There are no pics this week.

This week was book ended by family events. Monday was Memorial Day, which means the Parkton Cup. It’s a day of family, food, and croquet. Ed sets up 3 croquet courses. We had all three courses full for the first set and two more for the second. Winners of the first round play for the championship. For the first time ever, I was actually in the lead in my game. It didn’t last long. Maybe I’ll get into the finals next year.

Mark didn’t make it to the Parkton Cup this year because he is coaching students for the Physics Olympics. I’m not certain I have the details down. My impression is that he was coaching the mid-atlantic qualifiers.

Danita’s Uncle Bill died this week. He was 83. The funeral was yesterday. The service was at the old Polish parish in Highlandtown. Bud was with us. I dropped Danita and Bud off and went to park the car. When I came back to the church, I spent a few minutes out front with the Hartka men. It was a humid day. It felt good to stand outside for a few minutes. I knew it was time to go inside and find my wife when the men started talking about shoulder injuries, and which side of the casket they had to be on.

The drive to the graveyard started by driving through town. Running red lights is not something one gets to do ever day. Eventually we ended up on I-95. I knew where the graveyard is, and knew which exit the GPS recommended to get there. But the hearse wasn’t switching lanes to exit. What route were they taking? They did finally exit, but by then there was a very large and very noisy truck to my right, followed by a very aggressive pickup with a lawn mower in the bed. The result was that for quite a while, I couldn’t see the front of the funeral procession. Plus the GPS seemed to be going nuts. It literally turned the route into a sideways figure 8. Or was it an infinity symbol? Everything ended well, but for a while there the only thing I knew for sure was that a lot of cars were following me.

The lunch was at Bowman’s on Harford Rd. We’ve had so many funeral lunches at Bowman’s that I refer to their dining room as the “Hartka Room”. The food was good. The conversation was better.

Danita and I like to watch TV for a hour or two before going to bed. There’s not a lot of new programs on TV this time of year. This summer I selected movies from Amazon to stream. My criteria were they had to be free (with Prime membership) and have a rating of 7 or better on Rotten Tomatoes. I din’t pay any attention to whether I thought we would enjoy the movie. We’ve had some real duds. Twice we stopped the movie after watching 10 or 15 minutes. We’ve had a couple of movies that one of us liked and the other didn’t. We’ve had some good movies, And we’ve had one sleeper. If you haven’t seen “Temple Grandin”, you should get it. A lot of things have to come together to make a great movie — the story, the way the story is told, acting, photography, music, script … This movie does everything well. The story is presented in a well-balanced manner with excellent pacing. Some of the story telling elements are highly innovative. The acting us superb. This is a movie worth watching.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

PS: Yes, we did get our Russian visas. We were even lucky enough that it rained only when we were on the metro or in the car, and not while we were traipsing around DC or the Metro parking lot!