I am writing this on Sunday, August 18. There are no pics this week.
This week I read an article about the moose in New Hampshire. It seems the winters aren’t cold enough to kill off the ticks. This leaves a lot of hungry ticks in the summer time. Ticks like to feed off the moose, leaving the moose emaciated. According to the article, moose in Maine aren’t affected because the winters are still cold enough. This very same week, we had several days of delightfully cool and dry weather. Lows were near 50 at night. Riding early in the morning required a jacket. In the middle of August. Amazing. Very nice, but amazing.
Speaking of riding, I had the entire day to myself Friday, so I took an all-day bike ride. I haven’t ridden very much since I got back from the BRP trip. This was partly due to some rainy weather and partly due to other commitments. I decided that if I didn’t do my old training ride soon, I would lose the ability to do it, and have to work back up to it again. I completed the ride. It was hard, I was tired, it felt great. The best part of the ride was the worst part of the road. The entire route is excellent biking except for the last mile or so in Howard county. That stretch has very bumpy pavement, a steep down-hill section, and heavy morning commuter traffic early in the day. The bottom of the hill has very rough railroad tracks, followed by a narrow bridge and an additional short section of road until I go one way and most of the traffic goes another. The pavement is so bad I am forced to ride slowly down the hill. It isn’t as bad as I make it sound, because the road is so bad that many drivers go slower than me down that hill. Friday, a road construction project had sprouted up on that section of road. The pavement on my side was beautifully smooth. The other side was finishing up. And the rail road tracks were very nicely smoothed out. Thank you, Howard County. You have moved the worst part of the ride to Carroll County!
I spent three days at Nick’s place. When I worked for CASA, I developed a shortcut for upgrading Windows 8 to Windows 8 Pro. It worked great and saved a lot of time. Unfortunately, my little shortcut did now work when converting Windows 7, 32-bit to Windows 8 Pro, 64-bit. As a result, I didn’t bring everything I needed when I came on Monday. It took half a day to fix that. Oh, well, that’s why I build flexible schedules. I should finish most of the work at Nick’s Place this week. I’m also working on a project to connect the ReStores to the central office for Habitat.The project is approved, but the company that does computer support for Habitat added a new requirement that adds $1000 to the cost of the project. This is a lot of money to Habitat. We’ll see what they decide.
Wednesday we had the “August Party” at Ed’s place. Ed said it was easier if he didn’t have to put everybody in a car to come to our place. That is eminently understandable. We had plenty of people there. Bud came up from Potomac, driven by Danita’s brother Rick, who was visiting from Texas. Joe was also there. There were hamburgers, potato salad, chips, and sweets a plenty.
Our other big party this week was Bill Bauman’s 70th birthday celebration. It was a typical Bauman party. Lots of people. Lots of conversation. Lots of “BJ’s” food. We had a good time.
We have launched a James Bond marathon. It’s fun watching movies from an earlier era. We’re watching them in sequence so we can see how the movies developed. The free 007 movies I found on Amazon are available only through the end of August. The timing is perfect. It ends when we leave on vacation, and corresponds to TV’s summer doldrums. But it leaves us with a mad dash to watch 20 movies in less than a month — plus attend all the parties, classes, dinners out, etc. Life is hard, sometimes.
Danita’s doing a cooking countdown to our Alaska / Denali vacation. Between now and when we leave on September 1, she will be at the university retreat two days, we have a SOCA party, and we have an evening at the Aquarium. That means there are a maximum of 10 dinners at home before vacation.
I don’t often write about politics, but it’s hard to ignore how our president, the NSA, and other agencies have worked at hiding the scope of their data collection from the public. (And that’s being very generous to our government.) Those who are “in the business” were not surprised by recent revelations, but this knowledge gained relevance when it was finally proved. I personally think there are more activities that have not yet been revealed. Certainly, other countries are doing as much as they think they can get away with along these lines. And none of this begins to touch on the “cyber-war” activities that the US and other governments are conducting. I read a blog that suggested that Eisenhower’s farewell address is particularly applicable to us today. It’s short. You can read it and decide for yourself by visiting http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html. I found a couple of places where one can watch the original TV broadcast. Unfortunately, every site I could find ruined the speech by breaking it up with commentary.
That’s it for this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.