Lift Up Your Hearts!

I'm not Englebert Humperdinck.  I'm not Michael Bolton.  But <ahem> last night I sang with the amazing Ashley (Locheed) Tessandori!  Don't ask about the venue or the size of the audience, just let me bask in the reflected glory.

My random quotation generator greeted me with this when I turned the computer on this morning:

May no gift be too small to give, nor too simple to receive, which is wrapped in thoughtfulness and tied with love. - L. O. Baird

Merry Christmas to all!

I did some last-minute grocery shopping this morning, realizing that my normal day for that event (Friday) was out of the question this week.  Boy am I glad I didn't go later in the day—it was crazy enough as it was.

Before I even put the groceries away I checked my e-mail, which contained a Christmas greeting from Publix, our grocery store.  I like it so much I have to share it with you.

I know it's Advent, and we're still waiting for Christmas.  But that's the header for our Christmas newsletter.  This year we revamped our system for Christmas cards, sending more than half of them out by e-mail.  I'm concerned that some folks may have gotten lost in the upgrade.

So if you did not receive our Christmas letter, and would like to, please let me know.

Actually—there really ought to be a word for "daughter's in-laws."

That Phil and Barbara were involved in a protest back in the day doesn't surprise me.  But I had no idea they made the New York Times!

Here's the update almost thirty years later.

This year we splurged and purchased annual passes to Disney World—for the first time since we moved to Central Florida over 30 years ago.  Back then, with two very young children (four and not-yet-two), the reason was to free ourselves from the pressure to drive our kids hard in order not to "waste" any of the very expensive day at the park.  What was our excuse this time?  Beats me, but we're enjoying it.  Porter's retirement frees us to visit the parks on our own schedule, and his annual pass provides free parking.  (Mine is a lesser, cheaper version, but what need have we for two parking passes?)  When parking is $20, it's a deterrent to casual visits.

All that to say:  for a year, we can go to Morocco for dinner.  Or China.  Or Norway.  For our first trip, we chose EPCOT's Marrakesh Restaurant, always one of our favorites.  Then we stopped by Japan; we didn't buy anything, but admired a lot.  We didn't buy any funnel cakes, either.  Pictures bring memories of good times but no additional calories.  :)  You can click on the images to enlarge the photos, but please don't drool on your keyboards.

Beef brewat rolls, chicken bastilla, Jasmine salad...and bastilla for dessert

Especially for Vivienne

We went to Disney Springs (formerly Downtown Disney, formerly Disney Village) a couple of months ago to pick up our new passes, and I was most thrilled by the parking garage!  That's not meant to disparage the rest of the site, but I was happy to find some place in America that has adopted this Swiss custom.  (Okay, I don't know if the system is Swiss or not, but Switzerland is where I first saw this useful technology.)

It's a smart parking garage.  Sensors know which spaces are open and which are not, and lighted signs direct drivers to the open spaces.  It sure beats driving up and down all the rows!

I'm glad Veterans Day didn't suffer long from the Monday holiday craze and retains the connection with "the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month."  History is also worth remembering.

It must often be so...when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them. (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King)

 Thank you, all veterans and current members of our armed forces.

Almighty God, we commend to your gracious care and keeping all the men and women of our armed forces at home and abroad. Defend them day by day with your heavenly grace; strengthen them in their trials and temptations; give them courage to face the perils which beset them; and grant them a sense of your abiding presence wherever they may be; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.  (Book of Common Prayer, American Episcopal Church, 1979)

Rather cool, even if we do all have our mouths open.  (Click to enlarge, or follow this link.)

Porter loves bougainvilleas—so do I, though not nearly with the same passion—and years ago planted some out front.  He was so disappointed when they seemed to make little progress, and didn't bloom much.

Well, I don't know what happened, but in the last year or so they seemed to be determined to make up for those years all at once.  One of the bushes is growing so aggressively that its thorns threatened people attempting to walk to our front door.  I did briefly consider leaving it that way as a deterrent to solicitors, but since that would exclude Girl Scout cookies and LBHS Band apples, I gave up the idea.  (Click on photos to enlarge.)

Instead, Porter built a pergola.  He build the basic structure in the garage at first, then moved to the driveway to replace the temporary stubs with the 10.5 foot legs.  After he dug the holes, we (yes, just he and I) lifted it, in halves, and put it into place.  Then after levelling, and settling, and fastening it back together, he added the rest of the top pieces ...

... and filled in the holes, and introduced the bougainvilleas to their new plaything ...

... and we have a pergola!  Isn't it pretty?  I particularly like the sculpting he did on the ends.

This summer I noticed that our grandson was reading a book about "staycations."  I think it was about how to have a great vacation but save money by staying in your own town, and your own home, but acting as if you were on vacation:  eating out, seeing the attractions that you would see if you were visiting your city as a tourist, etc.  However, my mind leapt at a different interpretation of the term:  What if I "went on vacation" but never left home?

To me, vacations are not only fun but critically important, being mostly about family, but they are anything but relaxing.  I leave behind one set of responsibilities, but take on another, and if grandchildren are a joy that reminds me life is worth living, they don't leave much time for rest.  Or for making any progress on my own work, which is always waiting for me when I return.  So when Porter planned a three-week "working vacation" to the Northeast to help with construction projects in New Hampshire and to help out his father in Connecticut, I thought, "What a great time for me to take a staycation!"  Hard as it was to give up any chance to visit family, this was too good an opportunity to miss.  I would be home, but not home, avoiding as much as possible any normal activity or chore that I would not be doing if I were actually away.  If it could survive three weeks of my being out of town, it could survive being ignored for that long.

There were exceptions.  If we had both been out of town, things like mail, newspaper, lawn/pool care, and feeding the worms would have been taken care of, but it made much more sense to handle them myself.  A friend pointed out that I could have hired someone to mow the lawn, but that would have been more stressful than just doing it.

I didn't have a hard-core agenda; this was supposed to be a vacation, after all, a personal retreat, and I wanted to leave it somewhat fluid.  But I did have a few goals.

1. This seemed like the perfect time to accomplish 95 by 65 Goal #94:  Rocket boost photo work (40 hours of work in segments of 1 or more hours, over 2 weeks), since I could work largely without interruption and any hours of the day I chose.
2. There are some projects that work a lot better if I can spread them over space and time without worrying about interfering in someone else's life.  I wanted to work on some of these.
3. I've been battling a tendency toward hoarseness ever since I got the worst laryngitis of my life four years ago, and being alone at home with no outside commitments looked to be my best chance to see what a period of voice rest could do to help.

These were my three big priorities.  How did I do?

1. I knew from my experience with Goal #86, Rocket boost genealogy that the hour-long segment requirement doesn't work for me, so I gave myself the freedom work in segments of any length.  That worked great.  Sometimes it was ten minutes, sometimes several hours, but I met the goal and never experienced the burnout I did with the genealogy work.  It also helped that I had mostly cleared my schedule, so guilt over not doing other things was not part of the picture.  Also, in this case the hardest, most tedious work came at the beginning, instead of at the end.  I spend approximately 56 hours on this project over the three weeks, and here's what I did.  (If it doesn't seem like that much to you, you don't know the magnitude of the project; trust me, it was a big deal, and I'm very happy with it.)
   • Set up a set of working files on a new 2TB drive I had bought for this purpose.  Having all that space gave me the freedom to make as many interim backup copies as I wanted to, which took away the fear of messing things up badly.  It's impossible to overstate how lovely this was.
   • Learned to use Irfanview to make lossless JPG rotations, and batch-process name changes.  Again, it's impossible to overstate the value of these tools, especially the batch processing.
   • I researched and decided on a system for identifying all my photos with the date and time as the first part of the filename.  Maybe that's old school—they say that the date and time, along with people, places, and other keywords, should be stored as EXIF data associated with the file—but I've been burned before with having information lost when I switched systems.  Maybe that won't happen with EXIF, but I also like to be able to see and search for that information easily. 
   • I decided that I would begin with what is probably the easiest part of my many, many years of backlog:  2015 photos from my phone.  They have date-and-time information stored with each image, and in most cases location information as well.  What's more, the more recent memories are easier to recall than those from, say, 2007, or even worse, 1975....  I then processed all of the 2015 photos from January through mid-September, giving them all filenames that looked like this:  yyyy-mm-dd@hh-mm-ss (with appropriate extension).  Do I need to know what second a photo was taken?  No, but the point is to be able to sort photos by the order in which they were taken.  It's also an easy way of making sure each has a unique filename, so I no longer have to worry about appending numbers after each photo in a series, and adding further suffixes when I find something that belongs in between two consecutive numbers.  It's liberating and I haven't yet found a downside.  Unless it might make the filename too long; I've also put sometimes lengthy descriptions in the filenames.  Long names have gotten me in trouble before, with certain copy/backup programs with less generosity in that department than Windows.  But so far I've been okay with this.
   • I made a quick-and-dirty cull of pictures that were obviously bad.  I mean really quick:  mostly pictures that were taken accidentally.  Trying to choose the best from a set of basically the same shot was not appropriate for this step.  This was the end of Phase 1.
   • In Phase 2, I went through all the renamed photos, culling still more (but still being very generous in what I kept), and changing the filenames to include descriptions:  people, places, events, anything to help place the photo in context.  I'm actually still in Phase 2, having at this point not quite completed from January through May.  I had hoped to finish this phase of 2015, but another major project was spawned when I hit April, and our genealogical visit to a cemetery.  Before declaring those photos complete, it only made sense to analyze the data and put together the whole story of our findings.  That in itself took almost 20 hours.
   • Phase 3 will consist of going through the photos again and making edits so that the images show best what is important to me in the picture.  For example, I have one photo of the family eating at a large table, and in itself it's not worth keeping because too many people were caught not looking very attractive.  But properly cropped, there's an adorable picture of a sleeping grandson.  Finally, Phase 4 will be the Production stage, in which I choose photos to share with others in some attractive form.
   • For Phases 3 and 4 I purchased PaintShop Pro.  It's intimidating, but I've been helped a lot by instructional videos available on YouTube.  For those who might be in similar straits, Christopher Oneill's YouTube channel has a lot of detailed information.  Too detailed, maybe, but I've found nothing else that covers the material as well.  And if I can multi-task, say eating lunch while watching, it makes it less frustrating that he is sometimes repetitious and slow.
   • Why do I do everything in phases, making several passes through the images?  Because I have a very, very large elephant to eat, and it goes down better one small bite at a time.
   • Yes, I'm making sure to back up my work.
   • Maybe best of all, I now have a set of procedures and a system for continuing to make progress, albeit at a much slower rate, now that my retreat is over.
2. Working on house projects was a great success, as detailed below.  Projects involving the kitchen and the master bedroom are particularly likely to annoy other people if they're spread out over several days.
3. The jury is still out on my throat.  I've made progress, but not as much as I'd like.  That's not going to stop me from going back to choir this week, however.  I plan to keep up my regimen of salt-water gargles, xylitol nasal spray, and lots of drinking.  For the last, I'll keep up the regular tea, and the lemon and honey, but I will be glad to see the back of the make-me-gag herbal tea that is supposed to help soothe throats.  Maybe I'll have to go back to that, but I'm sure hoping not.  One problem I did discover was that being home alone did not mean I didn't use my voice:  I talk to myself a lot!  I pray out loud, and I often keep a running commentary on what I do and how it's going.  As I've said before, I think in words, and it turns out that when I'm alone I like to hear those words aloud.  I kept catching myself and reminding myself not to talk, but it's a pretty strong habit.  At least my volume is lower than when speaking to someone else....

In answer to the question you all are asking, "What did you do on your retreat?" here's what I can remember.

• Set up system for labelling and identifying photos
• Learned a lot about PaintShop
• Culled bad photos from 2015; labelled the remainder with date and time; labelled January through most of May with description
• Analyzed, augmented, and wrote up the genealogical data from our cemetery visit in April; also did some general genealogy work
• Maintained a schedule of daily Bible reading and prayer
• Maintained a schedule of daily exercise, only twice logging less than 90 minutes and 10,000 steps
• Completed two major yard projects
• Mowed the lawn twice
• Cleaned the pool three times
• Maintained a schedule of daily language learning with DuoLingo
• Exchanged our defective toaster oven
• Bought a bunch of clothes—those who know me will understand what an extraordinary accomplishment this is
• Wrote 12 blog posts
• Read and reviewed one book—below average for me, but it was not a priority for this retreat
• Completed six kitchen-related projects—some large, some small
• Completed a major project in the master bedroom/bath
• Created four Shutterfly projects
• Cooked some dishes to freeze for future quick meals
• And a lot of little things

Because my 95 by 65 goal required me to log at least 40 hours of photo work, and I didn't want to limit myself to either one-hour time blocks or very tedious record-keeping, I looked into time-tracking software.  I found Gleeo Time Tracker, and I absolutely love it!  I think so much of it that I will be writing a review, so I won't go into details here, but it does what I need, it doesn't do what I don't need, and anyway how can you go wrong with a Swiss timepiece?  I began with the photo work, and gradually added (and am still adding as time goes on) more categories and tasks, so the numbers below are, except for the photo hours, understated.  By how much depends on when I added them to the time tracker, and of course there were plenty of other things I did that didn't get recorded.  But what there is, is enough to give a pretty good feeling for how the three weeks went.

I logged an average of about 12 hours per day.  There is some duplication, as when it was appropriate I counted each task separately when multi-tasking.  For example, I often do reading and exercise simultaneously, but they are clearly different activities and it's important for me that I count them both.  Exercise and yard work I only counted as yard work, even though I expended a lot of energy and wound up very tired, because they were the same activity, not two activities occurring simultaneously.  I could have counted the PaintShop instructional videos as either Learnig or Photo Organization, but I chose the latter.  And so on.  There were also many activities that didn't get logged.

Even with some duplication taken into account, these were long days.  I worked from morning till bedtime.  I read only one book, and never turned on the television.  When I sat down to watch a video, 99% of the time I was learning about PaintShop.  (There were a few short videos of terribly cute grandchildren as a change of pace.)  My staycation was no more relaxing than our vacations.  It was wonderful, it was restorative, and I feel great about what I accomplished.  But relaxing it wasn't.  I guess I'm just not cut out for rest.

Or maybe I just need rest in the right circumstances.  Porter came home last night, and this afternoon we sat down together and watched an episode of NCIS.  I have to admit that was just lovely!

I like Bed Bath & Beyond.  Their prices can be a little higher than at some places, but there are plenty of opportunities to get 20%-off coupons, and despite what the fine print might say, the coupons never expire.  Most of all, here is the reason I love to buy small appliances at BBB:

Three years ago we bought a new toaster oven.  I've been very happy with our choice, but early this year I noticed that one of the lower elements had developed a split.

The appliance still worked fine, so dealing with the problem dropped to the bottom of the to-do list.

However, I recently realized that the three-year warranty was about to expire, and the element, much to my surprise, had shown no sign of healing over the last seven months.

I wrote to Cuisenart, and I wrote to Bed Bath & Beyond.  Both responded.  Cuisenart's response was acceptable, but felt scripted and was not particularly helpful.  I was beginning to wonder if it was worth the hassle and postage to return the unit.  Maybe I should just fork over another $65 for a new toaster oven.  If I were being cynical, I'd be pretty sure that's why warranty returns can be difficult.

But Bed Bath & Beyond's response pushed cynicism out the window.  What it boiled down to:  There's no limit on our return policy, just take it back to the store.  Now that's what I call customer service.

So this afternoon I bundled up the toaster oven, not without a prayer of thanksgiving for three years of good service, and headed off to our local store.  Thanks to Porter's meticulousness, I had the receipt, but since I wanted to do an even exchange I might not even have needed that.  The cheerful and helpful sales clerk took the old toaster oven and sent me to pick out a new one.  I was pleased to note that they are still carrying the same model, slightly updated, and for the same price as in 2012.  The clerk made the exchange and sent me out of the store with a smile.  Needless to say, I was smiling, too.

As far as I'm concerned, that's more than enough reason to shop at Bed Bath & Beyond.  And to keep our receipts!

Ah, I knew there was a reason I didn't want to have Amazon's "1-Click" purchase button turned on.  But when buying Kindle books, there's no choice.  Tonight I was browsing their daily deals and, somehow, accidentally clicked on a "Buy now with 1-Click" button.  I think the problem was related to the fact that something—my computer, Firefox, Norton, our ISP; I don't know the culprit—has been making the Internet unpredictably slow.  For a while it will go just fine, then lag by several seconds.  For example, typed the first half of the previous sentence in real time, then the last half took in all my keystrokes before appearing all at once.  The mouse has a similar problem, so the computer must have registered a click in the wrong place.

Whatever the reason, I was on the phone to Amazon right away.  There really needs to be a "cancel this order" button.  I know how to do that with physical orders, but could see no way to do it with the digital order.  So I called.  Yes, I, even phone-phobic I, picked up the phone.  The cost was only $1.99, not a high-risk financial move, but two bucks is two bucks, and it was definitely not the  kind of book I wanted cluttering up my Kindle.

Despite language issues, I think the Amazon rep got things straightened out for me.  The book disappeared from my Kindle all right, but the refund of my charge should come "within two to three business days."  I'm hoping it will be a bit faster than that, just because I don't think it should take so long, but I'm happy to know that such accidental purchases can be undone.  Maybe next time I'll find a "cancel" button—but I'm also hoping there won't be a next time.

Now my computer/Internet/browser/whatever really needs a rest.  Maybe it will feel better in the morning.

We didn't come nearly as far south as usual on our trip home from Connecticut, because we enjoyed a wonderful visit with my cousin, her husband, and other family members.  We hadn't seen each other since my Dad's memorial service in 2002, and only just scratched the surface of reminiscing and catching up.  We could have lingered longer over breakfast, but we needed to get going, and anyway, our hosts were dealing with a clogged kitchen sink.  It was a great visit, but it meant we were still nearly 850 miles from home.  We were thinking of stopping around Savannah, but ... things happened.

The trip began uneventfully, unless you count the good event—the trip from Washington, DC to Richmond has never been so easy.  Probably that's because we're usually hitting that stretch in the late afternoon, and this was morning.  No traffic problems at all!  But we made a gas stop in good old Walterboro, SC, and as we drove away the car door locks began randomly and repeatedly cycling:  lock, unlock; lock, unlock.  We tried this, we tried that.  We searched the Internet, where what we found most useful was learning that other people have had the same problem, though there was no consensus as to a solution.  I whined on Facebook, and received some replies that cheered us up, but no practical suggestions.  Our own mechanic had gone home for the day.

So we just kept going.  Instead of stopping in Savannah, we decided to go straight home, not knowing what might happen if we stopped the car and left it overnight.  There were some promising breaks in the lock cycling, but it would come back again.  And again.  Until finally it didn't.

Although we no longer had our Personal Percussion accompaniment, the I-4 stretch had enough to keep the driver awake:  a long construction zone, with no street lights and no lane markers, in the pitch dark and pouring rain.  At least the other folks on the road had the sense not to be driving the posted 70 mph speed limit.  But we made it to the grocery store, where the car locks behaved normally, for a few staples and some sushi for dinner—as I said, we hadn't wanted to stop the car while far from home.

And then we were home!  All seemed well, and we walked over to the neighbors' to pick up our mail.  There we discovered that both of them were sick in bed.  This is relevant to my tale because of what happened next:  Porter went to turn the water to the house back on, and discovered the valve was leaking—and who knows how long it had been.  He had the material needed to repack the valve, so instead of enjoying our sushi, he went to work.  Normal procedure would have been to borrow from our neighbor both his assistance and the tool needed to turn the water off at the street.  But ... (see above).  Not without difficulty, Porter managed to make do with me as an assistant and wrenches plus a lot of effort to turn the water off, then on again, then off again when we realized things were still leaking, then on again when the repair was finally complete.  Well, almost—we have water, and we've left the finishing touches for a time when, we hope, the "sun comes out and dries up all the rain."  So the day that began with plumbing, ended with plumbing.

Oh, and we also replaced the battery in one of our smoke detectors, which was beeping so insistently I could hear it from outside the house.

We may be getting to bed a lot later than we had hoped, but we're home, we're thankful for a wonderful vacation and a safe return, and we trust that daylight will reveal no further problems—our neighbors keep a good eye on things while we are gone—and we finally had a chance to enjoy our sushi.  Soon we will be off to bed, after I write one more post....

After spending two weeks with our this-side-of-the-Atlantic grandchildren, I find myself puzzled.  I've researched the genealogies of both sides of the family pretty far back, and have yet to discover where the mountain goat line comes in.

I've written about this before, when a park maintenance man berated us for allowing a 14-month-old to climb freely over the playground equipment.  Now that toddler is four-and-a-half, and correspondingly even more sure of foot.  Nor are her siblings any less coordinated.

One of our favorite Maggie P. activities (besides eating M&M's) is to walk to the Outer Light.  This includes traversing a half-mile-long stone breakwater, which of course is the most fun part of the trip for the kids.  Most of the huge granite rocks are flat enough for easy hiking, but there are good-sized gaps, and some tricky spots, particularly where unfortunate ships have shoved the rocks askew.

On this particular day, the five oldest children—Jonathan (11.75), Noah (9), Faith (nearly 7), Joy (4.5) and Jeremiah (2.5)—made the trek, along with Grandma (old enough) and Dad-o (ditto).  The three oldest had no intention of walking sedately and carefully across the rocks.  Oh, they were careful enough—but at a running pace.  I walked with Joy, while Porter and Jeremiah brought up the rear.  Jonathan had time to run out, back, and out again well before the four of us arrived at the lighthouse, but it was only short legs that held us back.  Or so I thought, until the trip back.  Jeremiah kept a grip on Porter's hand, but leapt over foot-wide fissures with ease and confidence.  Joy was completely reliable, and I only reminded her a couple of times (probably unnecessarily) that the danger was not in the rocks, nor the speed, but in not paying attention to where her feet were landing.

As we neared the lighthouse itself, Faith, who had waited there for us, informed Joy that the final stretch was a bit difficult (true).  Joy drew herself up to her full height and proclaimed "I'm four!  Last year I was only three!"—with all the indignation of a teenager's, "But Mom, I'm almost an adult!"  And proceeded to climb all over the area of jagged, randomly placed and spaced stones—with a lot more agility than her grandmother, I can assure you.  Even Jeremiah insisted on going wherever his siblings went, dragging Dad-o with him.

On the return trip, only Jeremiah consented to stay with an adult, and his slower pace was due more to his two-year-old desire to stop and examine everything (Porter steered him deftly around the dead and decaying cormorant) than to his size.  Joy threw off all fetters and flew (safely) across the rocks, behind but no less carefree than her siblings.  I thought I might catch up with her at one of the tricky spots, but she maneuvered through them with no hesitation.

I confess that I was relieved to have everyone's feet back on solid sand, but it was a great trip, and I was humbled by the exuberant courage of the young, who know that a challenge is what turns a simple walk into an adventure.