Us at Green Market

The big news this week was certainly our visit at West Palm Beach. After an uneventful trip down, we started our first day, Saturday, with a bang. We visited the Green Market, which is right next to the boating dock. Theirs is not an every-day boating dock, as you can see from some of the yachts in the picture below.

Mom & Danita at Green Market

WPB Yachts

Mom Downloading Pics

Sunday we had originally planned to go on a water taxi tour. Unfortunately, they were forecasting showers. While the showers never developed, I personally chickened out on getting into the harbor in a small boat when there was the possibility of a squall. It turned out to be a quiet day. I spent some time installing printer drivers for Mom’s laptop computer, then giving Mom pointers on downloading pictures from the Internet and printing them out. For most of us, using the computer is not associated with exercise. But in WPB, Internet access that requires something more than dial-up starts with a trip to the clubhouse, ensuring at least some physical activity is associated with computer use.

Mom and Kincachoo

Monday was our busiest day. We went to McCarthy’s Wildlife Sanctuary. This is a place that accepts exotic animals that need a home. McCarthy’s is out in the sticks. All the roads in the area are unpaved gravel, but they are in good shape for gravel roads. People do all kinds of crazy things such as try to hand-raise a tiger, or have a monkey for a pet (besides all the other disadvantages you might have heard of, they like to mark their territory), or bring home a baby turtle that will grow to be 300 pounds. The only way to see the Wildlife Sanctuary is to take a tour with a guide. Guests are permitted to handle some of the animals. We didn’t handle any of the 500-pound tigers, but we did stand withing a foot of them, with only a chain link fence between us. The guide got some of the tigers to jump up on the fence and gave them belly rubs through the fence. For an additional fee, guests can participate in a tiger petting session. After almost 2 hours at the sanctuary, we went to a tea house for lunch. In the evening, we had a rip-roaring game of Parcheesi.

Tuesday it was time to go home. Danita had an important work meeting and I had a doctor’s appointment. Unfortunately, our plane had an electrical problem. This being the busy winter travel season for FL, alternate flights were booked up and spare airplanes were not available. At Noon Tuesday, instead of being at home, we found ourselves in the Fort Lauderdale airport. US Air gave us the $150 taxi ride between airports. After we arrived in Fort Lauderdale, they sprang for another $150 got us a nice hotel (Homstead Suites). We found a bakery a block from the hotel that turned out to be very ethnic (some kind of a middle-eastern place — all the customers spoke some flavor of Arabic, and the women all wore traditional Arabic head coverings). The food was quite good. I can’t remember the last time the two of us were able to have lunch for just $9 (including 2 Cokes). The hotel had a free dinner which was adequate and better than I expected. We finally made it home (via Philadelphia) early Wednesday afternoon.

Our club house got new hardwood floors in the office and craft room. This was needed for the office especially. Seven years of heavy use had made the carpet quite dirty. The new floor is quite an improvement. Unfortunately, when they moved everything back in, they found that they didn’t have Internet access. Carol, the events coordinator, called me for help. That would have been fine, but at the moment I was standing in the WPB airport trying to figure out how we would get home. When I got over to the club house Wednesday I found Steve (another resident) trying to put things back together. Nobody knows how the network in the clubhouse works, but working together Steve and I got it working in about an hour. Now that it’s easier to scoot desks away from the wall, I spent some time documenting how everything is connected for our future reference. I found that we actually have two internet services. We might be able to save the association a couple of bucks by consolidating.

Getting home late turns out to have meant that I missed some pretty good biking weather — 50 and sunny. It turned out to be rainy today, but I got a nice ride in Thursday, and the weather looks good for this weekend.

Last week I said I might have the opportunity through Re-Serve to help ACS with their web site. They decided they were taking the wrong approach and I lost the opportunity. That was a bit of a bummer, but I have to agree they had better options available. However, Re-Serve got another opportunity with an organization named CASA. Just by coincidence, they’re withing a block of ACS. We’ll see how this turns out.

I’ll end this post with some more pictures taken at McCarthy’s Wildlife Sanctuary.

At the entrance before the tour

Outside the stinky reptile house

We had some more Christmas fun with the Reeds. Elizabeth completed a shape puzzle which was purchased for Bryon. As you can see, she was quite pleased with her accomplishment.

We went on an adventure Thursday. We went to the Air Museum at College Park, the oldest airport in continuous use in the world. Both Bryon and Elizabeth had a great time. In spite of my cool new “fast shot” camera program, Elizabeth was faster. My best shot was blurred.

Jul and Pat went on an overnight date, leaving early Friday morning. We took the kids on a big adventure. Everything worked great, except I forgot my phone, so I didn’t get any pics. We started at the Fire Museum in Lutherville (just north of Baltimore). There we saw antique fire engines, got to ring a fire bell, spent time in the play room, and saw a train garden. By the time we were done, it was lunch time, so we went across the street to Friendly’s. The weather was pretty nice, so after a great lunch (with ice cream!) we stopped at a cool play ground on the way home. Of course the sun went behind the clouds as soon as we got to the play ground. But the kids had a great time. Danita and I got a pretty good amount of exercise just trying to keep up with where the kids were. We made it through the whole day without Mom & Dad, without naps, and without any breakdowns. It was pretty remarkable. It just goes to show the power of having ice cream after lunch.

Saturday the weather was back to white stuff, although it never got cold enough for the snow to stick to anything. We had a quieter day. Our adventure was going to the community theater to watch Toy Story 2, another of E’s presents. Jul and Pat got back in time for dinner. Elizabeth has this grandparent thing figured out. Safe in her mother’s arms, she started crying profusely. She turned to me and exclaimed through her tears, “I want to go on an adventure”.

After a very nice chicken curry dinner and some wonderful chocolate-covered chocolate balls Julia had made, the kids went to bed; Jul and Pat went upstairs, and Danita and I went downstairs to watch a Star Trek episode. When we came upstairs, we found that Elizabeth had been quite sick. Pat and Jul were finishing up cleaning. We had a tub filled with a drying port-a-crib mattress. Jul had started an emergency load in the clothes washer. We have a large tub on the main floor — larger than some front yard ponds. Danita filled that and used it as a soaking tub. Elizabeth went back to bed, but ended up spending most of the night being sick. Danita also got sick shortly after midnight. None of this bothered me any. I slept through it all, and didn’t learn about any of it until the next morning.

In spite of all the last minute excitement, Jul and Pat were able to get on the road fairly early Sunday morning, and arrived safely at home in an incredibly short time.

After 10 days out of the saddle, I got a bike ride in Monday. It’s amazing how quickly a 64 year-old body disintegrates.  I lost one or two gears, and at the end of a short ride my legs were sore. I goofed off New Year’s day and didn’t feel so great Wednesday. Today by Noon it was still near freezing. I rode inside on the rollers.

We had a quiet New Year’s Eve, watching one of the worst disaster movies ever made. What do you do with leftover champagne after the holiday parties? Drink Mimosas while watching the Rose Bowl parade and eating junk food, of course. The down side of that is that it pretty much means I’m not riding every day this year, starting on the first day of the year.

Today I had a phone interview with ACY. They are the folks that want somebody to re-do their web site. I can do most of the job they want, It wasn’t a slam-dunk. I should hear back from them next week.

We’re looking forward to an extended weekend with Mom in West Palm Beach.

This drawing was created by Elizabeth Reed and offered to me as a gift. If you want an original from this artist, you will have to contact her directly. She might be able to create something for you, but I can’t offer too much hope. Her creations are highly valued in some circles.

I figured out how to get the pictures out of my burst mode camera. This is great because taking over 20 pics a second is a big help at catching kids, and the pictures come out looking fine. Here’s a pic from Bryon on Christmas day.

Now a picture of Elizabeth. She’s helping Joe to find out he’s another Maryland Lottery Looser!

One of the gifts Bryon got was a full set of Pirate rain wear. How cool is that?

Elizabeth received Ladybug rainwear. But that is no where as cool as having pirate reainwear. Her solution was to inform us that this was also pirate rainwear. So we now call it the pirate ladybug rainwear.

The day after Christmas, it snowed. We ended up with almost an inch of snow on our deck. It was great fun to play in. Shortly after the third picture, the fun promptly stopped when Bryon stuffed a snowball inside Elizabeth’s shirt.

After we took care of that, we braved the elements to walk to the club house to watch another Christmas present – Toy Story – in our neighborhood theater. It was fun walking in the snow for the first half block. The second half block required a lot more coaxing. We finally got there and watched the *very scary* movie. The moral of Toy Story is that children must play with their toys nicely. After the movie, we walked around the clubhouse counting Christmas trees and nutcrackers. When we got home, Bryon and Elizabeth promptly took out their new play tool set and attached Elizabeth’s new baby doll. I guess Toy Story encouraged a backlash against the moral.

What a wonderfully successful Christmas! We had the surest sign of a successful Christmas. By the end of the day, the kids were blindly wondering around the house, totally overloaded, and unable to decide what to do. Unfortunately, I experienced a slight technical glitch. I got a new program for my smart phone. It takes two pictures a second, in the hope that I can actually capture the children in a reasonable pose, and temporarily not moving. I think it worked pretty well. I’ll know for sure when I figure out how to find the pictures this program took. In the mean time, I’ll use this picture to represent the first present.

Louise, Bob, and Bud

We’re getting ready for lunch. There is activity and anticipation of a movie, so I’m going ahead and posting this quickly. Bud came up Chrisstmas Day. The Belyeas were at Ed’s house; as were Pete, Rebecca and their two girls; and Joe. Unfortunately, the two girls were sick. Lynne & Rebbeca stayed with the girls, and the five other folks from Ed’s came down. Here’s the Belyeas and Bud.

Her’s Pete and Joe. It seems even the adults were pretty active — I wasn’t able to catch Pete sitting still.

Jul, Pat, Bryon, and Elizabeth are staying the week. Mark’s here for just today. Everybody else went home last night. I’ll see if I can post more later. I’m not to sure, though. There’s lots of activity around here.

Here’s Pat and Ed, then a pic of Pete, Joe, Mark, and Jul.

This time of the year, there are lots of Christmas displays out. I’ve seen tons of them. Large and small, religious and secular, tasteful and gauche, beautiful and ugly. But this year on my bike rides I saw a new category – whimsically humorous. I don’t even know what the opposite of “whimsically humorous” is, but there’s no doubt that’s the category for this display. There’s no sense in trying to describe it. You simply have to see it. That brings me to my other topic for this paragraph – pictures. I tried sharing pics through Picassa. That seemed to work for a while until some people told me they couldn’t see them. Then I tried attaching them to Emails. Again, some worked, some didn’t. Now I have a new solution, as you can see here!

The second picture is a “digital zoom”, so it’s a little pixelated. What you can’t see in the picture is that the snow man and penguins shake in the breeze as if they were shivering. Way cool!

I’ve been lucky to get several rides in this week, including another 40-miler. Saturday was a no-go due to winds that were consistently 20 MPH, with much higher gusts. I doubt I will get any rides in for a while, because Christmas starts in a short while when I pick up Mark.

Ed Geisendaffer died late last week. I went to his viewing Monday afternoon and ran into some people from Westinghouse. I saw one of my old supervisors, John Asenzi, and the man who was the director of engineering, Bill Patalon. Bill told me that Tony Chaprnka filed for retirement the previous week. I called Tony Saturday, but I haven’t heard back from him yet to get the details.

Another thing I did this week was to learn about WordPress. This is one of the most popular software packages for running web sites. It started out as being blogging software, but it has since grown to be a very capable package. I got interested because Re-Serve found a possible position for me at ACY (Advocates for Children) in Baltimore. ACY wants to re-write their web site in WordPress. I applied and got a phone interview scheduled for Jan 3. I thought it would be a good idea if I figured out what I’m signing up for. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence, but my solution for sharing pics just happens to involve WordPress.

Tuesday we had a major catastrophe. I punched a microwave button and it snapped, sparked, and smoked. At first I thought it was just a light bulb that had shorted. That’s rare, but it happens sometimes. And one of the light bulbs had exploded. But the next day, I learned that the microwave cooking function was dead, dead, dead. As soon as Danita got home Wednesday, we went out to buy a new one. The appliance store near us could install it Friday. That taken care of,  we had to eat dinner out. One can’t eat dinner at home without a microwave! We went to try a new pizza place, but it was way too loud, so we went to our reliable Tino’s for pizza. Thursday we still didn’t have a microwave, but that’s our normal night for eating dinner out anyway. The store called Thursday evening and said the installers would come between 8 and Noon Friday. That was great. Friday about 6:30 AM, we got a call. The installers were on the way and would arrive in half an hour. That’s no problem for us. We were both up and dressed. But it’s a slow time of the year and Danita was taking her time getting to work. We had to hustle to get Danita off to work (so her car wouldn’t be blocked in by the truck). It turns out the installers had an easy time of it. We have an above-the-range microwave. These are held up by a metal plate on the wall plus two bolts that go through the cabinet above the unit. The new microwave used exactly the same bracket as the old one. The installers were gone by 7:30 – half an hour before we were told they might come. We weren’t complaining. With all the holiday traffic, it was nice to eat dinner at home Friday.

Of course, as we now know, the world did not end this week. I actually learned something about the Mayan calendar. 20 days make a uinal, 18 uinals (360 days) make a tun, 20 tuns made a k’atun, and 20 k’atuns (144,000 days or roughly 394 years) make up a b’ak’tun. Uinals, tuns, and k’atuns are cyclical – when one ends, another one starts. But b’ak’tuns are linear. The third world started on Aug 11, 3114 BC, and would end after 13 b’ak’tuns on Dec 21, 2012. Thus the Mayan “prophecy” that the world would end. The irony was that the Mayans weren’t predicting when the world would change. They were predicting the world would *not* change for a very, very long time. As we know, the Mayans were very bad prognosticators, and Cortez had nothing to do with it. Nobody knows why the Mayan civilization collapsed. But as Doonesbury pointed out, everybody’s still here, unless you’re Mayan.

I hope everybody is doing well, has a merry Christmas, and a wonderful New Year.