Wednesday, June 11

V&A Tippoo’s Tiger – Use Google to get an interesting story. But avoid the two very boring posts on the V&A site.

This was Danita’s day. We went to the Victoria and Albert Museum, which focuses on art and design. We started with a 1-hour docent introductory tour. She was so good at her job that even I got interested. After that we wondered around until Danita took pity on me and we went to their cafe for a very good lunch. Then it was off to the National Gallery to see Nelson’s butt and some artwork. I spent my time going through the Impressionists exhibit (which was amazingly small, considering the stature of London’s premier art museum). When Danita was ready to leave, she came to find me. We decided to take some time off and just rest in the hotel for a while.

Taxi Strike

On the way back to the hotel, we saw a long line of Taxis all queued up. This was the Taxi strike against UBER (an internet / smart phone ride service) that made international news. Before the strike started, the cabs were all properly queued up. Drivers were standing around outside their cabs, enjoying the wonderful weather, chatting amiably. We approached one driver to see where he got his ice cream. He cheerfully let us know, then cheerfully answered our questions about the strike. The drivers weren’t dumb. The strike was at mid-day. They were all back at work at the end of the work day, when the demand for taxi service is high.

Hyde Park

After dinner, we took the metro to Hyde Park and walked around the lake. We saw a fabulous rose garden, the Lady Diana memorial fountain, and of course lots of people enjoying themselves. We took so many trips on the metro that our Oyster card maxed out. Our return trip to the hotel showed a charge of “0.00”. Woo-Hoo!

Hyde Park

Tuesday, June 10:

This was an ambitious day. We took the train for a day-trip to Bletchley Park. When we got back, we had tickets to the London Ballet at the Opera House.

We started out going to Bletchley Park, where the WW II code breaking effort against the Germans and Japanese was headquartered. I’ve long been interested in this, partly because of the secrecy and partly because of my work with cryptography at Schlumberger / Axalto / Gemalto. We started out being anxious about catching our train, which left from the Euston train station. We knew we had to switch tubes at the Victoria tube station. We had been there Sunday and had found it very confusing. We weren’t confident of our ability to navigate to Euston, and we woke up early. So we decided to go up to Euston right away and have breakfast in Euston. It turns out we got there with no troubles, and had almost 2 hours for breakfast. The nice thing was that we found an American-style diner for breakfast. Danita had an excellent waffle. I did not order quite as wisely, but my sausage and egg breakfast was perfectly acceptable. Best of all, we finally got good American coffee. Europeans love their espresso. I admit, their espresso is quite good. But for breakfast, I like having a large mug of coffee, preferably with free refills. Europeans aren’t big on refills. And their idea of American coffee is to add hot water to an espresso. The result is a mess. This diner actually had good American coffee, and even offered us one free refill.

The train ride was a little under an hour, and it was a delight. The train was clean, quiet, efficient, and on-time. I mean exactly on time. I looked at my watch when the train started pulling out of London. It was the exact advertised departure time to the minute. The same was true of our arrival in Bletchley, and also on the return trip. It turned out that most of our train rides were equally on-time. Our last ride was from Windermere to Edinburgh. The first train was a few minutes late. The second train got held up at a stop on the outskirts of Edinburgh, and got us in several minutes late. I wish we could find transportation like this in the US.

Bletchley Mansion

We started with a guided tour of Bletchley Park. This was a very good decision because the guide was very knowledgeable and gave us a great overview of the facility. It’s a good thing, because the area is pretty much a mess. It was so secret for so long that many of the buildings are rather run down. After it was finally opened, it was run with virtually no funds, basically by volunteers. Now the British government has decided to turn it into a first-class destination. They have a very long way to go. Some people were given the wrong origin for the tour and had to join us a few minutes late. We were given the correct destination (Hut 12), but the “1” was missing from the hut number and there was no sign indicating the tour started there. They have managed to assemble one major exhibit, which the printed material indicates is in Hut 6. However, this exhibit has been moved to behind the reception building. Hut 6 is closed, and no signs indicate where the exhibit is to be found. The site is used as a technology incubator, so over half the buildings are not open to the public. Again, no signs indicate what is open and what is not. In spite of these limitations, I had a great time and I learned a lot about the history and overall operation that I didn’t know. (This wasn’t a major attraction for poor Danita. But she was a good trouper.)

English Typex Machine with Enigma Mods. These machines worked like the German Enigma. They were used for message decryption, once the settings were known.

The best surprise about the Bletchley Park was their focus not on just the decryption, but on all aspects of the operation: monitoring and intercepting German messages, extracting meta-data, figuring out the code words or buzz words used by the Germans, and indexing their information. Only Brittian could have pulled this off. Their world-wide empire meant they had the world’s leading communications network, with outposts everywhere. Bletchley Park had a huge database to track and help interpret their information. There were no computer databases, of course. This database used people and punch cards. They ran an average of 5 million cards a day through their sorting and collating machines. Alan Turing’s work in decryption and computer design was awesome. But it would not have been useful without the rest of the operation, which was mind-mindbogglingly amazing.

BOMBE

They have made a few of the buildings available to other groups to host other museums. One group runs the computer museum, which contains a rebuilt “BOMBE”. This machine was used to help decrypt messages encoded with the German Enigma machine. The mathematicians (mostly grad students from Cambridge or Oxford) would manually find a schema diagram. This diagram was entered in the BOMBE. Typically, 4 or five Enigma settings would match the schema. The BOMBE used rotary switches to step through all possible combinations, stopping on each setting that matched the schema. Each of these settings was used to try to decrypt the message, until they had the setting for the day. It was quite a clever machine and greatly sped up the decryption of messages. It was a joy to be able to watch it work.

Colossus – This machine is not curved. The curving is an artifact of the pan0roma feature of my phone.

Colossus runs a fixed program, but the parameters can be changed. This punched paper tape enters the parameters.

The much more interesting machine, however, is Colossus. There are plenty of arguements about what has to be included before a machine becomes a “computer”. Depending on your definition, Colossus was either the first computer, or the direct predecessor of the first computer. The Colossus was used to help find schemas for signal traffic used by the German High Command. (This traffic used a machine more secure than the Enigma machine.) They built 10 Colossus machines. No two machines were the same. They were all destroyed, partially for security and partially because the scientists and engineers were quickly moving on to better machines. However, there was enough information available to rebuild Colossus. I saw the rebuilt Colussus and watched it work. It’s a 100% functional machine, completely true to the original. It’s the only one in the world, and it was amazing to watch it work. Colussus wasn’t officially open for tourists Tuesday. They had a tour, but the tour didn’t include it. However, I was able to sneak in behind a school group. After the group moved on, one of the guys stayed behind to show me a few more things and watch it work a little longer.

Dekatron (also not curved)

We then took the official tour, available on Tuesdays only. We saw several more very early computers which I found totally interesting. The most interesting of these was the Dekatron. If you don’t think Colossus qualifies as a computer, then the Dekatron was the first digital computer. It was fully programmable, had an ALU, memory, and output. It was based on a 10-position cold cathode tube (a little like a Nixie display). It was naturally a decimal machine (not binary) and consumed very little power when compared to other computers based on vacuum tubes.

After that, things got less interesting and even I was happy when the tour ended. Poor Danita, of course, was mildly interested, but found herself lagging behind most of the day.

Coming back to the hotel was mostly uneventful except that we somehow got into the wrong tube station and had to take a different line, which turned out to be the only line in London that was delayed due to some kind of signaling problem. This was a kind of a big deal because we had tickets to the Royal Ballet. The tube station near the Opera House is closed, forcing a rather long and obscure walk through part of London we had not yet visited. We didn’t want to be late for Ballet, so we hailed a cab. I’m convinced it took us as long to get to the Opera house as if we had walked, due to evening traffic. But we arrived in plenty of time.

The ballet was incredibly good. London has one of the world’s best ballet companies which, of course, performs with their own live pit orchestra. The Opera House is an amazing venue. It all adds up to extremely high expectations, which the performance easily exceeded. They started out with an ballet based on Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, along with Mendelssohn’s music. You might recall we watched stage actors perform the play with the BSO playing the music. I joked that the Baltimore show was better, because the audience gave the BSO a standing ovation but the London audience did not. But the simple fact was that the stage setting, choreography, and dancing were all superb — as was the pit orchestra. It was an incredible experience, and the night wasn’t over yet. We next watched a contemporary dance. I cannot even begin to describe it, but it was another incredible performance, in a totally different style than the traditional style of the first dance. But wait, there’s more! We were treated to a third dance, which was the funniest ballet we ever saw. I can say this without hesitation, because it was the first funny ballet I ever saw. It never occurred to me that ballet could even be funny. They had a pianist on stage to play as the soloist with the orchestra. He did a kind of Liberace routine, but without all the sequins and exaggerated arm waving. The dance included dancers that got their steps wrong, ended up in the wrong place, etc. In the end, the dancers were being butterflies. The pianist finally got so disgusted he stopped playing and started chasing the dancers with an over-sized butterfly net. It could have been exasperating “stick”, but it was very well done by dancers and musicians who obviously knew exactly what they were doing and exactly how to make it funny. So we ended up with 3 dances, all very well done, and all in different styles.

When we got back to our hotel, it was almost midnight. We were in high spirits but quite tired, and immediately fell asleep.

Monday, June 9

St. Paul’s

There was no time for sleeping in today. We were in London with a lot of things to get done. The forecast was for thunderstorms in the afternoon, but the day turned out to be a nice one. There was a brief shower, which occurred after we got back to our room for the night. In fact, we had good to excellent weather every day of our trip in the UK. There were a couple of other cloudy days, and we kept our umbrellas handy on those days, but I never used my umbrella because it never rained while we were outside. Temperatures were a little above normal. Our warmest day was in Edinburgh, where the high was 82 degrees.

Our day was focused on two main attractions — St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Tower of London. Both of these are in old London. Our hotel is on the other side of central London, near Westminster Cathedral. So this was our inaugural visit to this part of town, as well as our inaugural use of the tube.

At the top of St. Paul’s

St. Paul’s Cathedral opened first, so we went there first. This is one of the more recognizable buildings in London. The building was designed by Sir Christopher Wren. It was his seminal work. The dome is the highest and largest (if one applies the correct modifiers). There are actually 2 domes. The outside dome is 365 feet high. We were both surprised how much there was to see. After visiting the main floor, one can walk up three levels.

Selfie in a reflecting Statue

The first level is the “whispering gallery”, about half way up the inside dome. If you do it right, two people can stand on opposite sides of the dome. A person on one side can hear the other person whispering on the other side. We didn’t do it right, because the only thing we heard was a lot of other people whispering “Can you hear me?” The next level up is the stone gallery, a balcony around the outside of the dome. It is about as high as the inside dome. The third level, some 530 steps from the main floor, goes around the top of the outside dome. Danita and I both made it to the top in good form. The view is exhilarating. After this, we went down to the crypt. Our audio guides had excellent presentations, but we found we weren’t as interested in the crypt, so we moved on to the Tower of London.

Beefeater Tour Guide

All the guide books say one should start the Tower of London with a Beefeater Tour, and they are right. It was a very interesting, entertaining, and informative tour. This guy loved tweaking the Americans. One of his favorite lines was “This is history” (comparing the 900 years of the Tower of London to the 300-year history of the US). Of course, what he didn’t mention is that the written history of London goes back to Roman times. We’ve seen the Roman ruins in Barcelona. That’s history. English archiological history goes back even further to Stonehenge. Danita saw a stone circle from the train on Tuesday (I was napping.) But London doesn’t have any major touring areas from Roman or earlier times.

Tower of London

The Tower of London is the original castle in London, built by William the Conqueror to protect himself from his conquest. (It seems the Saxons didn’t take very kindly to being ruled by a Norman king.) William died before the castle was finished. His son, William II, finished the castle. Succeeding kings used it — it was their official residence for about 500 years. It is unique because the original stones still stand as they were originally built in 1100 (more or less). Most of the exhibits are original items (not reproductions).

Original and Authentic Chopping Block

The Normans were far advanced of the English. They were using chimneys, which the English wouldn’t start doing for another 100 years. (The English generally built a fire in the middle of the room on the floor.) Not only that, but the Normans used stealth chimneys. Fireplaces had slots on either side of the flue. Smoke was dispersed and discharged such that nobody could see it from outside the castle. Outsiders couldn’t see whether the fireplaces were in use.

Authentic and Original Henry VIII’s Armor

After that we wandered around and stumbled into the tour of St. John’s Chapel. (Pictures weren’t allowed because it is still used for worship services.) I’m not sure how far back one has to go before saying “This is history”, but I was quite satisfied to sit in the chapel where William II and his queen celebrated mass.

By this time we were getting our London legs. I was not surprised to find it is quite easy to navigate the tube. London streets are another matter. They go in all different directions. I had a data plan for my phone. I found it’s quite addictive to have instant, full-time access to data. The navigation aid I was counting on most was my phone’s GPS, along with Google Maps. It was useful, but there were issues, especially in London. The GPS got confused with all the signals bouncing off the tall buildings around us. It generally knew where we were, but sometimes was off by one street. Errors were worse with direction. If we were walking north, sometimes the GPS would say we were walking south. Finally, my phone had trouble holding a battery charge all day, so I had to limit my time viewing the map screen. Fortunately, we had an unexpected  navigation aid for London streets. In fact, navigating London is amazingly easy, thanks to London’s brilliantly designed “You are here” maps. These are found every few blocks in London’s central district, oriented so that the “you are here” arrow shows exactly where you are and which way you are facing. Just about everything a tourist could want to get to is marked on this map. Each display had two maps, one marking a 5-minute walk and the other a 10-minute walk. These were quite a surprise, because the two tour books I read don’t mention them. I wish they had, because we spent quite a bit of effort looking for how to walk to our next destination, and most of that effort would have been avoided if we had known about these brilliant tourist aids.

Traitor Gate. This thing is *heavy* Not even Mel Gibson held this up with one hand while fighting with the other.

Our other surprise was the quality of the food. The English are famous for having lousy cuisine. We certainly had some perfectly awful “grab and go” breakfasts and lunches, where sandwiches are made ahead of time, sitting on the shelf. But throughout our visit in the UK, restaurant food was quite good. When we took the time to have a “sit down and order” meal, we were never disappointed. I had Welsh pastry, meat pies, meat Yorkshire pudding, Italian pasta, pizza, etc. It was all good or excellent. We found there weren’t many vegetables. And it helps that we were smart about what we ordered. No “bangers and mash”, no “fish and chips”, and no “haggis”. Coffee was available everywhere we went and it was pretty good to excellent. I even found that tea can be a pleasant drink, if one adds enough milk and sugar.

When we got back to our hotel, we were pretty tired and spent some time watching very bad TV until we could say it was late enough to go to bed.

we’re back, safe and sound. Because I didn’t have a computer with me, I couldn’t write this up as we went along. I tried doing some drafts, but now I have hundreds of pics and disjointed thoughts to sort through. It’s a bit daunting. Nevertheless, here’s our first day in the UK.

Sunday, June 8:

Big Ben

We had a smooth flight and arrived in London on time. Since we were disoriented and a little tired, we decided to take a rather expensive cab to the hotel. Did we waste our money? One can take public transportation from the airport to our hotel. However, we met another family from the US who was in London for their third time. They got totally lost and spent most of the day trying to find their hotel, taking various public transports and dragging their suitcases behind them. We spent most of the day having a good time (as you will soon see) and decided our money was well spent.

Having Fun at Trafalgar Square

We got to the hotel well before check-in time, but the room was available and they let us check in early. We found ourselves in the middle of a perfect day — sunny, with highs in the low 70s. Besides that, it was Sunday and the last day of mid-break (when schools are off for a week). Plus, the World Cup was starting soon (that’s a big deal in Europe). As a result, we saw tons of people everywhere we went, all having a good time. This was especially true in the parks. Everywhere there was grass, there were people enjoying themselves. There were street performers and outdoor concerts. The streets were filled.

Thames from the London Eye

We spent the day walking around central London. We saw all the normal landmarks in this part of town — the Thames, Trafagal Square, Big Ben and Parliament Building, etc. In our travels, we rode the London Eye (like a giant Ferris wheel.) They run it like a cheesy attraction. But the view is dramatic, and it’s a lot of fun.

Gold Coach

The other attraction we visited was the Royal Mews (a more conventional name would be the Royal Stables.) They only had two of the horses there, and the official limousine was being used in the D-Day celebration. But we saw many royal carriages. The one here was built by George III, to celebrate his victory over the French in the 7-years war and the mighty power of England. It’s so huge and heavy it requires a team of 8 horses to pull. It’s very uncomfortable to ride in. And 15 years later he got spanked by some upstart Yanks.

Nelson

It was a very tough day and a lot of walking, but we met our primary goal of staying awake until 9. We also met our secondary goals. I got a UK SIM card for my phone that includes a data plan, and we purchased Oyster cards. These are the best way to use The Tube (the London subway).

Our biggest surprise for the day (besides the amazingly good weather) was Trafalgar Square. It has a tall column topped by a statue of Lord Nelson. The best way to get a picture of this famous column is from the steps of the National Gallery (art museum) — which has a fine view of his butt. The square is filled with the expected array of rather serious statues, complete with large lions and lots of famous dead white men. But it has one very strange, very blue statue of a chicken. We have no idea at all of what that’s about.

Blue Rooster

First day surprises:

“Look Left / Look Right” is painted on the street next to every curb. Extremely useful for the disoriented visitor.

It can be hard to understand wait staff, if English is not their first language

I am writing this on Thursday, June 5. There are no pics this week.

We’re leaving on our visit to the UK Saturday evening. I published our itinerary earlier, and am repeating it at the bottom of this post. If you are interested in contacting us while we are in the UK, here are some things to know. The best way to contact us is to send an email to deichenlaub@gmail.com. I plan to get a UK SIM card with a data plan. I should receive the Email on my phone so long as we have a cell phone signal. This should be everywhere except perhaps a few hours while hiking in Windermere. If you feel the need to call, it is best to call my Google number (410-417-8854). Google will send me an Email. I can play the voice mail from that Email. Danita’s phone does not work in the UK. We will have only my cell phone and Danita’s iPad. I hear that public Wi-Fi is not very good in the UK, so our web access will likely be limited. I won’t be posting much while we are there, because I don’t know how to move pictures from my phone to the web without a computer.

As you might have guessed, my computer, a Lenovo Think Pad, is still not working. The problem is the fan, so I thought it would be relatively easy to get it fixed. I took it to one shop. They said they could fix it, but then they said they couldn’t find any new fans. I took it to a second shop that specializes in fixing Lenovo Think Pads. They ordered the fan, only to find out that the supplier’s web site said they had 200 fans in stock, but actually they didn’t have any. Fans are available only from Lenovo, and they cost $500. I wish I had bought the 3-year service contract. My fan died after 2 years, 11 months. I could have had one of those fans for free. I started a serious search for a replacement computer. There are some very nice computers available these days that aren’t made by Lenovo, but they are quite expensive. (50% more than what I paid 3 years ago for my Lenovo, or more.) I finally settled on an HP Split X2. The entire computer is in the display part, which can be separated from the keyboard and used as a touch-screen tablet. The unit sold in the stores does not meet my requirements. But by ordering directly from HP, with the right options, I was able to get quite a nice computer at a reasonable cost. (I upgraded to a dual-band Wi-Fi, the better screen, and included a 500 GB rotating disk drive in the keyboard section.)  This time I bought the 3-year service contract. That probably means my computer will die in 3 years, 1 month. Because it’s special order, it should ship about the same time we get back from vacation.

Two of the places we enjoy eating Sunday breakfast are Bob Evans and Mimi’s. They both issue plenty of coupons, most of which exclude Sundays or breakfast. That’s understandable, because Sunday is their busiest breakfast. But lately, they’ve been having breakfast BOGO battles. We have so many BOGOs we’re having trouble using them all before they expire. We were kind of keeping up, using a Bob Evans BOGO last Sunday. Then we got a BOGO for Mimi’s. That’s bad news, because we’ll be in the UK Sunday. Fortunately, we just happened to run out of breakfast food, so we’ll have to go out for breakfast Saturday. I’m thinking we’ll be using our Mimi’s breakfast BOGO.

It was a busy week. Last Sunday we had the last our last BSO concert. They offered a performance of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. The BSO was there to play Mendelssohn’s incidental music. I’ve seen the play and I’ve heard the music. I was skeptical, but it turned out to be a delightful performance. I couldn’t understand everything the actors said and could understand very little of what was sung, but knowing the plot was very helpful. I never realized how brilliant Mendelssohn’s music was until now.

My work at Habitat is lurching on in it’s normal way. I’ve been working for two years to get all their ReStores networked to their main server. They will have FIOS internet installed in their main office Tuesday. This is a key event that allows their IT support company to do a major piece of the project while we are in the UK. That’s very good news, but I recently realized that while all their computers are updated and ready, their Columbia store never connected to their local network correctly. It’s a long story, but the result is that the Columbia store could not be connected to the new network. Fortunately, I was able to get that squared away this week.Then, at the last minute, the office manager sent an Email saying she wanted to check with the CFO to make sure they will proceed as planned. To put it very politely, my feelings were “My, oh my”.

Three years ago, our clubhouse office purchased an inexpensive inkjet “all in one” printer to be their fax / scanner / backup printer. Besides the high cost of ink, this printer was not built to stand up to the heavy usage they give it. They asked me to recommend a replacement printer. I suggested a specific model of an HP color laser all in one. The board approved it and one of the ladies ordered it. Unfortunately, she ordered a completely different printer sold by Dell. This thing has some of the worst drivers I’ve ever seen. After 3 hours of work, the scanner still wasn’t working. I finally called Dell. At least she took our recommendation and bought the 3-year service contract. If she hadn’t bought that, Dell wouldn’t have helped and scanner still wouldn’t be working. Everything was squared away by yesterday afternoon.

Our deck is coming along. The contractor started laying the floor yesterday. He will be done with the floor today or tomorrow. That will end this phase of the project. The support column and beams were trimmed with white boards. This was the source of the problems, because the trim held water from the rain and the support beams became saturated with water. We decided to split the work into two parts. After the floor is done, we will let the support beams stay open to the air for a while to dry out. Then we will put up new trim using white vinyl boards. The next slot the contractor has available is in August, which will give plenty of time for the lumber to dry out.

Danita’s been spending time polishing our UK itinerary. She found more hiking options for us in Windermere and has been reviewing things we might want to see in Edinburgh. We will have very long days for the next two weeks. London is as far north as Newfoundland. We’ll be there for the summer solstice. We will have about 17 hours of daylight each day. “Daylight” is not the same as “sunshine”. The forecast is calling for plenty of rain, which I suppose is normal for that part of the world. When I purchased train tickets to go from London to Bletchey Park, I picked up a BOGO. If one prints out the coupon and shows their train ticket, they get a free admission. Danita found out this is common throughout the UK. It won’t help us in London (because we are arriving in London by plane). And it won’t help in Windermere (the admission to the hiking trails, when converted to US dollars, is approximately — nothing). But it is quite useful in Bletchley Park, Stratford-Upon-Avon, and Edinburgh. Purchasing tickets ahead, traveling mid-day, and printing coupons before we leave, we will save quite a bit.  We were able to get all our train tickets for £15 or less, which is a good deal. The BOGOs turn a good deal into an amazing bargin.

That’s all the news. I hope this finds everybody doing well. Here’s our itinerary. (“BA” is British Air.)

I am writing this on Saturday, May 31. There are several pics.

Removing the railing

This the week that deck repairs started. There are a lot advantages to hiring professionals. They get a lot of work done. They get it right the first time. And they’re fun to watch. In two days, they removed the old floor and trim, and installed most of the rubber that will be below the new floor. They also lowered the deck so it slopes away from the house. These pics will show their progress, but unfortunately you can’t tell the deck now slopes at 1/4″ per foot from the pics. The deck should be put back together this week. The support beams were quite saturated with water. I decided it would be a good idea to let them dry out before installing new trim. My contractor’s next available slot is in August. So the support beams will have plenty of time to dry out.

Watch that Edge

I read a couple of interesting books lately. “The Last Voyage of Columbus” by Martin Dugard is an excellent history and biography of Columbus and his times. I picked up James Shapiro’s “A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599” as a lark to learn something before going to Stratford-Upon-Avon. It turned out to be a quite interesting and very illuminating book. It compares events of the day to Shakespeare’s work. Shapiro chose his year well. 1599 was a turning point in Shakespeare’s work (he wrote “Hamlet” near the end of that year) and an important year in England’s history. On the other hand, “The Secret Life of William Shakespeare” by Jude Morgan is getting good reviews. But I found that it’s a completely fabricated story, written to include the highlights of Shakespeare’s history, with no discernible insights offered. I couldn’t get past the first few chapters.

Removing the Floor

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Perhaps a Trellis instead of a Deck?

This Rubber will guide water away from the house and past the beams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday

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

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

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

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

Tuesday

Imaginative Hot Dog Stand

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

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

A few of observations

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

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

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

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

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

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

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

Water Exiting WG Gorge

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

Saturday

Rainbow Falls

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

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

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

Taughannock Falls – taller than Niagra

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

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

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

Sunday

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

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

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

Typical Winery Retail

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

A Boat out of Water

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

Waterfall

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