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.

There are two pics this week.

Adirondack Park Loop

Last week I wrote about the cool and rainy weather. This week we’ve had the air conditioning on almost all week. Highs are in the 90s and it is quite humid. This is the earliest I can remember turning on the AC. Last year, we didn’t turn it on until August. But the bike riding was good. I did my first 100 KM ride. (Actually, it was 100.95 KM, but who’s counting?) I usually cross this milestone much earlier in the year, but weather, travel, and lack of urgency all contributed to more relaxed riding this spring. I don’t think I could do another 1,000 mile bike tour. But it’s just possible I’ll be able to do a 350 mile “bike & hike” in the Adirondacks in September. I’m looking at a loop route that goes up the east side of the park and comes down the center.

I have planned stops for all my bike rides. The “easy 100K” I rode yesterday includes a food stop at a place that used to be a gas station. They still have the pumps, but they don’t sell gas. There’s no trouble remembering where the place is — one can smell the grease a mile away. I was riding early to get home before a possible T-storm in the afternoon. In the past, the place has not been crowded. Yesterday I found out that 10 AM on a Saturday morning is prime breakfast time. The most popular thing ordered was a hamburger with a fried egg on top. They have hispanic women doing the cooking. One woman will sometimes be working hard and simultaneously conducting two different conversations in two different languages. But you have to listen closely to catch the English, because it sounds a lot like Spanish if you’re not paying attention. These ladies are big, and they like putting a lot of meat on a sandwich. I had a ham and cheese, and was the only person who ordered something that wasn’t grilled. It’s good food, but I take mine outside and sit on the curb to eat. The inside has grease everywhere.

Toy Bird

China is filled with cheap things to buy. One of them is toy birds that fly by flapping their wings. These are a variation of the balsa wood planes with rubber-band propellers. They’re really cool, really cheap, and look like a lot of fun. I bought 3 for about $5. My neighbor watches their two young grandsons everyday. I gave them one of the birds. They gave it back because they couldn’t figure out how to assemble it. That started “the challenge”. I would work on it for a while, then go do something else. After a couple of weeks, I had it pretty much figured out. But I had ruined the bird with my mistakes. The second bird had a poorly formed molded plastic piece. I successfully built the third bird. You can see it here, being held by granddad with the older grandson standing behind. They suggested starting flights with “medium power” (20 turns), so that’s what we did. The bird fluttered its wings as it slowly descended to a soft landing, which was pretty successful. But when we went to pick it up, we found the tail had completely separated from the frame, and the main wing had started separating from the frame. So much form 3M’s “strongest and best glue”. (Which, by the way, cost twice as much as the 3 birds.) But I had a lot of fun playing with it.

We saw lots of movies this week. I got “7 Years in Tibet” with Brad Pitt from the library, so we could play “I was there.” We had a neighborhood party yesterday. Afterwards, our movie hound showed Adam Sandler’s “The Cobbler”. It was a good movie, perhaps the only good movie Adam Sandler stared in. After Church Sunday morning we went down to College Park to take Mark out to breakfast. Then we saw the current box-office favorite, “Spy”. It’s the first funny spy spoof ever made. And, it’s a very, very funny movie.

Last year the spring on our garage door broke. I got Danita’s car out of the garage, but I dropped the door when trying to put it back down. The bottom panel got wrinkled a little bit. All that would probably have been fine, but several of our neighbors have garage doors damaged so badly that they can’t possibly be opened. The association maintenance committee got on a tare, and we got caught up in the hoopla. Two garage door companies said there’s nothing wrong with the door, but that makes no difference to the association. Danita and I put in a request to install garage doors with windows. If that’s approved, we’ll upgrade the doors. Otherwise, I’ll replace the panel.One thing’s for sure. It will be months before the association rules on our request. That bent panel is sure to be bothering some of my neighbors all summer long.

Danita had a 3/4 crown Thursday. Her mouth still feels “different”, but she’s already feeling better. It’s amazing the dentist can do work like this done in one visit.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are no pictures this week.

Last week was rainy and cool (around 60). It was no weather for riding. So I spent my time looking at options for the SOCA web site. I made great progress. I think I’ll be ready to make recommendations after one more phone call. Besides that, I finished all but the last presentation of “inside your router”, which will be Wednesday evening.

One of the restaurants we like is starting a weekend brunch. They offered 50% off. We don’t normally go out to eat on Saturday, but we went for lunch. After lunch we watched “San Andreas” in 3-D. Danita is an aficionado of disaster movies. This wasn’t a candidate for best ever, but it was a darned good disaster movie. We had a great time. Saturday evening we went up to Ed and Lynne’s and showed off our China pictures. Today we had our last BSO concert of the year.

The weather is looking better for riding this week. In the mean time, I hope everybody is doing well.

There are no pictures this week.

Last week was rainy and cool (around 60). It was no weather for riding. So I spent my time looking at options for the SOCA web site. I made great progress. I think I’ll be ready to make recommendations after one more phone call. Besides that, I finished all but the last presentation of “inside your router”, which will be Wednesday evening.

One of the restaurants we like is starting a weekend brunch. They offered 50% off. We don’t normally go out to eat on Saturday, but we went for lunch. After lunch we watched “San Andreas” in 3-D. Danita is an aficionado of disaster movies. This wasn’t a candidate for best ever, but it was a darned good disaster movie. We had a great time. Saturday evening we went up to Ed and Lynne’s and showed off our China pictures. Today we had our last BSO concert of the year.

The weather is looking better for riding this week. In the mean time, I hope everybody is doing well.

There are no pics this week.

As some of you know, Glen was in the hospital for several days. He had an infection and needed I-V antibiotics. The other person in the hospital was Tony Sochurek. He had blood clots in his lungs. It was quite a surprise. We saw him at Circle Sunday and he was doing great. Tuesday he didn’t feel well. Wednesday he was in the hospital. Fortunately, both are doing well.

We had such a good time and learned so much on our China trip that we decided to do it again. We’ve signed up for a trip to Greece with Road Scholar. We’ll be traveling April 25 – May 11. The focus is on ancient Greece and Turkey (400 BCE – 500 CE).

I’ve given the first two sessions of my “Inside your router” seminar. It’s gone very well. I have about 20 residents involved. There’s one more session next Thursday (June 4). I tried writing the third presentation a week ago. But after the second session, I saw that what I wrote isn’t going to work, and I rewrote it. I’m holding identical evening sessions the following Wednesday, so the last presentation is June 10.

Almost half my bike rides go East, through Ellicott City. It’s good riding with hills, plenty of interesting routes, and of course lots of places for a lunch or snack. All of these rides go down Ilchester Rd, which is also the road our church is on. I mention this because they’re closing Ilchester Rd June 8, and it will remain closed for most of 2015. They’re quite serious about this. No traffic of any kind, 24 x 7. There are other roads, but Ilchester is the best. And with Ilchester closed, there will be that much more traffic on the alternates.

Bummer.

We have a quiet weekend. The only activity is a church picnic on Sunday. They’re forecasting thunderstorms, so this might be an “interesting” event. We volunteered to help setup. I’m wondering how many times we’ll end up rearranging tables between inside and outside venues.

I did a home project this week. We have a walk-in shower that uses a fiberglass floor pan and has tiled walls. The crack between the floor pan and the walls is caulked. The caulk was getting grody. I found a “dummies” article on re-caulking the shower and decided I could that. Sometimes home projects come out OK, but certainly not professional. This time things turned out pretty good. My caulk job isn’t quite up to the professional level, but it looks pretty good. Of course, it took me a week to do what a pro would have done in a few hours. But I don’t have to admit that to anybody.

I went to a SOCA neighborhood IT meeting Friday and picked up a new project. This time, I don’t mind the project. We have a web site. It’s works well for the community, but it’s awkward to maintain. It was started by Mike, one of our residents, and he still owns the site. It’s not possible to have anybody help Mike keep it updated, because the software is so primitive. We’re looking for an alternative that SOCA can own and will be easier to maintain. Mike and I are taking the lead. It should be a fun project, but there will be a lot of drudge work when we actually start rebuilding our site with whatever product we select. If anybody knows of a company that has a good product for hosting non-profit websites, please let me know.

That’s it for this week. I hope Glen continues his recovery and everybody else is healthy.

There are no pics this week.

We’re firmly in the swing of things back home. Last weekend, we had a neighborhood party and a BSO concert. This weekend, we had Circle and the “Parkton Open” at Ed’s. Today is a holiday, and we’re going to use it mostly relaxing. I have Men’s club this morning. (We generally solve the world’s problems. By the next week, there’s a hole new set and we have to meet again.) I’ll follow that with a ride. I’m building up, gradually making my rides longer. I’m considering a bike trip this fall. Danita will spend some time at the pool.

I started a neighborhood router workshop. I’m running two sets of sessions — one during the day and a second set in the evening. The first session described the basics of Internet Protocol. The second, which I will do this week, goes into the router settings. It shows how to see what’s connected and how to make basic settings. After that, we’ll go over some “advanced” topics. The first session went pretty well.

Both Danita and I saw the dentist last week. By coincidence, we both had Wednesday morning appointments. The world is definitely not fair. I went in as Danita was coming out. As usual, Danita got a great checkup. As usual, I was offered additional tips for cleaning my teeth better. They suggested I try using a sonic toothbrush. I have it, and it’s certainly different. I’m supposed to divide my mouth into 4 quadrants, brushing each as indicated by beeps emitted by the brush. So far, it mostly makes a fair-sized mess.

I’m off to solve the world’s problems. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

There are pics today. We’re home, safe and sound.

Window Washers Get a Board to Sit On

The first group left for the airport at 4:30 yesterday morning. At 5 PM, ours is the last flight. Four of us took the last van, leaving the hotel at 1 PM. Since we had some time to kill, we went for a walk in Daning-Lingshi Park. When we got outside the hotel, we found a group of window washers. Each washer gets one board to use as a seat. It looks precarious, but the window washers were hard at work and chatting away. As usual, we found musicians, singers, exercisers, and people just walking around in the park. There are several pics below.

Daning Park

Daning Park

Daning Park

Chenglish: “A Landscape In Your Eyes”

Birders

Daning Park

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