I am writing this on Monday, 5/26. There are no pics.

We’re enjoying a quiet and relaxing holiday. The weather has been very nice. We had our Thursday dinner out on Wednesday this week. On Friday, Danita worked at Goddard. This always means a longer commute with more traffic. By Friday afternoon, the holiday traffic was so bad that I-95 became a virtual parking lot. Danita had her GPS route her home on back roads. With nothing happening Friday evening, and having eaten at home Thursday, we decided to go to Jason’s and have a salad bar dinner. After that, we watched the last of this season’s TV shows. We stayed home Saturday.

Sunday was Ed and Lynne’s Parkton Open, the annual invitational croquet championship. There were so many people this year, Ed had 3 croquet courses set up. There were two sets of games (6 games in all). The winners of each game played in the championship game. Danita was in the first set. She came in 4th out of 6. I was in the second set, coming in 6th out of 5. In my defense, I was knocked way out at the beginning of the game. After that, I was well behind everybody else. Unable to tap anybody’s ball and get two more strokes, I ended up almost half way through when the game was won.

This morning, we took Mark out to breakfast. He’s busy packing for his big trip. He got a summer job teaching physics to high schoolers through CTY. This year, he’s teaching in Saudi Arabia. He’ll be living on the US compound. The Saudi students will come on the compound for their classes. The second half of the summer, he’ll be teaching astrophysics at Hopkins, also for CTY. Mark knows a lot of people working in physics. One of the things he likes to do is arrange Skype sessions so the students can meet a lot of people and hear what they do with their education in physics. He’s had a bit of a trouble getting people lined up this year due to the time difference. His classes start at 1 AM East Coast time. While it’s possible that some folks are awake at 1, he also needs them to be sober. ;-) He’s using more folks from the west coast for this class. They told him to be a cultural ambassador. He’s taking that seriously. He said he has females, blacks, asians, whites, and even a middle-eastern person lined up.

My personal news is about my laptop computer. The fan started making noise. Sometimes, the computer reports “fan error” and refuses to boot. I decided to have the computer repaired. It’s amazingly expensive, but the computer is only 3 years old. I’m hoping that a new fan will make it good for another 2 years. In the mean time, Danita has a work laptop and iPad. She uses them for working at home and takes the laptop to Godard when she works down there. But one of them is generally available. She has a keyboard for the iPad, which makes it much easier to type. In fact, I’m writing this on her iPad. My computer is supposed to be ready near the end of the week.

That’s the news for this week. I’ll be starting the charcoal for some hamburgers pretty soon. Then we’ll stream a movie suitable for Memorial Day. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I am writing this on Wed, May 21. There are a few pics.

Monday

If you want to move your boat between the lake and the river, you can use this handy lake lock.

One thing on my “A” list was to do a 2-day ride around Cayuga Lake. The total ride is 100 miles. I didn’t do this when I first arrived because of the rain Thursday. I didn’t do it over the weekend because my overnight parking spot was next to a church, and I figured they probably use that lot. So I got up bright and early Monday morning and drove an hour to get half way around the lake. The ride didn’t start well. I put my cabin key in my car’s cup holder. Or I should say that’s what I meant to do. Actually, it fell between the console and the seat. When  I got to my parking spot, I didn’t see the key right away, got distracted by something else I *did* see, then forgot about the key. I remembered it a couple of hours later, but it was too late to turn back. That created a little anxiety, because I didn’t know for sure where the key was, and I didn’t want to buy a new lock for the cabin.

Bucolic Scene – It’s important to have a good bucket to sit on when fishing.

The other thing that went wrong was breakfast. They were forecasting rain and possible thunderstorms to start about 3 PM. I decided to get to my parking spot early, have a cooked breakfast at the “Be Happy Cafe”, and skip lunch. That way I would be back well before any T-storms. That would have been a great plan, except that the “Be Happy Cafe” is closed on Mondays, and it’s the only place in town that serves breakfast. This wasn’t a major issue. I rode 15 miles to where I could get breakfast, and finished my ride in plenty of time to ride into town (4 miles uphill — an easy ride back on a full stomach!) to get a sausage and onion sandwich, with homemade sausage and homemade bread. It was quite good. The rest of the ride was great. I expected to see a lot of scenes like the “Bucolic Scene” in the pic, with guys fishing and whatever, but I guess it was too early in the season. This is the only one I saw. I took this from a distance because I didn’t want to be intrusive. When I rode closer, I saw that they were sitting on buckets. It’s important to have a good bucket when fishing.

Tuesday

Imaginative Hot Dog Stand

Having ridden half way around the lake, the only thing to do is to ride the rest of the way around and pick up the car. So that’s what I did. My route took me through some of the “unsquished” land (i.e., HILLY). But that was fine. Most of the land I saw Mon and Tue was farms, but larger than the Mennonite farms I saw around Seneca Lake. It wasn’t the most exciting ride I’ve had. Once you’ve smelled one cow, you’ve pretty much smelled them all. I was thinking about what a great idea it would be to stop for an ice cream when I had the great good fortune to ride through historic Aurora. Among other things, Aurora has the birthplace of Wells (founder of Wells Fargo Express), Wells College (how many other people do you know who have personally lied eyes on this august institution?), and the first house built by a white man in 1789 (sometimes I can tell you the words on the sign, but you have to determine the meaning without my assistance). But they do not have anyplace that serves ice cream. Fortunately, it was near the end of the ride. I was not about to see if the Be Happy Cafe served ice cream or not. It’s pretty easy to find ice cream if one has a car.

I got back to the cabin about 1:30. The forecast was for rain to start around midnight, with thunderstorms Wednesday and more rain Thursday. I decided I had done all my “A” items, and there was no reason why I shouldn’t drive back in nice weather. I was home by 9 PM.

A few of observations

All the bridges close to Cornell are netted. Students can jump. If they hit their head on a steel beam, they can die. But they can’t fall into the gorge. Having seen the gorges, I know this is a huge advantage to the first responders. It would take all day to retrieve somebody at the bottom of the gorge, even if they weren’t being moved downstream by the river. Cornell must be a very, very tough school.

After the first day, lows were in the very low 40s and highs were 65 to 70. It’s possible to be sitting in camp reading and be quite comfortable in this weather. It’s easy to be comfortable all night in a cabin without heat. But it’s very difficult to get out of bed in the morning and get dressed. Especially after having done this for several days.

It was very nice having shoes and boots and hiking gear, and the all the other stuff I could bring because of driving up. I enjoyed the hiking even more than the biking. Cooking on the electric griddle was easy. But I missed not having a destination. Being at one spot and being required to reach a second spot is a powerful motivator for getting moving in the morning.

Living in a house with heat, indoor plumbing, and a kitchen sink makes life a lot easier.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I am writing this on Saturday, 5/17 and also Sunday, 5/18. There are plenty of pics.

Friday (The pics are from Saturday. I’ll write about them below.)

Water Exiting WG Gorge

It was raining or rainy all day. The temperature started cool and slowly dropped during the day. (The high Thursday was 80. Today the high is 65.) I was still recovering from my insane ride, which made it a great day to visit the Corning Museum of Glass. This is two museums in one. It’s a glass art museum, which has some amazing pieces, including Egyptian glass that was made back in 1400 BC when glass was “invented”. The second part is a glass science museum, which is totally geared towards kids (actually, dumb kids) and which I didn’t find interesting at all. The things people do still amaze me. There was one woman who was taking a picture of everything in the art museum with her camera phone. She wasn’t looking at the pieces, or reading the cards, or even being careful of how she framed her picture. She just shot half the case, then the other half of the case, then moved on to the next case. Very strange.

Saturday

Rainbow Falls

Today it’s sunny but still cool. I spent the day hiking. The number one attraction in the area is the gorge trail at Watkins Glen, about 20 miles from here. This was my 3^rd time in WG. I parked my car there for my insane bike ride. I rode through there to get to Corning. And today I rode there to see the gorge. Unfortunately, there was an over-abundance of water in the river, and the gorge trail was closed. So I hiked the “Indian Trail” on the rim. (Hey! I didn’t give it that name.) After that I walked the trails around the Taughannock River where my cabin is located.

The first pic is of the water exiting the bottom of the gorge. The pic looks kind of “meh”, but being there is an awesome experience. It would probably help if you play some thunderous music, and crank the base. The gorge trail goes by a bunch of waterfalls, and even goes behind one, which is cool but not as cool as the Phantom cave or Zoro’s lair. The only waterfall one gets a good view of from the Indian trail is Rainbow Falls, which is pretty impressive.

Taughannock River – This doesn’t count as a water fall around these parts

Taughannock Falls – taller than Niagra

My cabin is at Taughannock Park. The river’s lower falls is the tallest waterfall in the area, taller than Niagra. I walked up the gorge trail and back to see it. Then I walked up the south rim trail and down the north rim trail so could see the upper falls also. The upper falls in some ways was even more impressive.

I took advantage of the placards and other information available and studied up on my history. Here’s what I learned. A long time ago, the Canadians were exporting duty-free icebergs. The thrifty yanks couldn’t turn down the bargain and said “We’ll take tons”. They put them in upstate NY because there’s no WiFi here and nobody would ever know, so they wouldn’t have to do an environmental impact study. The ice weighed so much, it squished the ground down. Then it melted and made the Finger Lakes. Water from the unsquished ground ran down into the lakes, cutting gorges in the rocks. The yanks decided to make the best of a bad thing and built water mills so they could make stuff here in the good old US of A instead of buying it from England. And that’s why England taxed our Tea, and that’s why we drink coffee and had our rebellion. A little while later, it flooded, washing the water mills away. That was OK because Edison invented electric lights and everybody wanted light bulbs. Glass blowers were taking their own sweet time, making artisan bulbs one at a time. So somebody built a factory to make light bulbs with machines in Corning. Then they used some of those light bulbs to light the factory and went to Detroit to get some union labor to run the second and third shift. Before long, there were so many light bulbs that there was more light than we needed and we had light pollution. But that turned out OK also because somebody else invented optical fiber and used that and the extra light to build the Internet, and now we have information pollution. I couldn’t figure out what they did with all those icebergs, but I happen to know that they use ice to make raspberry snow cones in Baltimore. I’m not sure exactly how that relates, but as they say in the TV detective shows, “There are no coincidences.” And this is just one of the things I know that a lot of other people don’t know.

I would like to tell you more, but Danita made some fabulous stew and let me take some on the trip and it’s just about heated to the perfect temperature.

Sunday

It was quite cool last night and this morning. The day started with a few showers,then slowly cleared up. Taughannock Park is about 15 miles north of Ithica. There are two more state parks just south of Ithica, plus several major waterfalls in the city itself. I decided to drive down to Buttermilk Park, which has what I think is the prettiest waterfall in the area. From there I took my bike into Ithica, hitting all the major waterfalls and also finding several very nice waterfalls that weren’t mentioned in the tourist literature. From there, I dropped down to Robert H. Treman Park, which is build around Enfield River. I walked up the gorge trail and down the rim trail. RHT is the prettiest area I’ve found around here. The lower falls are nice. The upper falls (Lucifer Falls) are quite impressive. The mill above the upper falls was built in 1850. It is not in working order, but the built that stuff to last, and last it did. The mill itself is quite similar to George Washington’s Mill. But the area along the river is beautiful country. The other stuff is just a bonus.

That’s it for now. I hope everybody is doing well.

I am writing this on Wednesday 5/15. WiFi has been less available than I thought it would be. I hope to post this tomorrow, so you may not see it until Friday. There are several pics.

Typical Winery Retail

The drive to Finger Lakes was uneventful. I was driving and listening to songs about the open road as only Bob Segar can sing them, when I came upon a small truth. When it comes to open roads, nobody builds them worse than Pennsylvania. I stopped at a Wegman’s in Ithica and bought some food for the week, including a salad for dinner. I got into camp about 4 and spent the rest of the day organizing all the stuff I took.

A Boat out of Water

The forecast for Thursday was great – sunny and warm. But the forecast for Friday was for rain all day, heavy at times. So I decided to spend Thursday riding around Seneca Lake. That’s a 77 mile ride. At home, the longest ride I plan is a little over 60 miles. With the hills in Howard County, I expect to complete the ride with less than 6 hours of saddle time, and less than 6 ½ hours overall. That’s pretty much my limit. The road around Seneca Lake is a lot flatter than Howard County, so I figured everything would be fine. Everything started out fine. I broke for lunch at mile 35, a little over 3 hours after I started. Winds were calm. Flags and signs hung limply from their posts, lake water was smooth. My average speed was over 15 MPH, which is much faster than normal for me. I was looking forward to a relatively easy completion, but Mother Nature had other plans. While I was eating lunch, the wind picked up big time – and it was going to be a head-wind all the way back to the car. I don’t have quantitative data, but I’ve ridden in a lot of wind. This one was absolutely awesome. Flags and signs were going crazy in the wind. The Lake had whitecaps. There were times I could barely keep the bike moving forward. I needed breaks every 2 or 3 miles. No matter the weather, there’s only one way to get back to the car. After almost 7 hours in the saddle and over 8 ½ hours on the road, I finally made it. I was so tired I didn’t even know what hurt. I got wind burns on my face and legs. My riding glasses were not doing a very good job of keeping dust and stuff out of my eyes. When I got back to camp, I forced myself to take a shower right away because I didn’t know when the rain was going to start. Then I laid down for a couple of hours because I was too tired to eat. The rain held off and I ate some snack foods after I felt a little better.

Waterfall

The countryside around here is very nice but not the breathtaking types of scenery that makes it easy to take pictures. There’s the lake, of course. Over half of the Seneca Lake shore is privately owned. The summer season hasn’t started yet, and lots of people haven’t opened their lake homes or put their boats in the water. One thing I noticed is that nobody up here leaves their boat in the water over the winter. There are plenty of wineries, many with very impressive retail / tasting areas and great views of the lake. There are also several houses, a few small towns, and lots of small farms. Many of the farms are Mennonite. I saw road signs warning of horse buggies, but I didn’t see any Amish. It’s pretty flat land and mostly open. There are plenty of trees, but not nearly enough to break the wind. This is an area with a lot of waterfalls. I passed my first waterfall near the end of the ride. As you can see, it looks pretty impressive.

I am writing this on Saturday, 5/10. There are no pics this week.

Last week was booking along. I was putting the finishing touches on a computer upgrade for the last computer at Habitat. This computer was used for their register, so I was taking it easy, launching a set of downloads in the evening, rebooting to install the updates the following morning. Saturday, they called me mid-afternoon. The computer had stopped working. Is there any way I could have it working by Monday? Unfortunately, the disk drive was totally corrupted. I took it home, installed Windows from scratch, installed all updates, added Office, and delivered it to them Sunday afternoon. It turns out that Jimmie, their their in-house techie, is the store manager of the Columbia store, which is open on Sundays. The store is about 2 miles from my house. Jimmie installed their Point of Sale software and had the computer running Monday morning. I was glad we were successful, but it put a kind of a crip in the weekend.

This week I’ve been packing and riding, getting ready for the Finger Lakes trip. I’m leaving Wednesday. Woo-Hoo! I have a killer biking list. It’s in Excel. It has everything anybody could possibly want to take on a bike trip. There are columns for “Not this time”, “Need to Buy”, “Staged”, and “Packed”. I go down the list, one item at a time. Excel tracks for me the status of each item as it moves it’s way from the closet (or the store shelves) to the trunk of my car.  I’ve done my super-duper-training-ride 3 times in the last 2 weeks. I’m not in as good a shape as I was last year, but I won’t be riding as hard as I did last year. Driving up opens a large number of options. Riding the  bike from my driveway, the one-way commute is a good week. Driving drops that time to 5 hours. With a trunk, an empty back seat, an empty passenger seat, and the bike on a rack behind the car, I can carry an incredible amount of stuff. I’m bringing a full set of all-weather hiking gear, as well as biking stuff. The Finger Lakes area has dozens of fantastic water falls. There are a half-dozen state parks in the area with amazing hiking trails between 1 and 8 miles long.

I rented a cabin which comes with a bunk, a refrigerator, and an electric light bulb (complete with a switch). Unfortunately, we got rid of all the camping stuff when we moved, so there’s no Coleman camp stove or camp pots. That’s OK. The meals I made when I took the kids camping are far too much food for one old camper. I bought an electric grill and a cheap camp pot. I’m also bringing a one-cup coffee maker. I can put the pot on the grill to heat some stew, or I can grill some hamburgers, or fry an egg, or grill some carrots and onions. There’s also a good chance there will be firewood available, since it’s early in the season. So maybe I’ll be doing some hotdogs over the fire. I’m just 15 miles from Ithica, which has supermarkets and a terrific bagel shop. Staying at the cabin without a car would be a bummer. There’s no stores and just one restaurant nearby. It takes 3 hours to bike round trip to the nearest grocery store. But with a car, it will be a breeze.

In one week, I have plans to do 5 days of bike riding, and 4 days of hiking, and visit the Corning Glass factory while I’m at it. And of course it’s pretty easy to sit in the cabin and read if the weather is just absolutely nasty and I’ve run out of stores and museums to visit.

The Finger Lakes trip is pretty exciting, but there are a few other things going on. We had Circle last Sunday. There was a neighborhood party yesterday. We’re going to Spotlighters Theater to see a play this evening. I mentioned earlier that I got approval to repair my deck. the contract is signed, work is scheduled to start at the end of the month. Last week, with the weather getting better, several neighbors went out their back door and discovered their decks are in as bad a shape as mine, or even worse. It’s amazing how many people have very nice porches under their deck but don’t go out their back door. I think they went outside to look because the word got out that I’m doing something to my deck. They were shocked at how bad their decks are. They want the condo association to “do something”. They think a deck should last 50 years without any maintenance. They want all the owners to take pictures so they can collect them as evidence. What if everybody started repairing their decks in different ways? They are having a meeting Thursday evening. I’ll be in NY. And I wasn’t invited in any event. I asked my neighbor to let me know how it goes. I think the whole thing is highly amusing.

We’ve been thinking about being away from home for 2 weeks when we go to London in June. And we’ve been thinking of taking longer trips of some as-yet undefined nature in the coming years. We live in a nice neighborhood, but there have been several thefts. We don’t want to install an alarm, but we would like a little more peace of mind that our house is undisturbed. The neighbors are nice, but they have their own lives and take their own trips — sometimes without checking with us first. (Can you believe it?) Somebody mentioned that Samsung makes a good security camera, so I looked it up. I liked what I saw and bought one. It arrived, but I didn’t have several hours to install it, so I put it off. A couple of days later, I had an hour before dinner and decided to start doing whatever has to be done. 45 minutes later, the camera was fully installed and working. I was amazed how easy it was. I can see the camera picture on my computer or on my phone, from anywhere in the world. The camera has a wide-angle lens so it sees the entire main living area with just one camera. The picture has amazing detail. It has an infrared LED which lets the camera pick up a pretty good picture at night. I have it set up to detect motion. If it detects motion, it sends an Email to whoever I wish, complete with a picture of the house so we can see who is in it. It also posts the picture on Picassa. Samsung says they will soon have the ability to post a short video on Google Documents. This is certainly no alarm. It can’t call “911”. (Neither can I, if I am out of town — I have to call the non-emergency police number.) It is a pain to activate or disable the motion detection. None of this works if the power is off, or the internet service is down. But it does a lot, all with no monthly fees.

That was a lot of news for one fortnight. You might have noticed the list of amenities for my cabin in the Finger Lakes included some items that some people would take for granted. What I noticed is that “WiFi” is not on the list of amenities. I’ll do several posts from the Finger Lakes, but the area is quite rural. Several sections of road go 50 miles without a single Starbucks. So posting is likely to be quite irregular. But it will all get up, sooner or later. I’m not on a formal bike tour, so I’m not eligible to post on “Crazy Guy on a Bike”. Instead, I’ll be posting on this blog.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I am writing this on Sunday, 4/27. There are a couple of pics, including one that is slightly blurry.

Black and White Party

I spent much of the week updating computers for Habitat for Humanity.There were plenty of surprises and unexpected happenings. But everything turned out reasonably well. If counting computers, I am well over half way done. But that includes two computers that took much more effort than the others, because they were older and running older software. I don’t wish to jinx myself, but I should be done with the project this week.

There are plenty of other things going on, of course. Our neighborhood had a “Black and White” party Saturday, with live entertainment and light food. The idea was to come dressed for a black tie event, but not everybody agreed. Dress of the attendees went everywhere from black tie to one man who wore a T-shirt printed to look like a tux and a formal shirt. Our president came dressed in all black with his white hanky hanging out of his back pocket. His theory was “Once you get the ladies looking at your butt, you’re half way home.” The picture is a little blurred. All I can say is that I didn’t take it.

Sherwood Gardens

Today was a super busy day. We started out with a BOGO breakfast at Mimi’s after Church. In riding around the area this week, I noticed the tulips seem to be out earlier than normal. So we visited Sherwood Gardens in Baltimore before going to a BSO concert. The weather was fabulous. As you might expect, we weren’t the only ones who decided to spend a Sunday afternoon at the park. There were more people there than we have ever seen before. However, we quickly found a good parking spot, and there was no trouble walking the grounds. The Azaleas weren’t out yet, but the tulips and flowering trees were fabulous.

Sherwood Gardens

Then it was off to the concert. The second half of the 1880s saw the introduction of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, Saint-Saëns’ “Organ” Symphony, Dvorák’s Eighth, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, and Mahler’s First (also called the “Titan Symphony”). Mahler was the highlighter for this concert, and I can’t help but feel we didn’t get the best of the litter. Still, it was a very enjoyable concert. The other piece, Rachmaninoff Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, is a delightful piece and was very well done. As to the Mahler, well, the BSO sounds good almost no matter what they are playing.

We ended the day with dinner at Petit Louis Bistro. This is a well-established French restaurant in Baltimore that recently opened a location in downtown Columbia. We had a very nice dinner without breaking the bank. We won’t be visiting frequently, but we’ll be back once in a while. It was a perfect capper for the day.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I am writing this on Monday, 4/21. There are several pics.

Taeo & Ryn

The big news this week was Easter. Ryn and Taeo came east. They visited with Jul for a day, then drove up to our place, arriving about dinner time Saturday. Mark joined us for dinner. Sunday, we went up to Ed & Lynne’s for the family dinner and Easter egg hunt. Monday Ryn and Taeo cooked breakfast. We went out to see the Grand Budapest Hotel (nice movie, but kind of quirky). They headed back after lunch. There was lots of very good and very special food. Everybody had a good time. The pictures are all from the Easter Egg hunt.

Pete & Rebecca

We had lots of other news this week. We got approval for the deck project Thursday. The contractor says he will probably start May 14th.

Danita, Lynne, & Toni’s Mom

I also reserved a cabin at Taughannock Falls State Park on Cayuga Lake for a week (May 14-21). This is in the Finger Lake area of New York, about 15 miles north of Ithaca. I’m going up alone. I’ll drive up with my bike and ride around the area. I plan to see plenty of water falls and ride around all the lakes. Cayuga Lake is the largest. It’s about 100 miles to ride around it. That’s more than I want to do in one day. One morning, I’ll drive the car half way around and ride back to my cabin. The next day, I’ll ride from my cabin back to the car. I’m still working out the details of the trip, but I have routes plotted around each lake, and I have an overnight parking spot approved by the local authorities.

Ed & Addi

All this bike riding means I have to be in shape. Towards that end, I did my first 100 KM (62 mile) ride last weekend. I was a little tired, but the ride went well. I would like to do a lot more riding in the next weeks, but I’m going to have to restrain myself somewhat because Habitat for Humanity approved the networking project. My task of the moment is to update all the ReStore computers to run Windows “Pro”. There are 14 computers, and most of them need some kind of update. The first store is done. I’ll be doing the biggest store this week.

Taeo, Ryn, Rebecca, Mark, Toni, Bud, Pete

Toni, Toni’s Dad, Ryn, Rebecca

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

I am writing this on Sunday, 4/12. There are a few pics.

Tranquility Point

1971 was sandwiched between the Kent State shooting and Watergate. (Raise your hand if you remember Al “I’m in charge” Haig.) It was the year the Pentagon Papers were publicly published; and the year that documents from the FBI office in Media, PA were stolen and made public. I just finished reading the book “The Burglary” by Betty Medsger. Her focus is on the team that stole the FBI documents. The FBI never caught the team. Medsger found all of the team members except one. She did detailed research and in-depth interviews. The result is a compelling story of how the illegal actives carried out by J Edgar Hoover’s FBI were made public. As Medsger points out near the end of the book, the secret government culture that developed around Vietnam and was finally outed in the early 70s was never effectively eliminated. And, of course, it came back in force after 9/11. I thought I knew the 60s because I was there. I was surprised by how much I had forgotten, and how much I had wrong. The book has some weak points. Parts of the book are tedious and preachy. She seems to think that the FBI’s efforts to find the team was a Keystone Cops episode. But my reading of the facts she presents indicates the FBI did a reasonable job, and used some breakthrough techniques to gather evidence. In spite of the book’s imperfections, reading the story of the burglary team was very interesting. It’s a compelling book, and one you should find interesting.

What if I could ride by here twice a week? Wait! I already do that!

It’s spring and the weather is great. I heard my first peepers and saw my first heron. I’m slowly building up my biking endurance. I’m pleased with my progress, which is pretty much keeping up with the additional daylight and improved weather.

We had a busy week. Wednesday was the meeting to review our application to fix the deck. We got approval from our condo and from SOCA. The next and last step is neighborhood approval (Long Reach). We should hear by Thursday. This was my first visit to the Long Reach office. They call the office “Stone House”. I thought, how quaint, they restored an old stone farmhouse to use for their offices. Wrong. There is no house; there is no stone. “Stone House” is in a brick office building behind a shopping center. This is Columbia, after all. But they do have a wood plaque on the wall with a couple of lines from an obscure poet that includes the words “Stone House”.

Lake Elkhorn Turtles

Friday was a SOCA party. Saturday was a walk around Elkhorn Lake and Seder dinner with circle. Danita is so organized. She cooked an excellent dinner for 9, with plenty of time for the afternoon hike. While we were walking, Danita stepped off the path, twisted her ankle, and half-fell a half dozen steps, almost into some brambles. Today she’s hobbling around with a sore right ankle and a sore left knee.

Today was breakfast at Rudy’s Grill. Rudy’s is a strange place. They have the best Gyros I’ve ever had, but they’re only available before 3. They are reputed to have a good breakfast, but they don’t open until 8. We’re usually seated, ordered, an drinking coffee by 8. But Palm Sunday is the longest mass of the year, so we took that opportunity to visit Rudy’s. We still waited 7 minutes in the parking lot. The breakfast was quite good and reasonably priced, but I don’t think we will visit often — at least until Danita retires and we can have Gyros before 3.

We’re looking forward to Easter festivities next week — including Ryn’s arrival Saturday. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I’m writing this on Sunday, 4/6. There are no pics.

It’s nice to start the week off with good news. Jul & Pat have a contract to buy a new home. The inspection is next week. They will move in June.

I’ve turned my attention to our trip to England. Ballet tickets go on sale Tuesday. While waiting, we’re polishing the details for our time in London and I bought two of the three train tickets we need. We are traveling from Stratford-Upon-Avon to Windermere (two big vacation spots) on a weekend day in the summer time. I expected this trip would be a little more expensive than the others. But so far, the best price I can get is over 7 times higher than a non-weekend summer fare. Looking in more detail, this trip entails rides on three different rail lines. One of the three trips is 5 times higher than the other two. I’m holding off while we consider some options. According to the web site, the bus driver is handsome and friendly. (I saw his picture!) Even so Danita and I decided not to take the bus.

Since I was a teenager, I have heard about how great the rail service is in Europe, and what a shame it is that we can’t have a similar quality of rail service in the US. I guess the UK isn’t part of Europe. Or maybe “they” were exaggerating a little bit. My experience buying the rail tickets was a bit of an eye opener.  I learned that there are over a dozen different rail lines offering passenger service in their own separate service corridors. There are a few aggregators that make it easy to buy tickets when routes use multiple rail lines, or when one doesn’t know which rail line to search. One simply enters the start and destination stations, the date and time, and Presto! Options appear. There is even a link to find the “cheapest fare”. I searched both ways for the three trips we need. One time the standard search found the cheaper fare. One time the “cheapest fare” link found the cheapest fare, and one time they both found the same fare. Well, nothing’s perfect.

Moving on, I click “buy tickets”. I was amazed to find myself whisked off the aggregator site and on to the rail line’s site. Unlike US travel sites such as Travelocity, the aggregator doesn’t sell the tickets. Only the rail lines do that. So far, I have three UK web accounts for rail travel — one for the aggregator and one for each of two different rail lines.

I saw an option to pick the type of seats we want. Every train I’ve ever been on had two seats together. But just in case, I thought it might be nice to tick off “window seat” to make sure we had a window to share. The next thing I knew, we both had window seats; and obviously not next to each other. It took quite a bit of time to un-do that.

Seat numbers being acceptable, I purchased the first ticket, choosing to print the ticket on my printer. It required the last 4 digits of our passports, which I thought was a nice security measure. When I booked the next ticket, I was informed that international customers cannot print the ticket on their printers. I’m puzzled as to why the web site gave me the option. They already had my address, which clearly stated we live in the US. I’m not sure what we’ll need to get our tickets out of whatever machine they use, because there is no information about that on the web site. I guess we’ll have to go to the station on the appointed day and hope for the best.

Having purchased the tickets, I was examining the details of the route. That’s when I found that at one stop, we have to disembark from the train, walk a few blocks to a different train station, and board a train for a different rail line, which for some reason couldn’t share a terminal with the first rail line.

Well, at least there are options for getting around by train in the UK. And the fares are really quite reasonable. Provided, of course, one doesn’t travel between two vacation cities on the weekend.

We had a nice quiet weekend. Our big activity was that we got to the Spotlighters to see the performance we didn’t get to on our anniversary. AND we found free parking just a few blocks away from the theatre. We wanted to go to Taco Bell to try their waffle breakfast. They are widely advertised to open at 7 or earlier. Unfortunately, they have a strange definition of “open”. When we got there at 7:45, the dining room was locked. The drive-thru was open but we’re just not into eating breakfast in the car.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Late Snow

It was a lot of rain. Not surprising that the Patapsco flooded near Elkridge. But Snow at the end of March? Shortly after this pic, I did the only possible reasonable thing. I closed the blinds, turned on the lights, switched on some music, started the fireplace, and sulked until it was time for the chilli cook-off. The chilli was good. We even got a bonus movie afterwards — “Rush”. The snow quit. But it’s still raining.