Balloons Over Baltimore

This is Preakness week, and that means the hot-air balloons are in town. We went out early this morning (Saturday) to see the balloon inflation. Back when we lived on Rueckert Ave in Baltimore, they did this in Patterson Park. When we moved to Kingsville, they moved it to Hunt Valley. Now we live in Columbia, and they have moved to Turf Valley — just 15 minutes away. (I’m just stating a fact.) If we wanted to see lots of balloons, we should have gone on Thursday or Friday. By Saturday, many of the balloon teams had left. Only one full-size balloon was in the air (tethered balloon rides — just $15!). There were also a couple of mini-balloons. Still, it was a nice morning and we had fun. Afterwards, we went out to Bob Evans to take advantage of a BOGO breakfast. (BOGO means “Buy One, Get One”.)

We Were There!

It was eventful all week, starting with our concert last Sunday. As you may remember, we heard the symphony play the music to Charlie Chaplain’s “Modern Times”. We were both delighted. I had always associated CC with old-time slapstick comedy in silent movies — good in its day, but not very interesting any more. I found an amazingly funny and uplifting movie. The movie had slap-stick comedy — one great gag after another. It also had a story. It had characters. It was uplifting. In short, it was a good movie. Danita’s favorite part was when Chaplain started doing Michael Jackson’s “Moon Walk”. I got a biography of Chaplain from our E-library. The man lived through a very rough childhood. But he was eternally optimistic about his (and our) future. I found a copy of “The Kid” on Amazon. It’s on our “to watch” list.

Having passed my PT (I expect to be discharged Monday) and having raised the handlebars on my bike (so I don’t re-injure myself), it was time to get serious about training for the ride up the Blue Ridge. I have two serious training rides — a 65 mile course around Liberty Reservoir that includes 6,000 feet of climbing, and a hilly circle around Ellicott City, crossing back and forth across the Patapsco River, using the steepest hills I can find. My training plan has 3 parts. 1 – Ride both training rides twice within one week. 2 – Continue riding each training ride once a week, while mixing in some other rides I find more fun. 3 – Go back to serious training rides for the last two weeks of June. I must be in better shape than I thought. I achieved the first goal this week. I did the second Liberty Reservoir ride Friday in absolutely perfect weather. The temperature was moderate. The sun was shining brightly. The spring flowers and greenery were in full bloom. Having ridden around much of Howard and Carroll county, I can safely report that this spring has brought a bumper crop of construction. Everywhere I went, I saw house renovations and repairs, new home construction, and of course road construction. It looks like one of the roads I use on the Liberty Reservoir route will be unrideable due to a repaving project. This will close the route for me (there being no reasonable detours). Even though I temporarily lost one training route, I am quite pleased to have met my goal so soon (and also still a little tired).

Besides that, we went to “Medicare 101”, offered by a Howard County volunteer organization. We learned that if one MUST sign up for Medicare Part A within 3 months of their 65th birthday. If a person decides not to sign up for Part B and later changes their mind, they will pay a penalty for the rest of their life. There are many, many parts to Medicare. The system is unbelievably complicated. Lastly, we learned that thanks to Danita’s many years of service to the state of MD through her job at UMBC, we are very lucky to need only Part A. We don’t have to go to Medicare 102. We don’t have to compare Part D plans on the web. And we don’t have to visit a Medicare counselor to try and figure out which of the many options is best for us.

We also had a neighborhood art show Friday evening. We have a lot of very talented artists living in our neighborhood.The garden club offered floral arrangements next to many of the paintings. They did an incredible job of complementing the art. Of course, being a SOCA event, there was food and libations. After seeing all the art work, we relaxed on the porch, chatting with neighbors and enjoying the perfect weather. It’s a good thing we went to that party, because the next one won’t be until Sunday, when we have an Elvis impersonator coming. Sometimes it’s hard living up to the Jonses in this neighborhood. One does what one must.

Rick, Dani, and Mom might remember when Dad had that little Austin Healey Sprite, how we joked about how it was Dad’s road dinghy. Well, here’s a picture of somebody else’s road dinghy. I though it was a cute pic.

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

This was a great week because I finally finished my work at CASA. The job ended up being to issue new computers and take care of a few odds and ends. It wasn’t that big a deal. But the office manager is passive aggressive. She would demand unnecessary tests and meaningless information. When I did what she asked, she ignored the results. She refused to buy what we needed. For a week and a half, I stopped going in because there was nothing for me to do until she bought something we needed. (Of course, I told both the office manager and the executive director what I was doing and why). All together, the job ended up taking twice as long as it should have, which I found quite frustrating. But by Thursday I had done everything I could do. As usual, there was an issue. As usual, I told them. As usual, they denied me permission to solve it and did not solve it themselves. But this was for an upgrade for one PC that works perfectly fine without the upgrade. I told them they can call me if they need me, and that I need at least 2 to 4 hours of work to come in. (It takes me 2 hours work to pay for the trip.) I managed to leave the office without doing anything dramatic like shaking the dust off my feet.

It was just in time, because the weather Friday was perfect. It started out a little cool, warmed to 80, and was sunny all day. It was just the day to try my hilly metric century ride again. This time it went very well. I was tired at the end of the ride, but I had no pain in my arm, shoulder, or neck. The weather has been extremely unpredictable the last several days. I’ll look at the weather the night before and learn that I should be able to ride in the afternoon, but not in the morning. I’ll check the weather in the morning and see that I can ride in the morning, but not in the afternoon. By late morning or early afternoon, it becomes apparent that the thunderstorms that had a 95% chance of starting at Noon just couldn’t get started. And so it goes.

Last night we had a neighborhood “Chill and Grill”. The association provides hamburgers and hot dogs, buns, drinks, and plates / silverware / etc. Residents bring a side dish or desert. We had wonderful weather for the party. We sat inside, but the majority of residents were outside. After the party, one of the residents offered a movie. Just as we were walking in the house, a major thunderstorm started up. Lucky us!

Tomorrow is the last Symphony concert. This one is a little different. The orchestra will play music to accompany Charlie Chaplin’s “ModernTimes”. I’ve never actually seen the movie, although I have seen the famous takeout of Charlie working on the gears.  It should be a lot of fun. If we go out to eat afterwards, it will be someplace low-scale. Trying to eat at a restaurant on Mother’s Day is not our idea of fun. We make it a point to have Sunday breakfast at Panera on Mother’s Day, because it’s even less crowded than normal. And Panera serves a perfectly fine breakfast.

Physical Therapy is going very well. Last Wednesday, the therapist got 100% motion in my arm. I’m thinking this will be the last week of PT. That will give me even more flexibility for training.

Ed and Lynne Schmaus’s son Pete was working as the grounds keeper at a Boy Scout camp on the Eastern Shore. Pete lost that job this week. The house they were living in was provided as part of the job, so they lost the right to live in the house as well. We’re not sure what happened, and it doesn’t really matter. Pete, Rebecca, and their two daughters are moving in with Ed and Lynne. Lynne has been teaching Kindergarten full time for the last several years. She is well connected with the Baltimore County schools. She was able to get the older grandchild placed immediately because they are technically homeless. (The younger girl is too young for school.)

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

Note: There are no pictures this week.

After all the excitement we had last week, we were due for some quiet time. We had no neighborhood parties. We ate dinner out Saturday and breakfast this morning. Other than that, we didn’t go anywhere this weekend. I got a few good rides in. The higher handle bars are definitely a big improvement. I spent much of my time at CASA wiping sensitive data from computers so they can be donated or recycled. (As old as these computers are, they could still run Linux and Open Office.) I was able to add the Visitor Pool Passes to our neighborhood residents database. PT is starting to have a positive affect on my shoulder. That’s about it for the week.

I hope everybody is doing well.

Dennis

Note: There are no pictures this week.

Nothing particularly special happened this week. I’m close to finishing the computer upgrades at CASA. There’s more work to do, but maybe not a whole lot. I won’t mind if I run dry there. I work 4 hours a day, 2 days a week. I get a stipend, but the first two hours of my stipend goes towards paying for the mileage and parking. I had a meeting with the tech support company at Habitat. They agreed with my overall plan, but disagreed with my proposed implementation. Their solution is technically better and also more expensive. It’s not likely to happen at Habitat. There are other things I can do for them, so I’ll re-focus my energies there.

I’m still doing PT twice a week, which take an amazingly large chunk out of the week.

Not much happened on the bike. My bike is in the shop getting its handle bars raised. They ordered the wrong part. The process of ordering and receiving a part takes at least 2 days. I hope to get the bike back Monday or Tuesday. I’ve been riding my backup bike, but it’s not set up for longer rides. In addition, it has turned amazingly cold here. We had a freeze warning last night.

Fortunately, the entertainment rolls on. We had a SOCA party yesterday. Today, we are going to a BSO concert.

Next week we’re having an adventure. Danita and I will leave for North Carolina Friday, returning Monday. We plan to head over to the Charlotte area and knock on doors and see if anybody will let us visit with their children. I have an idea we’ll be successful with the first door we knock on. Danita’s dad is coming with us. He has a friend in Charlotte just 20 minutes from Jul’s house. Bud’s coming to our house Thursday for dinner and staying overnight. The trip should be quite different with a 3rd person in the car.

That’s in for this week. I’m not likely to write next week. But I just might have some pictures to share when I do finally write again. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Note: There are no pictures this week.

I did this season’s first metric century ride today. I rode 65 miles, climbing 5000 feet. That’s a little over 100 KM, or a metric century. The weather was perfect, but it turns out my body is a little less than perfect. I’m having real trouble reaching my handle bars. I’m going to have to find some way to get a more relaxed fit. The best thing about the ride was that The Snowball Stand was open. They didn’t have any ice cream today, but that’s not what I typically get at The Snowball Stand. However, I’m glad I asked. While I was standing there waiting for them to make my snowball, I overheard a mother ask her young daughter whether she wanted a snowball or ice cream. I knew where this was going, and warned her. I was fast enough that the girl didn’t have time to set her mind on ice cream, so all ended well.

I had a busy week. I had PT Monday and Wednesday, followed by a ride. (Actually, the continuation of the ride, since I rode my bike to PT.) I had work Thursday and Friday. I even had work on Saturday! Because computers at CASA were dying as I was trying to issue new ones, I had to issue several laptops before they were ready. Now that things are ready, we had 4 laptops that were issued and needed to be updated. It takes half a day to update them. People need to use their computers at work. So I came in Saturday morning to do the updates.

I think I mentioned before that our community association asked if I would mind being on an IT committee. I said that was fine with me. This week, I was asked to attend the board meeting. It’s certainly not everyday that I am summoned to appear before the board. I was joking with Danita that if they kick me out of the neighborhood, she can have the house. I don’t know what they think this IT committee is, but I’m pretty certain it’s not going to include attending board meetings every month.

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

Sue is one of the researchers that works in Danita’s research group. Don is Sue’s husband. (Does this make Don some kind of a brother-in-law through work?) This information is relevant because Don got excited about my trip to Maine. They invited us over to their house for dinner so he could pump me for information. Somehow it came out that Don tried to do a one-day ride on the Blue Ridge Parkway and found it very, very hard. In fact, he didn’t make it to his destination. He flagged down a pickup truck and hitched a ride to where he was staying. The next day, he had a local point out a shorter road going back. That sounded like a challenge to me. We kept egging each other on about riding the Blue Ridge. Finally, we decided to ride the parkway from Ashland, NC to Front Royal, VA (where it ends). After we get to Front Royal, we will ride on to Harper’s Ferry, WV. From there, I will ride home. Don might have Sue pick him up in Harper’s Ferry.

We need places to stay. Don can’t camp. I don’t want to carry the weight of camping gear in the mountains. We definitely do not want to ride into town, because that means riding down the side of a mountain, then riding back up the next morning. Mountains tend to be 2500 feet or so above civilization. Fortunately, there are enough places either on the parkway or just off the parkway that we can do the ride. These tend to be mountain vacation resorts. Monday, we made our hotel reservations for the entire trip, except for two places that aren’t open yet. This means every day is already planned out. We will ride the prescribed miles no matter the weather.

Blue Ridge Parkway

You can see a map of the trip here. (Click the picture to make it larger.) Notice that we will climb a total of 53,000 feet. That’s 10 miles! This in spite of the fact that Front Royal is 3,000 feet lower in elevation than is Ashland. The blue rectangles mark our hotels. We are planning shorter days where we can. (There are only so many hotels on the Blue Ridge Parkway). We will do the 500 mile ride in 2 weeks (July 12 – 26).

My bike training is just beginning. The weather has stayed stubbornly cool, with highs between 40 and 50 degrees. Yesterday, we had our first warm day, with a high of 62. It was my first ride this season with short sleeves and short pants. There was lots of skin to slather with sun block. It felt great. I even managed to work up a drop of sweat near the end of the ride — my first drop of sweat for the season! It was back to cool weather today, but next week we might get temperatures in the 70s. If the weather stays good, it won’t take long to build my distance and hill-climbing capacity. I’m champing at the bit, because there’s no doubt I will have to be in better shape than I was last year.

There’s not a lot of other news for us. We’re going to a concert at the Engineering Club tomorrow. The Engineering Club was once a very elegant house in Mount Vernon — the very fashionable neighborhood in downtown Baltimore (near Baltimore’s George Washington Monument). We’ll be hearing the Concert Artists of Baltimore perform. They’re playing some music that most folks don’t hear very often. It’s not exactly Beethoven, but it should be a fun concert.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Note: There are no pictures this week.

Happy Easter everybody. I hope yours is a good one. Ours will be a little different. Danita and I are going to Ed & Lynne’s as usual. But Ed raised turkeys, so we’re having turkey for Easter dinner. I think this is the first year that ham hasn’t been available. Given the weather forecast for today, I suspect we’ll be hiding plastic easter eggs inside this year.

I went back to work at CASA this week. When we started the computer upgrade project, we agreed we would use Windows 8 Pro and Windows 7 Pro. The reason for the “Pro” versions is that it allows them to encrypt sensitive files, and allows them to back up personal computers. It turns out the office manager is passive aggressive  and refused to order the software licenses. Two weeks ago, I ran out of useful work I could do. I don’t really need this job, and it’s against my ethics to make them pay $15 per hour for me to do nothing. I decided to stop going to work. This forced the issue. The licenses were ordered. They came in Tuesday. I went back to work Thursday. This didn’t change the passive aggressive nature of the office manager. Instead of giving me access to the downloads, she burned them onto disk “for” me. She burned Windows 7 instead of Windows 7 SP 1. I spent 4 hours downloading the service pack over their very slow data link. When she burned Windows 8 Pro, she copied the ISO file onto the disk instead of using the ISO file to create the CD-image. She clearly knew this was not the way to go, because she created the CD-image for everything else. Fortunately, I found a way to work around this. Two of the computers need a memory upgrade, which she didn’t order because she was “confused”, even though I sent her a web link. Finally, after forcing me to work every Thursday and Friday, she decided she couldn’t come to work Thursday or Friday, so we couldn’t “clarify” the computer memory upgrade.It’s frustrating to have a small project turned into a major production like this, but it’s nice that the work is optional. I’ll go in next week and maybe one day the week after. If the memory isn’t in by then, I’ll run out of work again and stop going in.

I have two projects in the works for Habitat. Both will take weeks to get going, as meetings must be held and after that hardware ordered.

In the meantime, the weather is getting nicer. I’m spending a little more time on the bike. One of the women who works for Danita has a husband who got very excited about my bike trip to Maine. Don and I were talking about bike trips and started talking about riding the Blue Ridge Parkway. This morphed into a 2-man ride up the Blue Ridge from Asheville, VA back to home. We’re planning to do the ride in mid-July. It should take about 2 weeks to ride the 500 miles. The mountains take a toll. We’re not planning on riding as many miles a day as I did riding to Maine. We won’t be doing any camping. Don isn’t at all interested in camping, and I’m not interested in carrying the weight of camping gear in the mountains. Except for Roanoke, we won’t be able to ride into a nearby town to get a hotel. It’s not that big a deal to ride an extra couple of miles. It’s no problem if those miles go down the side of the mountain. But going back up the mountain the next morning before even starting the daily ride is an overwhelming thought. Fortunately, there are enough hotels, B & Bs, and less expensive resorts right off the parkway to make the trip possible. Because some of the places are popular in the summer time, I’m going over to Don’s house tomorrow. We’ll make our reservations for each night of the trip. Except for the last two days, we should only ride 4 or 5 hours a day. That will give us some flexibility to ride around rain squalls. It should be a challenging adventure. After we finish the reservations, we’ll do a bike ride.

I got the results of an MRI of my brain this week. I was surprised to learn that I had a stroke. It’s an old stroke. I had an MRI about 17 years ago, and it wasn’t there then. It most likely happened during my surgery. But it might have happened while I was on Plavix. Or it might have happened some other time. I guess it’s true what people have been saying about me. I have a hole in my head (a missing tooth), and I’m brain-dead (stroke damage). It’s at least nice to know there’s something more than just bone between my ears.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Note: There are no pictures this week.

TV is light entertainment. Great TV provides light entertainment very well. The really great TV shows never last very long. An example was “The Flash”. It was one of the best shows ever. Visually, it had an intriguing juxtaposition of the latest in technology superimposed over an Art Deco background. It was a perfect genre piece (male hero, not always sure of himself; female scientist, good looking and brainy; really bad villains; a few hero side-kicks and hangers-on). The show was pure shtick, and they played it straight. There was a nice sense of self-depreciation and humor (like when the Flash did his mother’s dishes really fast so he could leave his mother’s house in good graces and go save the world). As good as it was, it didn’t last long.

Neither did Vegas. This show was really great TV. It had an authentic feel of post-war 50’s Vegas. It had bad bad guys and good good guys. Visually, they got every detail right — from the cars, to the desk lamps, to the fire extinguishers, and everything in between. When they made allusions to historical events, they got them right. Sadly, it looks like Vegas is cancelled. Bummer.

Fortunately, there are a couple of decent TV shows still on:

• Blue Bloods: Totally predictable schmaltz, done right.
• Good Wife: Whatever happens, you won’t see it coming and it will be slightly outrageous.
• The Mentalist: a nice off-beat take on cop shows. We haven’t seen any of these episoeds this year. 10 PM is too late for us.

Danita and I had a nice week eating out. We ate every breakfast out until Wednesday, when Danita had to go back to work. We ate every dinner out, including a SOCA party coming up tonight. Yesterday being our anniversary, we went a little upscale to the Candle Light Inn. We did their early dinner special. I had potato-leak soup, truffled meatloaf, and chocolate-peanut butter mouse for desert. It doesn’t get much better than that. The nicest thing about going to restaurants (besides Danita not having to cook and me not having to do dishes) is  that we can disagree on what we like to eat, and both eat something we like a lot.

I’ve gotten a couple of rides in, but not many. It’s been cool and rainy. They are forecasting snow for this evening. I’ve been looking at the possibility of riding the Blue Ridge Highway from Asheville, NC to home. That’s about 500 miles of very tough mountain riding. It turns out the riding is the easy part. Getting myself to Asheville, and finding places to stay that don’t cost $300/night with a 2-night minimum are not as easy. Also, I would have to reserve all the rooms ahead of time. Whatever schedule I decide on, it would be rain or shine riding. I’m not sold on this yet, but I haven’t given up either.

I spent most of today on computer stuff for CASA. They have laptops with detailed information about juveniles. Maryland has really tough juvenile privacy laws. Their laptop data needs to be encrypted. But they don’t have any significant IT support. I wanted to use Microsoft’s Encrypted File System, with everybody sharing one key. This way everybody in CASA could automatically share the encrypted files, but if they lost a laptop, the bad guys wouldn’t be able to get to the sensitive information. I spent hours searching and finding that this wasn’t possible. Microsoft designed the system so everybody has their own individual key, and that’s that. I finally got disgusted reading and just make it work, exactly like I wanted it to. That felt satisfying.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Note: there are no pictures this week.

Last week and this week are all about vacations. Last week we firmed up our plans for Alaska. We’ll be flying to Anchorage Sunday, September 1. We’ll get into Anchorage late and stay overnight. Monday we’ll drive to the Independence Gold Mine, then continue on to Talkeetna, near Denali State Park (the southern part of the park). We’ll spend the better part of a week staying at the Talkeetna Roadhouse Hostel (includes the FREE Talkeetna cultural package!) We’ll spend time soaking up the Talkeetna atmosphere, hiking, and hanging out around Denali Park. We even have a day set aside for the obligatory bus ride in Denali National Park. Saturday, we’ll drive back to Anchorage. We’ll spend a couple of days in Anchorage, staying at the Camai B & B. Then we’ll grab an overnight flight home Sunday evening, Sept 8. All the reservations are completed. We’ve started the outfitting stage by going to REI and getting Danita a good pair of boots. (I already have a good pair of boots.)

We’re doing Denali “on the cheap” by staying 3 hours south of the national park, using modest accommodations  and skipping the expensive “adventures” (such as dog sled ride and airplane fly-over in the fog). Of course, “cheap” is relative. Alaska is expensive. We understand it will be an experience we will never forget. Roughly translated, that means we’ll probably spend a week slogging around in rain and mud, then come back and brag about the wildlife and scenery. “Modest” accommodations is also relative. Like most hostels, the Talkeetna Roadhouse has gone upscale. We will be taking advantage of one of their private rooms, complete with a queen size bed and a sink!

This week is spring break for UMBC. Danita is off Monday – Wednesday. We decided to tale a mini-vacation this week, right here in beautiful suburban Columbia. Between SOCA parties, restaurant coupons,  and our upcoming anniversary, we have an entire week of dinner out planned — except Thursday. I’m confident we’ll find a way to eat dinner out Thursday also. If you have any good coupons for the Baltimore area, please rush them to us! We even have a few breakfast restaurant meals planned.

We started the week out with a bang-up breakfast at Mimi’s. We got a buy-one-get-one-free coupon for our anniversary, plus a second coupon good for two of their huge muffins, absolutely free. That alone covers breakfast for today and tomorrow. Sunday is the toughest day for breakfast coupons. It’s pretty easy to find breakfast coupons for week days. We already have a buy-one-get-one-free at Bob Evans. This afternoon, we are looking forward to hearing Saint-Saëns’ Thundering “Organ Symphony”. The concert is virtually sold out, as it should be. This is an astounding piece of music, and it’s one of those pieces for which a radio broadcast or CD simply can’t come close to duplicating the experience of a live performance. The Baltimore Symphony Hall was built to accommodate a first-class pipe organ. Unfortunately, they never got the funds for said organ. But the reviews indicate that the electronic organ they are bringing in for this concert is an incredible piece of engineering. They might not launch a tsunami, but I expect we’ll be feeling the floor vibrate.

Bike rides are proceeding at a stuttering pace. The weather is better this time of year, but it’s not good enough to be able to take long rides. I got a moderate ride in last week. For me, that’s a 20-mile ride to lunch, then a 20-mile ride home. The ride was quite unusual. Normally, when I ride, I don’t see any emergency vehicles. On this ride, I saw 8. the first 5 were all at different times, were all going to different locations, and all had their emergency sirens on. The next 2 had emergency flashers on. The last one was just tooling down the road. I got a second unusual ride in Friday. I went to my bike shop on a rainy Monday morning to get some things I needed for the upcoming season. They didn’t have the gloves I wanted in stock. They ordered them for me, with the delivery expected for Friday. Come Friday it was down right nice out — 55 degrees and sunny. Of course it wasn’t possible for me to drive to the bike store in weather like that. But I had never ridden my bike to the bike store. I knew I would have to cross 3 Interstates, a major highway, Amtrack tracks, and the Baltimore Light Rail. This would make finding a good bike route a formidable exercise. So I went to Google maps, clicked the “Bike” button, and asked for a route. The route looked pretty good without changes, so I plugged it into my bike GPS and took off. The ride turned out to be all back streets and paved trails. I crossed the Amtrack tracks near BWI airport using one of the paved trails. The trail took me to a building. I entered the building and walked my bike across the tracks on a pedestrian / passenger bridge, then took an elevator down on the other side of the tracks. My hat’s off to Google Maps!

Life is more fun when it includes new toys. We have a cordless phone with three handsets. (Yes, we still have old fashioned telephone jacks in our house. In my defense, they are part of our FIOS service, so they aren’t totally old-fashioned.) The main unit plugs into a phone jack in the living room. This drives all three cordless handsets — one in the living room, one upstairs, and one downstairs.We got these phones way back when we lived in Kingsville. They’ve served us well,  but last week they started dying. The upstairs handset started going wonky, overcharging the battery. Then the display stopped working. We could dial a number, but it was impossible to see the number we punched as we entered it. I went on-line and found that the phone is so old they don’t sell handsets for it any more. It was definitely time for a new toy! The new phones were quite easy to set up, they work great, and they have a cool new feature. In the past, if I wanted to talk with Danita, and I was upstairs and Danita was in the basement, I could use my handset to page Danita in the basement. We almost never used the feature, because the handsets were numbered, and we had to know which number handset we wanted to page. With the new phones, we can give the handsets names. I don’t know how this started, but we started calling the basement the “Garden Level”. (The house is too up-scale to have something so common as a basement. Besides, the basement is finished as nicely as the rest of the house, and is a walk-out with a huge door and window. So it doesn’t at all feel like a basement.) Shortly after that, the upstairs became the “Sky View Level”. I named the handsets “Garden”, “Main Level”, and “Sky View”; making the paging feature useful.

Well, that’s a lot of news for one week. I have to hurry up and finish this so I can get back to mini-vacationing. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Alaska Itinerary (click for larger view)

You may remember Danita and I were planning the ultimate Alaska vacation. We had quite a few difficulties coming up with our itinerary, but we finally did it. We would take the Alaska Ferries from port to port, seeing everything we wanted to see — all the interesting port towns plus Denali Park. The trip would be longer than we wanted (3 weeks instead of 2), but we would have the opportunity to see it all. The only problem is, it’s an impossible trip. We would end up toting suitcases through towns, looking for a way to keep all our stuff together while we await check-in time, or sometimes waiting for our transport to the next city. We took a close look, and we found the problem was the Alaska Ferry system. Not only would we be in a different hotel almost every night, but the ferries mostly traveled during the day. We would spend most of our time looking at water. The coup de grace was the end of the trip — 4 days on a decidedly non-luxuriant ship with almost nothing to do. We gave up.

Alaska Super Cruise

Casting about for alternatives, I accidentally found a dream cruise. It visits just about every port town we are interested in visiting. It was practically perfect. The cruise ship travels at night, giving us the entire day in town. We get to leave our suitcases on board. The only thing we take into town is our credit cards. The only problem was there is no opportunity to visit Denali. We decided to go with the cruise, with the idea that we can always come back to see Denali. That’s when Danita noticed that these cruises are available in 2014. That leaves us with no plan for vacation in 2013.

We are trying to decide what to do. We could do Denali “on the cheap” this year — a 1-week quickie to visit the interior of Alaska. Or we could do something else — for example, go to London. There are several things we won’t do. We won’t go to Mexico. (It’s too dangerous for Gringos these days.) We won’t go to Italy or Greece. (The economic downturn has hit these countries hard, casting a pall on tourism.) Whatever we do, we have to decide pretty soon.

Other than that, my biggest problem is our deck. The squirrels finally ate all our bird food. I decided it’s close enough to spring time. They are responsible for feeding themselves. As soon as I clean the bird droppings, that should be taken care of that for the year. The other issue with the deck is caused by my own error. We were supposed to get snow last week — 4 to 12 inches of it. As it happened, the temperature was a couple of degrees warmer than expected. That was enough to give us an inch of slush, followed by rain. I decided to push the slush off the deck. It was like pushing the world’s largest slushie off the deck. The error was I used a shovel to do it. That was a bad idea because it scraped the stain. I wasn’t planning to repaint the deck until next year.

Other than the deck, I’m having a better time these days. The clubhouse projects are completed. All my work at Habitat is suspended waiting for some kind of a decision meeting. I made some significant progress at CASA. The weather turned beautiful the last few days and I’ve been on the road. It feels good.

Poor Danita isn’t having quite as good a time of it all. UMBC is interviewing for a new VP of Research. This person will be her new boss, so she has a significant input to the selection. Unfortunately, the interviews are in the late afternoon, precluding her attending exercise classes. She’s experiencing a lot of pressure at work. She’s understandably stressed about helping her Dad sort through all of Leona’s stuff. And, of course, we’re trying to figure out what to do about our vacation.

I’m confident we’ll get through it all. I hope this finds you doing well.