As members, we were invited to a reception at the Walter’s Art Galley, celebrating a major revision of their Eastern art exhibit. The new displays are quite good. Before the gallery opened, we enjoyed some appetizers. There was plenty of food and it was all very good. At 7:00, they opened the gallery to non-members and started offering deserts. We had a great time.

While the reception was great, the trip to and from wasn’t. We drove up in heavy rain. In spots it was difficult to see the lane markings. We went up Howard St., which we hadn’t done in a number of years. I saw mostly abandoned derelict buildings. It was a huge change from what I remember Howard St. being. Coming home we went down St. Paul St., which looked a lot better. We had plenty of time to examine buildings closely as we ended up coming home about the same time the ball game ended. It must have taken 20 minutes to get to I-95.

The pool will open soon, which means our office manager has to print out an updated pool book. This is a list of every resident who has a pool pass, organized by the home address, with a picture of each person issued a pass. The office is still baren so we have to cobble together enough stuff to get the job done. I had the pool pass software set up to use a photo badge camera, which kicks out 400 x 600 pixel photos that perfectly fit in the allotted slots in the pool book pages. What I didn’t realize is that lots of residents sent the office manager pictures from their cell phones. These are fine, but the files are huge — up to 6 MB. Christy’s computer was groaning trying to pump out about 400 pictures. I gave myself a four day crash course on Microsoft Windows Image Acquisition, which can automatically compress pictures. (Yes, it took me four days. I’m somewhat less than half-fast these days.) I updated the database program to compress pictures as they are entered in the database, and also wrote a one-time program to compress pictures already in the database. The one-time program takes 5 minutes to run through the existing pics. I’ll probably install it Monday.

We had an unannounced Tex Mex food truck Wednesday. Unsurprisingly, they got next to no business because nobody knew they were there. We saw the truck, but we were already on route to have dinner out. A second Tex Mex food truck was announced for Friday, but they cancelled due to heavy rain. We had our mouths all set for Tex Mex, so we and the Jonses went to California Tortilla for dinner, then to a frozen yogurt place for desert.

That’s it for this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.