I am writing this on Monday, 10/13. There are lots of pics at the end. As always, you can click on the pictures to make them bigger.

It was a strange trip to NC. We arrived Thursday afternoon. Thursday and Friday, Elizabeth was still recovering from a bug. By Saturday, Elizabeth was better but Bryon was sick. Jul got sick late Saturday. Danita was sick for the drive home Monday. We did simple adventures, and we didn’t always take both children. Fortunately, Danita brought some simple craft projects and several children’s movies on DVD that saved the day.

Friday school was closed. Jul and Pat were at work, and we were minding the store. I spent some time with B in the back yard while Jul took E to the grocery store. After lunch, we went to a park and took a short walk.

Saturday we took E to a playground.

Sunday it was cool and rainy. We took both kids to a super mall. We started at Bass Outdoor Store, looking at all the stuffed animals, animal tracks in the floor, aquarium, and more. Then we walked the mall, rode the carossell, had ice cream, and spent some time at the Lego store play area.

The drive down and the drive home were uneventful.

Bryon on the back yard swing

More swinging

The back yard high wire act

Back yard nature study

Climbing the back yard tree

Still climbing, still with no help

Got there (and he got down, too)

At the Park – can you see the crane?

Doing paper work at home

E on the swing at the playground

E Climbing

E Climbing

What goes up must go down

Quiet Time

B took this at the Bass aquarium. You can see his thumb and my reflection — and even a fish

B, me, and E on the Carossell

At Lego Land

I am writing this on Saturday, October 4. There are a couple of pics.

A is for Australian Alligator

It wasn’t perfect, but it was a very nice week. Sunday, the garage door spring broke. These things always happen on Sunday, when there is no hope of getting help. I was able to get Danita’s car out of the garage, but when I went to close the door it got away from me. Now we have a slightly dented door. Fortunately, the car was *not* under the door at the time. The garage door man came on Tuesday at the appointed time. We have two doors. I figured the spring on the other door would fail pretty soon, so I had him replace both springs.

Anemone

We had a practically perfect evening Wednesday. To start the evening off, I met Danita at work and we went to a local bar for reuben sandwiches. They were quite good, and they certainly hit the spot. But there’s a Friendly’s Ice Cream place right down the street, so after we finished our sandwiches, we got a couple of Sundaes. Then we went to the National Aquarium. There was a nice crowd there. Everybody was having a good time. It was a friendly, exciting, good-time vibe. At the same time, the exhibits weren’t crowded. We had plenty of opportunity to see everything we wanted and even snap a couple of quick pics.

Fish

Friday I went with a couple of our neighbors to the Western MD Rail Road Trail. There’s a tourist train that runs between Cumberland and Frostburg. Next to the train is a very nice biking trail. (Actually, the trail comes all the way from Pittsburgh, and joins up in Cumberland with the C & O Tow Path to go all the way to Georgetown.) We rode our bicycles 15 miles from Frostburg to Cumberland, which is a down-hill ride. The fall foliage was much in evidence. The path is in excellent condition. The weather was cloudy but nice. It was a beautiful ride, with several “wow” moments where we would come around the bend and be presented with a spectacular view. The ride was a little disorganized, and we were racing storms moving in from the West, so we ended up riding pretty much straight through, then having lunch about 2. It didn’t start raining until we started driving home. I had a great time, but I probably won’t to do this trip again. When I analyzed the day, I found I spent:

5 hours SOMB (Sitting On My Butt) driving.
2 hours SOMB eating (including all three meals)
1.5 hours SOMB coasting downhill (there’s not much exercise in that)
$50 for gas and lunch (but I did get free parking, thanks to a busted parking lot gate)
After spending all day SOMB, Danita and I went downstairs and watched TV

Western MD RR Trail

That’s a lot of stuff for a short bike ride. And not a very healthful day to boot. It turned out I was quite lucky. The bike shop didn’t get my gear hub locked in correctly. It worked fine for a few rides I did earlier this week, plus 13 of the 15 miles of the trail ride. Fortunately, I realized what was wrong right away, and was able to coast downhill to the car without stopping. Imagine how embarrassing for me, the neighborhood bicycle king, to be the only person who had to stop and effect a bicycle repair on such a short and easy trip. Once I got home, I was able to fix the bike in a few minutes.

It looks like we will attend fewer neighborhood parties. We used to have 2 or 3 parties a month: one free “happy hour”, one $10 dinner, and often one $10 entertainment with deserts. But they’re running out of money in the entertainment fund, and they’ve doubled the price of the dinners. The dinners are a good time and the food is decent. But we don’t think they’re worth $40 for the two of us. I’m thinking we’ll find other things to do.

Next week promises to be quite exciting. We start out Sunday with a Church turkey dinner at the parish we are visiting. Monday is a retirement planning seminar and “free” dinner. Thursday we are driving to NC to visit the Reeds. We will drive back Monday, so my weekly blog will be a little late. But there just might be some cool grand-kid pics!

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

This is a test post of my blog, to see whether the Email is fixed. You do not have to respond.

I am writing this on Saturday, 9/27. There are no pics.

We met with the financial planner Wednesday. My goodness it was an experience. We reviewed our investments, etc. Discussed our goals. The financial planner will put everything into his computer program and we will review his suggestions in a few weeks. I’m not sure why, but we got quite — I’m not sure what. It wasn’t excited. It wasn’t worked up. It was something between those two, I guess. We ended up having an unplanned dinner out. Then we got TV snacks and a bottle of red wine. We still had our planned dinner out Thursday. And we were close to going out again Friday. I think we’re getting back close to normal.

We had some nice but cool weather, followed by a day of cold rain. Today it was extremely nice — 80 and sunny. We went to another section of the Patuxent Wildlife Refuge and had a wonderful hike in a wooded area. This time, we had to sign a form in triplicate. One copy stayed in the office, one went on the dash board of our car, and one stayed with us. We were required to return our two copies when we got back. They were talking about unexploded ordinance from when the area was part of a military base. We decided to take their advice and stay on the trail. ;-) After our walk, we had lunch at a local restaurant. We’ll do our normal Church and Sunday breakfast out tomorrow.

We’ve been attending different churches. We haven’t really fitted into St. Louis. We visited a parish that uses one of the shared religious centers here in Columbia for a few weeks. Now we’re trying another parish near by.

While we were having that cool but nice weather, then the rainy cool and not so nice weather, I was being reminded of how cold I felt most of last winter. We heat our house to 68 in the winter. It’s from a combination of wanting to be green and being cheap. Every time I settled down to read, or play with the computer, or do some other sedentary activity, I got quite cold. I understand the importance of being active, but I don’t plan to be active all the time. I decided what I need is a heavy, warm sweater. The only thing I can find in the stores is fashionable light-weight sweaters, so I ordered one. It came in today. It looks like it’s going to be a big help. What I know for sure is that it is *very* warm if worn when it’s 80 degrees.

I continue to be surprised by the things I should know but don’t. I was reading Ken Follett’s middle book in his “Century” series. This book starts just as Hitler is taking power in Germany. I read about the Battle of Cable Street. This took place in London on October 4, 1936. Fascist “Black Shirts” wanted to have a march through London’s East Side. The East Side is where the poorer people lived, including most of the Jews. Many people in the Black Shirts were from the upper-class. People from the East Side plus several leftist organizations opposed the march by barricading Cable Street. The London Police tried to clear the street — including horse mounted police beating British citizens with sticks. I had never heard of this before. After I read Follett’s fictionalized account, I started searching the internet. It’s easy to find news videos of the riot and endless summaries and analysis. What surprised me most was the disagreement of precisely who participated, and what the after affects were. I would read an analysis that said “clearly, this was the result”. Then I would read “clearly, that was the result.” I was almost left wondering if people were talking about the same event.

I hope next week will be a little less exciting. And I hope this finds everybody doing well. And it would be nice if my server actually sends the Emails this week. I guess we’ll see soon enough.

I am writing this on Sunday, 9/21. There are no pics this week.

It feels like lots of things happen, but by the end of the week, I have a hard time remembering them all. And the happenings I remember don’t necessarily turn themselves into a good story.

I got my bike back late Tuesday. It was a good week weather-wise, so having the bike lent itself to many fine hours on the road. It’s nice to have convenient access to a bike shop that lets me skip most of the uncertainty of how to effect repairs, and the grime of all that oil and dirt, and the frustration of not knowing how to put things together mechanically.

Danita and I met with a financial planner who is available through UMBC and TIAA-CREF (they run her retirement savings plan). The adviser makes a lot of sense. We’ve scheduled a meeting with another person from their organization to review our investments and get recommendations of how we might change them to better match our retirement needs. I must admit I’m approaching this with some caution and a little skepticism. But the service has no up-front fees, so we would be foolish not to at least listen to what they have to say. Retirement planners talk about the next 30 years. Certainly there are people who live that long. Looking back to what things were like 30 years ago and seeing the differences between then and now, one can certainly find a lot to think about. We’ll see where this goes.

Here’s a computer tip I came across. Like everybody else, I read a lot of documents in Adobe Reader (.pdf) format. I always felt that Adobe Reader was a large program that offers few features. This has been more true with recent releases, which move more and more features out of the free program and into paid cloud services. I was reading a computer security blog and stumbled onto an excellent solution — Foxit Reader. Don’t worry about the strange name. Foxit has an incredibly large set of features in their free reader. Go to  http://www.foxitsoftware.com/Secure_PDF_Reader/.
Sad but true, one has to be very careful of searching for popular programs and clicking the link at the top of the search results. Many companies make a living by tricking users into downloading junk onto their computers. That’s why I included the link to this program in my blog.

I had a nice experience this week. Our neighborhood got a new security camera DVR. I wanted to set it up so that when community board members we called upon to review the security video, they could do it from their homes. That was easy enough, but the problem was that with our new system, allowing access to video over the internet also allowed access to administration over the internet. (Administration allows a person to delete video, turn recording off, and in general be a genuinely bad person.) The system is *supposed* to allow us to permit access to video from anywhere while limiting administration to only in the office, but I couldn’t make it work. I called the service person and learned that this was a known bug in the system. Then I was astonished to learn that most of his customers weren’t bothered by this. Their solution was to allow easy access to administration from anywhere. I guess if I wanted to lead a life of crime, I could have an easy time of it. I called the manufacturer and found that a firmware upgrade would solve the problem. I installed the firmware upgrade and found that I could block administration over the internet, but I couldn’t make it work in the office. That wasn’t a very acceptable answer. I tried several things, all of them unsuccessful. I gave up. Two days later, I knew why it wasn’t working. The idea just popped into my head, fully formed. I went into the office and my idea worked perfectly. It’s brain magic — I have no idea where my idea came from. When I was working as an engineer, I relied on brain magic to help me with all kinds of problems all the time. Now that I’m retired, I don’t have much need of brain magic. It was gratifying to find that my brain magic hasn’t disappeared (yet).

Ken Follett got a lot of publicity recently for completing his “Century” trilogy. I thought it would be interesting to read the first two books in the series while waiting for my turn to get his new book. I went to the Howard County Library web site and found that I wasn’t the only person in the county who had this idea. But I was astounded to find that if I was willing to read the second book first, I could start immediately. So I put in my request. The book is waiting for me to pick it up. Amazing!

We had some entertainment this week. We went to a neighborhood party Saturday. The music was too loud, so we left early. The BSO season has started. We attended our first concert of the year this afternoon. Because it was the first concert of the series, they started with a very nice symphonic transcription of the national anthem. We heard Beethoven’s violin concerto and Mahler’s 4th symphony. The Beethoven was quite good. I’m still working on my appreciation of Mahler, but the piece had a gong. How bad can it be when they play the gong? After the symphony, we went out to a restaurant that was OK, but we probably won’t bother going back.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I am writing this on Monday, 9/15. There are no pics this week.

It was a quiet week. We had a neighborhood party Friday. I broke my glasses. My backup glasses don’t work as well. I received the part needed to fix my bicycle. I decided to take the part and my bike to the bike shop. I expect to get it back in working order in a day or so.

The week wasn’t entirely without interest. We booked our China vacation. We will be traveling April 23 – May 13, 2015. I tried to sign up on-line. I found I could sign myself up, and I could sign Danita up, but there was not an obvious way to sign us both up. It felt so wrong to be filling out information about roommate preferences to get the “double booking” price. I ended up calling them this morning. Sometimes it pays to use the phone. There is more flexibility in travel than the internet site indicated. Now we have to finalize flights, apply for our visas, etc. Trip details will be worked out over the next several weeks. Now that I’m paying more attention about news from China, I realized that China is blocking access to Google. I suppose that means that only Danita will have the ability to read her Email, should we be so fortunate as to have internet access. This might be quite an adventure.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I am writing this on Sunday, 9/7. There are no pics.

My bike book is done! It is available on all major E-book outlets, and is also available in paperback from Amazon and a few other outlets. Don’t worry about trying to find it. You will all be receiving a paperback copy when my order comes in. It’s my way of celebrating the completion of the project.

I had a nice experience with the book cover. They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but that’s exactly what everybody does. I have no artistic talent. But it turns out there are a large number of people who make book covers available through the web. Most self-published books are E-books, and most E-books are junk fiction. By far the largest category is romance novels for the ladies, followed by fantasy for the teens, and then junk guy stories (Samurai / Private Detective / Soldier of Fortune stuff). All the artists have sample work on their sites, but it’s hard to judge how they would do on a bike book from the samples. I picked a lady who had reasonable prices and seemed to have a good attitude. It worked out very well. I ended up getting it for a 3-year old laptop with a broken cooling fan plus 47 cents, thanks to E-bay. I simply sold the computer, left the proceeds in my Pay Pal account, then used the Pay Pal account to pay the artist. Very slick.

Last week we finally got our typical summer weather — 90 degrees and 90% RH. Not only was it hot during the day, it didn’t cool down much at night. We ran the AC all week. But we had a nice cool front come through late yesterday. We enjoyed a dramatic thunderstorm from the shelter of our under-deck porch. It was the first really good thunderstorm we had since the deck was re-done, and we enjoyed watching the storm very much. (We had a heavy rain day, which I wrote about earlier, but there was no thunder or lightening.) Today the AC is off and the windows are open. The weather is so nice today, we went out to play a round of mini-golf at the Columbia Sports Center.

I was out on my bike Wednesday for a short ride when all of a sudden, I couldn’t change gears. I had noticed a part was a little loose. I couldn’t tighten it, but I figured it would hold out until winter. I was wrong. I’ve ordered a replacement part, but I’m not sure when it will be in. I have my old backup bike, but I haven’t taken very good care of it. The cables are corroded, and I don’t want to ride it too far from home, in case a critical cable breaks and I have to walk it home.

In addition to the bike, my method of making the rabbits go someplace else didn’t work. I’ve put 4 bags of gravel in the ground, sprayed copious quantities of rabbit repellent, and dumped over a can of “Critter Ridder” peppers on the ground. They just keep on digging more holes to get to their warren. We’re coming up on another breading season (they have 3 or 4 a year), so I want to do something pretty quickly. Ferrets can be quite effective, but I rejected that option because I have no use for the ferrets once the rabbits are gone. Also, the ferrets only get the rabbits out of the ground. You still have to get rid of them. Cats like to hunt rabbits, but our neighborhood would not appreciate the type of feral barn cats that like to hunt. It’s supposed to be easy and cheap to trap them, but we have plenty of rabbits all over Columbia. There’s no place to relocate them. So I decided to call professionals in and ask them for the “final solution”. We’ll see what they say.

My most recent project is a Raspberry Pi computer. This is a little (2.5″ x 3.5″) circuit board computer that costs about $35. (You can find pictures very easily of you search for “Raspberry Pi” on the web.) The computer is amazingly capable, and there’s a very large DIY (Do It Yourself) community doing all kinds of things with it. They have a way to play videos on it. You connect it to the Internet, then plug it into your TV. Voila, you can play videos from the World Wide Web. I worked on this for a surprisingly long time, but I finally got it working. I was surprised that it does an excellent job of playing web site videos such as You-Tube. Unfortunately, I also found that video content doesn’t include Amazon streaming movies or CBS.com streaming TV shows. At least, not legally. I wasn’t surprised at the limitation.

The other thing I want to try with my tiny computer board is wireless remote control. There are a wide range of home automation and home security products. I am interested in devices using the Z-Wave protocol. They have a plug-in board that lets the Raspberry Pi talk to Z-Wave devices. Because the devices are mostly available for people buying very expensive systems, it’s hard to find the simple (and inexpensive) kinds of devices I am interested in. But after spending an entire day, I found a reasonably priced device that lets me detect a push-button switch. The add-on board and the switch device should be in Tuesday. Then I’ll start playing around with Z-Wave stacks, javascript, python, and endless other strangely named geek stuff that I don’t already know how to do. It should keep me busy for a good long time.

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

I am writing this on Sunday, August 31. There are several pics.

Deer

After the contractor finished working on our deck, the new deck looked great. And the porch below the deck looked rather ragged by comparison. At least I was able to predict the outcome this time. I went to buy the same paint I used last time I painted the porch, only to find they don’t sell that paint any more. So I went to Sherwin-Williams and got a paint that would work well. It took the better part of Monday to get it done. At the end of the day, I had unwittingly worn a pretty good sore spot in my right knee, which is still covered by an ugly looking scab. And the porch still feels tacky when we walk on it. I have no idea how long it will be before the paint is truly dry. But it must look pretty good. It attracted another deer.

Rabbit Den

That isn’t the only wildlife we’ve been attracting. I noticed a hole in the ground near our driveway. A little investigation revealed a sizable rabbit den. The pests have been literally undermining our driveway. I decided to fill the holes with pea gravel and finish it off with a generous layer of rabbit repellent. So far, I’ve put down 3 bags of pea gravel. The holes aren’t filled yet. I feel like Elmer Fudd. Wascally wabbits! (Click the triangle below for a short trip down memory lane.)

Patuxent Refuge

Last week was more delightful weather, with highs in the 80s and low humidity. Our normal hot, humid summer weather rolled in today. We took advantage of the good weather to finish our Howard County walks. We were rewarded with another Wegman’s coupon and 2 more water bottles. Yesterday we visited the Patuxent Wildlife Refuge. They have over 10,000 acres of undeveloped land, much of it wetlands and small lakes; mostly along the Patuxent River. It’s a beautiful area, and we enjoyed walking around one of the trails. We saw a small frog on the trail. You can see it below in the lower right corner, but you have to look closely. We had an easier time, because we could see it move.

Here’s a small frog we saw at Pax Refuge (lower right corner).

This morning, we visited a church in Baltimore then took Mark out to breakfast. We drove from JHU Homewood campus, in the center of Baltimore, down to the Blue Moon Cafe near the harbor. There was a huge crowd waiting to get into the cafe, so we drove back up to the Homewood area and got breakfast at one of the local cafes. Mark worked pretty hard teaching the CTY class that finished recently. He’s trying to figure out whether he wants to stay at Hopkins or transfer to College Park. Things should get settled for him pretty soon.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I am writing this on Saturday, 8/23. There is one pic.

After a week of really nice weather, we had a week of continuous high humidity and rain. Temperatures weren’t that hot, with highs below 90. But it was either raining or threatening rain all week. To air out the house, we open the doors to the deck. We can’t do that when it rains, because it’s so easy for rain to soak the floor. After several days of this, I got tired of the humidity and turned on the A/C. The rain should end tonight. Then we’ll be able to turn the A/C off and open the house.

Life sure is easy these days. Our toaster died this morning. I went upstairs and turned on the computer. Danita chose “2 slice” over “4 slice”, and “silver” over “red” or “black”. I clicked the button, and the toaster will arrive on our doorstep no later than Tuesday. No sales tax, no shipping, huge selection, and a price that’s competitive with any store in town. How did we ever get by back in the day?

School’s starting. Danita had 4 days of meetings this week. UMBC has a 2-day retreat at the beginning of each school year. Danita has worked herself into a position of status and respect, and has been invited for the last several years. It’s nice to be invited, but it took up much of Tuesday and all of Wednesday. Thursday was the UMBC opening meeting. Friday was interviews for a new position on campus. When UMBC wants to hire a new professional, they form a search committee. As a highly respected member of the UMBC community, Danita is often invited to be on the committee. Interviews for this position took most of her day Friday. She’s going to work Monday, her desk piled high with work, and she didn’t even get a vacation! Just to show how much influence Danita has at UMBC, she helped hire all but one of the people on this search committee.

Off To School

“Back to School” even impacted me this year. I took a ride Friday and met three high school BFFs who were leaving to attend college in two days. They were out for a little last-minute fun together, and asked me to take their picture. I was surprised to find they had a Polaroid camera. I thought the technology was dead. But here I was, taking this picture while they thought they had to explain this rad new technology for me. Polaroids are both the same and different than they were back in the day. The camera is much smaller and support lots of LED lights. But it’s still dead-simple to take a pic. Look through the little square hole and push a button. The film ejects and starts developing. Polaroid pictures are a lot smaller than they used to be. They’re a little larger than the wallet size snapshots we got from our school photos as kids.

I was quite impressed by these young ladies. They were going to 3 different colleges to study 3 different areas of technology — mechanical engineering, computer science, and computer engineering. The young lady on the right is attending UMBC. Into hands such as these we place our future. I must have appeared quite old to these young people. They kept calling me “sir”, and were surprised to find that I had my phone with me, and knew how to use it to take a picture.

It’s a quiet week. Bud’s coming over for dinner and we’re going to watch a DVD somebody lent him. We have a neighborhood party tomorrow.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I am writing this on Sunday, Aug 17. There is one picture.

This week’s theme is travel. We spent the week working on two trips. The first is a conference Danita will attend in Coronado, an island right outside San Diego. I’m tagging along. The trip will be Oct 19 – 25. The conference reserved rooms in several hotels, all upper-class resorts. The kind where it’s such a bargain to get a room for $300/night that nobody should mind paying the extra $50/night fee that adds such amenities as parking and WiFi. (But not breakfast. The brunch is about $30/person plus tip and tax.) UMBC is paying for the conference days, but we’re paying for the extra days. And even if UMBC were picking up the entire tab, I would have trouble sleeping comfortably in a bed that costs that much. The issue was resolved when Danita found all the conference rooms were already taken. We got a room in a Best Western hotel about a mile away. It’s close enough that if I get hung up in San Diego one day, Danita can easily walk to the hotel from the conference. As a bonus, UMBC will pay for the rental car on conference days. Both we and UMBC will save significantly, compared to what we would have paid for an official conference room. And the breakfast, parking, and WiFi are free.

The other travel we’ve been working on is next year’s vacation. I’ve long wanted to visit Greece. Danita is willing, but she only wants to go once. She advised me to make a list of all the things I want to see while we are there. I did. Key items on the list are at the end of this post. We found a cruise that covers all but one the important locations on my list. Then we found that they are running that cruise this year, but not next year. No other cruise or tour we can find comes close. We are not willing to do a “roll your own” trip to Greece because we think English is not very well known in Greece, and there’s not much chance we can figure things out by recognizing a few key words of Greek. So we decided to put Greece on hold for a year and go to China instead. For China, we looked at the tours and picked the one we like best. It turns out there’s not really all that much choice. The core of all China tours is pretty much the same. Once outside the major cities, there’s not a lot of choice of accommodations and restaurants. The tour we’ve pretty much settled on includes a visit to Tibet. I like that because not many people can start a sentence with “When I was in Tibet …”. Helpfully, the hotel in Tibet sells oxygen for those who need it. The tour we picked out has several possible dates. The next step is for Danita to talk with her boss about when we will be gone. Next year is an important year for Danita because UMBC will apply for an extension of their research contract with NASA. Danita has a pretty good idea of what’s required to write the proposal, but this is a big enough issue that she should get approval from her boss first.

Deer – taken from our back porch yesterday

That’s plenty of excitement, but wait — there’s more! My body was advising me to make major adjustments to my bike riding. Last week I felt better and started building back up. I am pleased with my progress. We had a neighborhood crab feast yesterday. I’m not big on crabs, and the party was kind of expensive. Danita went to the crab feast and I got a hamburger. We enjoyed very unusual weather for August. We had a huge amount of rain Tuesday — over 6″ in one day. This was a record for that day of the year. The most amazing thing was that as late as Monday afternoon, the forecast was for 1 to 2 inches. The drainage system in our neighborhood held up pretty well. So far as I know, nobody got flooded out, although most everybody’s sump pump got a good workout that day. I spent most of Tuesday sitting on the porch under our recently renovated deck, totally dry and enjoying the view. Other than Tuesday, it was cool, sunny, and dry all week. It was so cool that I had to wear a sweatshirt in the mornings and didn’t go barefoot until after lunch. We also completed several of our walks. We’re just one walk away from finishing the set.

That’s certainly a lot of excitement for one week. I hope this finds everybody doing well. My “Greek list” is below.

Things to see while visiting Greece

Athens, the Parthenon, and the Parthenon Museum. This is pretty obvious, be there are tours that do not include Athens, or do not give it enough time.

Constantinople (also called Istanbul). Capital city of the Eastern Roman Empire (also called Byzantium), which lasted for 1100 years. Hagia Sophia, built by Justinian 1400 years ago, has a dome that was the largest in the world for 1000 years. Also has the Topkapi Palace and Hippodrome.  Believe it or not, there are tours that skip Constantinople entirely. One needs at least three days to see this city.

Delos is one of the most important mythological, historical and archaeological sites in Greece. 1000 years before Greek mythology, Delos was the birthplace of Apollo.

Rethimnon, Crete contains an amazing restoration of an important palace. While modern archaeologists heartily condemn the restoration, it is the only site where one can walk around and get a true feel of what the palace was like and how it functioned.

Volos contains the famous Byzantine monasteries built atop the rock towers of Meteora. These monasteries were an essential part of the Eastern Christian Church, and would be well worth visiting even without the amazing surviving frescoes and icons.

Çanakkale, Turkey contains an archaeology site that holds 9 civilizations, including Troy.

Delphi, site of the prehistoric Oracle, a major temple to Apollo, and site of the Pythian Games. Apollo talked to mortals through the Delphic Oracle, which exerted considerable influence throughout the Greek world. Sadly, we cannot find a tour that includes this site that was so important to the early Greeks. This is the one site I will not see.