There are no pics this week.
Thursday was Danita’s last day at work. But she’s not retired just yet. She opted to take vacation and stay on the payroll for 2 more months. The financial advantage is that we get cheaper medical insurance for the two months. When her bosses figured that out that Danita was on payroll, they talked her into doing Email every day and coming in one day a week. She won’t take vacation when she works, but she’ll continue working part time. It might be a nice transition. The stress level should be less, because the bosses finally announced how they will proceed moving forward. They will promote Mary (one of the women that works for Danita) and hire a new entry-level person. It’s a reasonable plan. Here’s hoping everything works out smoothly.
Danita got a very generous REI gift card at her retirement. This was very nice, because it made it easy for her to go ahead an buy a bike. She got a “Townie”. Here’s a link that shows the bike. Her bike is blue, which isn’t a color shown on the website.
https://www.rei.com/product/851142/electra-townie-7d-step-through-womens-bike-2015
The bike suits her very well. I don’t have a picture yet. We’ve had bad weather and were able to ride only once. I would have taken a picture, but I had accidentally set some option on my camera that precluded my getting a shot. I finally got the camera straightened out, so there should be a picture by next week.
So far, retirement feels like a very relaxed 3-day weekend. For our dinner-out Thursday we got pizza. Then we came home and had a private party. (With wine.) Saturday we went to a concert at UMBC. We heard the Chiara String Quartet. The quartet is comprised of excellent musicians. Unfortunately, they wanted to broaden our horizons somewhat more than we want our horizons broadened. They played a piece based on Andean folk music (by Gabriela Lena Frank), and a piece based on Eastern European folk music (by Bartok). “Based on” was used very loosely. These pieces were both quite modern, discordant, and lacking in any peaceful or beautiful music. Fortunately, the third piece was a Brahms string quartet.
Today, we went to Miss Shirley’s for an extraordinarily good breakfast. We’re going to a special mass with Circle this afternoon, which will be followed by a dinner.
Over a year ago, I wrote about the Patapsco river valley. A century ago, it was a major industrial area, thanks to the beginnings of the B & O railroad. Among other things, it produced some of the finest flour available. Today, it is a very undeveloped park. One can walk along the path of the first US railroad and see parts of the foundations of some of the factories, including stone that is grooved from the original B & O rails. The last vestige of it’s industrial past is the Bode dam, which was one of the first hydroelectric dams and was very innovative for it’s day. I wrote about how the Patapsco Park personnel planned to remove the dam, which would bring the are from natural to industrial and back to natural in a little over a century. The park service announced they are in the final stages of the dam removal. By the end of the year, the only thing left should be a concrete bench. The river should be back to it’s pre-industrial state about two years after that. You can read the article here.
I hope this finds everybody doing well.