There are lots of pics this week.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

 

 

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.

 

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.

 

 

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.

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.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.