a plugin. I decided I could edit the plugin to make it work better. Only when I was done, the site stopped working. I couldn’t fix my mistake because — well, did I mention the site wasn’t working? I finally went into the server directly with ftp and deleted the plugin. Problem solved. But for a little while there, I wasn’t thinking at all about how comfy my new chair is.

We’re leaving in just a few days. The plans are set. The suitcases are ready to pack. We’re looking forward to a great time.

I hope everybody is doing well.

There are no pics this week.

We’re getting ready for our cruise. We leave next Saturday, returning Wednesday, Sept 8. We will be much less connected in Alaska than we were in China. Emergency contact information and our itinerary are at the bottom of this message. Emergency calls to the ship cost you $16 per minute. It might be better to call our regular numbers when we are in port. Our phones will not work in Canada. If you call our regular number and leave a voice mail, we will get the message when we have Wi-Fi (at a coffee shop in port).

We have a very unusual weekend. Danita spent Friday evening and all day today at a church women’s retreat. She’s looking forward to a good time.

We finished our neighborhood’s test website. I think it came out quite well. You can see it here: hoawebpages.com/snowdenoverlook/.

Emergency Phone to the Ship

IP NAME: STATENDAM
STATEROOM: 176
Booking No: VC9THW
Telephone: Shore to Ship
Connecting to a Holland America Line vessel at sea is simple by using Ship Dial Service. A credit card is required for all inbound phone calls to a ship. The rate is $USD16.00 per minute and billing begins at the time specified. Please have the ship’s name**, your party’s name and stateroom number before you call.
Instructions:
1. Dial 1-800-993-5483 (US). From outside the U.S. access 1-321-837-6106.
2. Listen to the announcement.
3. Listen to the menu and select the number that corresponds to the ship you are calling.
4. If you receive a busy signal or message, please hang up quickly and try your call again.

Itinerary

Sat Aug 22 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, US arrive 1:00pm
Sun Aug 23 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, US
Mon Aug 24 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, US leave 4:00pm
Tue Aug 25 VANCOUVER ISLAND – CRUISING
Wed Aug 26 KETCHIKAN, ALASKA, US 8:00am 5:00pm
Thu Aug 27 SCENIC CRUISING TRACY ARM 12:00pm 5:00pm
Fri Aug 28 JUNEAU, ALASKA, US 8:00am 10:00pm
Sat Aug 29 ICY STRAIT POINT, ALASKA, US 7:00am 2:00pm
Sun Aug 30 At Sea
Mon Aug 31 ANCHORAGE, ALASKA, US 7:00am 11:00pm
Tue Sep 1 HOMER, ALASKA, US 10:00am 6:00pm
Wed Sep 2 KODIAK, ALASKA, US 7:00am 2:00pm
Thu Sep 3 HUBBARD GLACIER 3:00pm 5:00pm
Fri Sep 4 SITKA, ALASKA, US 8:00am 4:00pm
Sat Sep 5 At Sea
Sun Sep 6 VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA 1:00pm 11:00pm
Mon Sep 7 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, US arrive 7:00am
Tue Sep 8 Home, arrive 10:00pm

Dennis: 410-417-8854
Danita: 410-709-8854

There are no pics this week.

I thought I was making great progress in the training for my Bike and Hike. So I decided to do long and hard rides 2 days in a row (Monday and Tuesday). Tuesday evening I had problems with leg cramping. Wednesday I was tired and took the day off. Wednesday afternoon I felt better and decided to ride up to Target to get a few things. It’s a 1.5 mile ride round trip. And it was not pretty. Four years ago I could do this stuff. Now I can’t. So I decided to cancel the “Bike and Hike” in the Adirondacks. Instead, I will drive from hotel to hotel, use the bike to get from the hotel to the trailhead, and do the hikes. I’m calling my new plan “Bikes, Boots, and Automobiles”.

Danita’s birthday was yesterday, and I blew it. Half of my mind said “Danita’s birthday is on August 8”. The other half of my mind said “Danita’s birthday is coming up.” But the third half of my mind never said “Today’s August 8”. I didn’t score very many points. I had plenty of clues — including, we took advantage of one of Danita’s birthday freebies when we went to dinner Thursday.

I’m making great progress on the new website. It’s functioning almost the way we want. Content has been moved over from the original website. The E-calendar is up and running. Our Office Manager said she would enter the events in the calendar this week. We’re meeting Tuesday to discuss processes and procedures. I still have to install some security modules, but nobody looking at the site can see that. What they can see is that the site doesn’t look at all like what we want it to look like. And that’s my next project. I’m not sure how much I’ll get done before going to Alaska, but it looks like we’ll be close enough to show it to the community and ask for feedback.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are pics this week.

Eastwind East Coast Contingent

The Eastwind East Coast Contingent arrived Tuesday. In addition to Kathryn, there was Bert and Sabrina. Bert was attending the art workshop at University of Baltimore as an artist. His polyhedra were accepted in a peer reviewed exhibition. Sabrina was attending the art workshop. chief fundraiser (through Kickstarter), and driver.

The art workshop was about art and math. Bert is the inventor of several polyhedrals, including the one shown here. Bert was kind enough to donate this piece to us. We started things off with Danita’s famous spaghetti dinner. I didn’t see anybody holding back!

Playing with a Liquid Magnet

Wednesday Kathryn and I spent the day together. The weather was very nice — not too humid or too hot. We visited the local nature center and walked around one of the parks while Danita went to work. In the evening, we all went up to Baltimore to meet Mark and have dinner at the Blue Moon Cafe.

Ryn and Mark

Thursday Kathryn and I watched the 1940 movie “The Mark of Zorro”. It’s a surprisingly good movie and we both enjoyed it very much. After that we had a compare and contrast version against the 1998 movie with Anthony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Eating Crabs

Dinner was steamed crabs. We didn’t have any idea where to go for steamed crabs. The people in the neighborhood I asked didn’t know either. We finally decided to go to a place about 12 miles down the road. It was terrific. They said the crabs were “medium”, but we would call them “large”. Danita and Kathryn couldn’t eat a dozen. We took several home. (I had a shrimp salad sandwich.)

At the Aquarium

Friday Danita took off of work. We spent the morning visiting the aquarium. This was the first time we have been to the aquarium since they finished all the renovations. We spent the entire morning, then had lunch at their cafe, then spent another couple of hours.

Virtual Reality at the Art Sow

Then we took the free Baltimore “Circulator” bus to the University of Baltimore and visited the art show Bert was in. We saw some amazing work, including some virtual reality gogles. These put us in the middle of a piece if art, looking out. It was unnerving moving our heads around, looking at different parts of the artwork. For dinner, we had some very excellent BBQ pork.

Sump Flow Switch

Saturday, we solved a plumbing problem. Actually, Kathryn did most of it, but she let me do enough of it to use the word “we”. When I installed the backup sump pump, I had the workmen install a flow switch. The idea was that the back up pump makes almost no noise. If the backup pump started leaking, the flow switch would sound a beeper and I would know it’s throwing water out the yard. Unfortunately, the flow switch didn’t work. I finally found a good flow switch, and it came in this week. Kathryn re-did some of the plumbing and installed the new switch. Everything worked perfectly the very first time. After that, we went out to watch the new Mission: Impossible: movie, which was quite good. We had Ed, Lynne, and Bud over for dinner last night. We ate an excellent beef tenderloin dish, along with home-made deserts.

Tonight the Eastwind East Coast contingent re-gathered at our house to travel down to “Acorn”, another community in Virginia. Kathryn deboned a chicken. Danita stuffed it with her famous stuffing  and served an amazing dinner. In addition to the deserts Danita has already made, Kathryn contributed some of Baltimore’s famous Berger cookies that Mark had given her. (We made sure Kathryn had plenty of Berger cookies for the road.) There was so much great food, we were eating like kings. Danita said she’s getting me ready for the cruise. I say the cruise is going to be boring after this.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pics this week.

I had a most unusual computer week. After our normal Church / breakfast / money counting last Sunday, I sat down to look at Mom’s computer. Mom has been complaining that her computer was acting funny. In the old days, that would be hard to do, with me in MD and Mom in FL. But these days, remote connect makes it a cinch. I finally had to quit so we could go to Danita’s office so I could hook up her computer. Then it was off to a BSO concert. The concert was fine. Mom’s computer was unsatisfying because I couldn’t find anything definitive. Hooking up Danita’s computer was more productive. She got Dell to replace her disk drive on Tuesday. Then my lappy failed to start up Wednesday morning. The symptoms looked like a disk crash. I bought a service policy with 24 x 7 tech support, but they didn’t answer the phone at 6 AM. So I went on my ride convinced I had a bad disk drive. After my ride, I called again. Surprisingly, they were able to fix it over the phone. It seems they were having problems with a driver. I wasn’t the first to call with this problem. Fortunately, their fix got me up and running right away. By the end of the week, all the computers in our household were working. That’s not supposed to be news, but some weeks are just like that. I rounded out my very strange computer week with Facebook. I have an empty Facebook page. Sometimes if somebody in the family posts on Facebook, I can see it. Yesterday, the real estate agent who helped our sell our house posted on my “timeline” (whatever that is). Now I’m getting tons of Facebook Emails, congratulating me on joining the 20th century. Please be assured, I intend to remain a Facebook curmudgeon. (Or is that Luddite?)

We enjoyed perfect bike riding weather Wed, Thur, and Fri. I was feeling good and decided to try to do three significant rides in a row. I was kind of tired during the last part of Friday’s ride, but other than that everything went well. I was quite pleased.

Unfortunately, I had an appointment for a blood draw Friday morning. I was so focused on the rides that I forgot the appointment. I remembered just as I was starting my ride, but it was a fasting draw and I had already eaten breakfast. I had to get this done in time for my next doctor’s appointment. And we have two parties this weekend. (A bull roast Saturday and a Bingo / Ice Cream Social Sunday. I’ll go the the Ice Cream Social and leave the Bingo to Danita.) I wanted to have a good time at the parties. And I wanted good lab results so my doctor doesn’t scold me. The only option was to walk in to the lab this morning. On a Saturday. Without an appointment. I got to the lab a few minutes before they opened, to find the hallway filled with people. I was number 21. The experience was much better than I anticipated. I was out in less than 45 minutes.

The excitement is building here in Columbia. Kathryn is coming this week. Plus, the IT Committee is presenting our web page proposal to the board. We expect the board to approve our proposal. Then the company has to put up a skeleton web site for us. After that, it’s up to me to post content before we go to Alaska so the community will have a month to comment on our proposed new design.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pics this week.

Danita had some stress at work this week. Margo was out with her mother’s funeral. She was covering for some of Margo’s time-sensitive work. In addition, her desktop and laptop computers both stopped working. Se took up an old laptop to use for a while, and it does a lot of things, but Microsoft Office programs don’t work on it. The IT department told her that the desktop has a bad disk, and Dell will replace it. But they didn’t put the computer back together. Danita was on the phone, talking with somebody from Dell who was half way around the world, and had a terrible accent, over a bad phone connection, and couldn’t make any progress at all. She finally hung up in total frustration.

Our neighborhood IT committee decided to recommend a WordPress web site. I’m busy working away. The board meets the last week of July. We’re putting a proposal together for their review. If they approve the proposal, I want to put up a test site before Danita and I leave for Alaska, which is followed by my bike & hike in NY. Our existing site has lots of content. I’m working hard getting all that stuff organized and formatted so I can build the test site quickly.

Here’s an example of a problem. The condos each have an organizational document. This is about 10 pages of dense text, complete with county stamps, folio numbers, lawyer signatures, etc. These documents all need to be put on the web site. That’s not too much of a problem, except that they were printed out and put in a scanner (to capture all the stamps and signatures). The files are huge. Modern practice is to keep posted files under 2 MBytes. One of the files was 100 MBytes. The free compression tools couldn’t make the file small enough to fit. The gold standard for PDF file compression is Adobe Acrobat, which is a ridiculously expensive program. I found out I could use it on a trial basis for 30 days, free. No credit card required. I’m sure I’ll get a ton of Email from Adobe later. But for now, it did what we need it to do. One condo printed the documents on colored paper. I couldn’t get them below 3 MB. The rest all are under 2 MB.

Here’s another hair puller. A lot of the board minutes were put on our old web site in Word format. They need to be converted to Adobe PDF format. That’s very easy to do. Of course, we have 6 boards with monthly minutes for the last 4 years. So there’s plenty of files to fix up. But the process is easy enough. Unfortunately, I couldn’t open one of the files. Word said the file was corrupt. I finally found somebody with an old version of Word that would open the file. They reformatted it and sent it to me, so I can include it in the new web site. Of course, this kind of thing is never supposed to happen. I’m just lucky, I guess.

And on it goes. In the mean time, before I take my NY bike & hike, I want to be able to ride 60 miles in hilly country. Then do it again the next day. So far, my body has had a succinct reply to that idea — “you’re nuts”. I decided that I tried to train too much too quickly. Now I’m focusing on doing 60 mile rides in not-very-hilly country, with occasional shorter hilly rides. I’m hoping that I can get that down, then start working on the longer hilly rides. I have four training weeks left. (I won’t be training while Kathryn is visiting, because I would rather spend time with her than argue with my body about riding the bike.) One good thing, all this hard work should give me wonderful blood chemistry. That’s important, because my next blood work is Friday. I don’t know how I got my doctor’s appointment just before our cruise, with all it’s sitting around and eating rich foods. But I’m glad I did. I figure I’ll have 6 months to wring all those fats and sugars out of my body before my next doctor appointment.

We have no SOCA parties this week. (That will also help my blood test results.) But we have a beef roast next Saturday, followed by an ice cream social on Sunday. Yummy. And great timing, just one day after my blood work. Too bad Kathryn didn’t come a little earlier.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pics this week.

It’s been a full week for both of us. Margo is one of the people who work for Danita. Margo and Danita are quite close. We attended Margo’s wedding. Margo’s mother has been very ill. Margo has had to take a lot of time off work lately to support her parents. Margo’s mom died Friday. Her mother lives a day’s drive from here, and the funeral will be private, so Danita won’t attend. It’s been an emotional time.

I am trying to condition myself for another bike tour. So far, I haven’t made enough progress to feel comfortable going on my Adirondacks bike & hike. In spite of the slow progress, I still have 6 weeks. I haven’t given up yet.

Our neighborhood IT committee had webinar presentations from three companies to help us with our web site. We rejected one company because their product doesn’t meet our needs. The other two have viable products. One of them helps communities build websites with WordPress, which would let me customize the site for our needs. It would be a lot of fun. We expect to make a recommendation this month.

Danita and I are working on our Alaska cruise. We are looking at the activities we want to do at the various ports of call. We’ve decided not to take any of the excursions offered by the cruise line. They tend to be quite expensive. We can do any of the activities we are interested in just by walking into town. In one case, we’ll have to take bus. We think we can manage that on our own. If one wants to ride the world’s longest Zip line (for example), the only way to do that is to take an excursion. But we aren’t all that interested in Zip lines, or helicopter rides, or special whale watching boat trips. We’ll settle for the whales we see from the side of our cruise ship.

We’re also getting excited about Kathryn’s visit. She said she plans to arrive July 28 and leave August 2. It should be a lot of fun having her around.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are lots of pics this week.

The Good Cheese

Our big news was a visit with the grandkids last weekend. The drive down was a breeze. Danita took US Route 29 from the south side of DC all the way to Greensboro. The road goes down along the eastern side of the Blue Ridge mountains. It’s half-way between I-81 and I-95. Most of the way it was nearly as good as Interstate, but with much less traffic and especially fewer trucks.

We ate extremely well — I gained plenty of weight, unfortunately. But it was all good food. Jul and Pat spared no effort, even getting especially good parmesan cheese.

Rock Scrambling

We left Saturday, arriving Saturday afternoon, and returned Tuesday. The somewhat unusual schedule allowed us to provide one day of day-care. Of course, visiting kids means going on adventures. Our first adventure was after dinner Saturday. Bryon asked how we could have enough time for an adventure, but this was a trip to the neighborhood ice cream place. This was an adventure that all 6 of us could enjoy. We barely had time to pull it off. There is no indoor seating, T-storms were rolling in, and there is definitely, absolutely, no possibility of eating ice cream in the car. But E finished hers just as the T-storm started rolling in, and Bryon chose a slurpy, which could be safely transported in the front seat cup holder.

Flying Minion

While in China, I saw an inexpensive and very cool toy. They were small characters with two propellers coming out of their heads. A sensor in the feet tells the toy whether there is something underneath. When the toy is close to something, it goes into high speed and climbs. When there is nothing, it goes into low speed and slowly falls. It’s a blast to play with. Holding your hand out, you can make it climb all the way to the ceiling without touching it. Or you can step back and let it gently touch the floor, then it will climb slightly and hover a few inches above the floor. If it hits something (like a wall), it shuts down to keep the propellers from damaging anything. Best of all, the batteries are rechargeable. Knowing Chinese quality, I made sure the propellers and sensors worked on both toys. Unfortunately, E’s toy wouldn’t hover. Instead, it took off across the room at a very high speed, hit a wall, and shut down.

Bryon

Sunday afternoon we went to a local park. Bryon got into a snit and decided not to go, so it was just the 3 of us. This park has a lake, and we did normal park stuff — playground, hiking, and paddle boats. Monday we started with breakfast out. Mr. Google and I found a very nice breakfast place. Danita and I had traditional eggs – meat – potatoes. B had a blueberry waffle, and E had a chocolate chip waffle. All the food was good, but the waffles were a real stand-out. (There was too much waffle for the kids, so Danita and I helped them out a little bit.)

Feeding Competition

Then we went to a drive-through animal park. The park offers feed buckets ( we got one for each child), which is a great way to train the animals to come up to the car. The animals had no problems poking their heads inside the car to get to the feed bucket — sometimes two or 3 at a time trying to eat from the same bucket. It was all great fun, until the bucket fell to the ground outside the car. Judging from the number of buckets we saw on the ground, this was an experience that was not unique to B & E. What surprised me the most is the animals were quite used to closing electric car windows, pulling their heads outside as soon as somebody started closing the window. It was a great way to spend a few hours.

The Real Bootleg

We rounded out the trip with a couple of DVD movies (“Despicable Me” and “Despicable Me 2” in honor of the flying minion.) It was a great trip. We even had the opportunity to try some real NC bootleg. Pat swears it is great stuff, but Danita and I declined.

Zebra

The drive back home was great until we got near DC. Road construction in Northern VA cost us an extra hour. By the time we got to the DC beltway, it was rush hour. That cost us another hour. We got home 2 hours later than planned, and quite frazzled from all the traffic. But we were safe and sound.

Goat

This is Independence Day weekend. Danita enjoyed a day off of work Friday. We’re taking it easy and catching up on chores. There’s a big fireworks display in Columbia as usual, but it’s beginning to look like the rain won’t clear up until late today. If it clears up by 6, we’ll go. Otherwise, we’ll watch a library DVD.

Water Buffalo

There are a few other things going on. Yesterday, I survived my first “big guhana” ride of the season (barely). I’m having a much harder time getting into shape for a bike tour than I had last year. We’re looking into the ports we will visit on our Alaska cruise. So far as we can see, we don’t need to take the expensive cruise tours of the ports. We can walk from the ship to points of interest in most ports. In others, we can get there through a tourist shuttle bus or plublic transit.

Critter

Our neighborhood has a web site run by one of the residents. He’s getting tired of doing the work, and the site is tied into his personal Email, so he doesn’t want to share the password. The technology is cheap, but not very flexible. There is no good way to permit multiple people to update the web site. I did a survey and found 3 companies that do web sites for community associations. I also found that Word Press has made tremendous improvements over the last 2 years and is fully capable of being used as a first-class web site. I built up a demonstration Word Press site on my laptop in an afternoon that has all the features we want. We had a meeting of our technology committee and decided to use one of the companies. It would have been great fun to put a Word Press site together. But it will be less work for me. As usual, it’s hard to get everybody together. We’re hoping to get demos from the 3 companies soon, make a choice, and move forward. We queried the board, and each member expressed support for the cost before we made a formal proposal. This is quite unusual, and shows strong support from the board.

Llama

Emu and chicks

Long Horns

Bryon

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There is one pic this week.

Hello from our clubhouse. Being in the clubhouse is becoming a real habit for us. We had a party here Friday night. Then another one Saturday night. After we got home, hurricane Bill came through our area and brought an amazing thunderstorm. We went out on the back porch to watch it. It was quite a show. Lightening would strike, seemingly freezing the rain drops and suspending them in mid-air. I even saw a fox walking by, totally unconcerned by the rain (but much more concerned about my pocket flashlight). When we went back into the house, we found all our Verizon services didn’t work. I decided power was probably out somewhere, and we went to bed. This morning, Verizon was still out. I called them on my cell phone. I waited over an hour for somebody to answer before giving up. We went to Panera to get breakfast and use the internet. I started a chat with a Verizon person. After quite a bit of back-and-forth, she asked me to manually reboot our “ONT box”. I lost my patience, reminded her we had no services, told her we were at a coffee shop, and asked her to schedule a technician. She said somebody will be out Thursday (4 days from now). I’m not too happy with Verizon at the moment.

After counting money for our church, I started poking around. I found wasps had built a nest in one of the Verizon boxes. I don’t know if that caused our problem, but I figure it’s not a good thing. I sprayed them, then decided to come over to the clubhouse to use the public Wi-Fi while I let the wasps die for a while.

There’s travel in our future. Next week, we will go to North Carolina and stay at “Monroe Mansion” (Jul’s). The grandkids are lacking day care Monday, so we’ll have an unusual schedule. We leave Saturday morning and return Tuesday. There just could be some pics when I get around to writing after we get back.

Alaska Cruise

Danita wants to take a very specific 2-week sea cruise to Alaska. Of all the cruises offered, only Holland America has one that visits one set of ports going north and a different set going south. Most cruises visit only one set of ports because most people don’t stay on the boat two weeks. They take the boat for one week in conjunction with a land tour. Danita has had her eye on this cruise for a long time. We decided to postpone the cruise and take the “hard” trips while we are younger. But Saturday we got a piece of junk mail from Holland America. Buried in the middle of a boring brochure was an offer to take this cruise at half price. Danita doesn’t miss much, and she certainly didn’t miss this. Even the internet didn’t offer the discounted price. We called up, found the deal is real, and took the offer on the spur of the moment. Buying the cruise “on a whim” was very stressful for us (in a good way). We seldom spend money without weeks or months of research. Of course, Danita had done her research over a year ago. Still, we would have normally waited at least a week while carefully considering all the ramifications.

We’re leaving August 23 and returning Sept 8. We’re especially looking forward to visiting Kodiak and Sitka, which are not usually stops for a cruise. We have a night at the Fairmont Hotel included in our cruise, which we’ll use to adjust to west coast time and as insurance against airline delays. On the way home, we found that flying on Labor day is quite expensive. We decided to stay a day in a hotel, because the savings in air fare more than pays for the room. We don’t have our return hotel picked out yet, but it won’t be at the Fairmont when it’s on our nickel. Boat Wi-Fi is expensive. And while I’m sure the ice is impressive, I doubt that endless pictures of ice are very interesting to anybody else. I probably won’t be posting daily.

We had quite an experience buying the air tickets. The cruise line couldn’t come close to the airline price offered by Southwest, so we decided to buy our own air tickets. We had everything all lined up, ready to hit the “commit” button, when Danita suggested we check one last possibility. The last possibility didn’t make sense, so we went back to the earlier tickets. This time Southwest said they couldn’t honor the price and offered us the tickets at $1,000 more. Each. (That’s $2,000 total.) I got disgusted and closed the computer. A little while later, I went back and got the tickets at the price we were originally offered. Who can understand these things? Not me, for sure.

That’s a lot of news for now. I hope this finds everybody doing well.