Archive for the ‘Activities’ Category

Road trip report

Tuesday, September 21st, 2021

I was out of town over the weekend. One of my sisters had a birthday recently, and her daughter wanted to host a surprise party for her. It was originally going to be held on her birthday, but it was delayed because my niece’s husband tested positive for COVID.

In any case, I left home last Thursday and drove to Texas. I took two days to travel from Denver to Dallas, which seemed to work well. It turned out that I was the surprise at the party, which was fine. I had a nice visit Friday and Saturday, then left Sunday morning to head home.

On the way out, I went east on I-70, then south from Salinas. My plan for the return trip was to head west, stopping in Amarillo for a meal at Dyer’s BBQ, and stopping overnight somewhere along the way before heading north on I-25 at Raton to get back to Denver. It didn’t happen that way.

I got to Amarillo in time for a late lunch, but Dyer’s was apparently closed for remodeling. At least, there was fencing all around the building, it looked closed, and nobody was parked around it. Disappointed, I grabbed a quick fast-food lunch, then continued on. I was far enough west of the main highway that my GPS navigation decided that the back roads were faster than going back to the highway. That may have been correct, but it meant fewer gas stations and rest stops, which can be important factors for someone my age.

In any case, I got to Raton before dinnertime, and headed north because I wasn’t that hungry yet. I ended up driving all the way from Dallas to Denver in one day, which was not something I’d intended; I just didn’t want to pay for an overnight stay when I was only a couple of hours from home. It took about 13.5 hours total. The last time I’d done a drive of that length was in 1997, when I drove from Denver to San Antonio in one day; about 16 or 17 hours, as I recall.

I spent yesterday recovering; the lack of activity caused pain in my legs and hips, and I had a headache that started sometime Sunday afternoon and lasted until sometime yesterday. If I had it to do over again, I think I’d stop in Amarillo, no matter that it was early afternoon, and find another place for a good meal and get a room overnight. Maybe try that place that has the 72-ounce steak that’s free if you can eat it in a certain amount of time. Not that I’d order that; I know I can’t even consider that kind of massive meal anymore.

Reminiscing

Friday, December 21st, 2018

Ten years ago today, Marion and I arrived in the Galapagos for our first overseas trip together. We had spent a couple of days in Quito ahead of our flight to San Cristobal Island, and we had a good time there.

The Galapagos were incredible. We were on a tour with GAP Adventures (now G Adventures), and spent ten days traveling to five of the islands and seeing the sights. After the tour ended, we spent another few days traveling through Ecuador. A very nice trip. I still have a Panama hat that I bought, along with a couple of shirts, one from the Galapagos Marine Reserve, and the other with Lonesome George embroidered on it.

I’d love to go back, but I doubt that I ever will. I’d probably say more about the trip, but my ISP has changed the interface used to write posts, and I didn’t realize it until started to write this article. I don’t know how to do anything without inserting the HTML manually, and I don’t know where to find things yet.

It’s Thanksgiving

Thursday, November 22nd, 2018

Since it was only my girlfriend and myself today (my daughter and her friends had other plans), I did not cook a Thanksgiving dinner. I did make a couple of desserts: a bourbon chocolate pecan pie and some chocolate rum balls. Instead, we went out. It was fine, and I don’t have the room in my fridge for leftovers from cooking a big meal, anyway.

One thing I meant to do, but never got around to, was to learn this so that I could play it today. Maybe next year.

I wasn’t expecting that

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2018

A couple of weeks ago, my sewing machine (an ELNA from the 1970s – very nice, durable machine) broke – the lower bobbin stopped turning, which meant that stitches were no longer being made. I found out where to take it for repairs (surprisingly close to my home) and they sent it off to the repair center. Repairs and refurbishing were going to cost a little under $200.

I have it back now, with no money out of pocket. The part that broke was a plastic gear, and that gear is no longer available. I haven’t decided what to do – I seldom have a real need to sew anything, but I do have some things that need sewing now, and a machine would be a lot easier than hand-stitching.

I don’t even know if the broken gear was returned with the machine. I think what I’ll do is try to find or make a replacement – there may be something available that’s close enough, or perhaps I can swing some time on a 3D printer, but in either case I’ll need to know what the dimensions, teeth, etc. are for the gear.

And if I can’t find or make a replacement gear, I’ll at least have a motor with a speed control foot pedal available.

Milestone achieved – next level unlocked!

Thursday, May 10th, 2018

Back in February, I noted that Marion and I were working our way through Will and Ariel Durant’s ‘The Story of Civilization.’ Monday night, we finished the first volume (‘Our Oriental Heritage’). It was an interesting book, fascinating in parts. Neither of us found the section on India to be as interesting as the rest, although I think I enjoyed it more than Marion did.

Now, we get to move on to the second volume, which is all about Greece. We’re looking forward to it!

I’m back!

Friday, September 8th, 2017

Marion and I just returned from a European trip. Well, we actually returned last Saturday evening, but my internet was out. It remained out until last night.

I couldn’t get a tech over the holiday weekend; the first available slot was Wednesday morning, which I couldn’t do. Wednesday afternoon I was available, though, and when the tech came, it didn’t take him long to determine that it was a cable problem. The cable crew couldn’t come out until sometime yesterday, but they got my internet up and running again.

We were on a tour called “The Best of Eastern Europe.” The tour group leader (CEO, or Chief Experience Officer in the parlance of the company) didn’t agree that it was a tour of Eastern Europe; her opinion is that it was a tour of Central Europe. The company actually has a tour that goes to most of the same cities that they call “Explore Central Europe.”

The differences are that the “Eastern” Europe tour includes Poland, and the “Central” Europe tour is part of their National Geographic tour series. Joking around on the tour, we decided that that the tours were named as they were because the general public considers anything east of Germany to be “Eastern Europe,” while “National Geographic” readers are likely to know more geography.

We had a great time. I drank a lot more beer than I normally do on the trip – I’d have one or two half-liter glasses with most dinners. It was usually quite good beer, too. The only beer I wasn’t that fond of was the “smoked beer” that I tried in Cesky Krumlov. It’s a local specialty that was first brewed when part of a brewery caught fire, and they decided to use the barley that had come through the fire. It wasn’t bad, but I preferred the more usual beers, such as Staropramen. One of the other guys on the tour asked for “a good German beer” at a biergarten in Berlin, and was told that the really good beers came from the Czech Republic.

I was rather surprised at how hard it was to find restaurants serving traditional food in Berlin; the best meal we had there was actually at an Italian trattoria. Italian and kebab places seemed to be the most common.

Warsaw and Krakow were nice (I prefer Krakow). We got traditional food in each of those cities, and Marion acquired a taste for pierogi.

In the Czech Republic, we also got traditional food in both Prague and Český Krumlov.

By the time we got to Vienna, I was starting to tire of traditional foods. We attended a concert of Mozart and Strauss music in the venue that saw The Magic Flute’s first performance. The Instagram reviews the people sitting in front of us were reading described it as “cheesy but fun,” but we thought it was both good and fun, with no “cheesy” involved.

We’d been in Budapest before, so we hadn’t planned to stay there after the trip officially ended. We ducked out on the walking tour part-way through, because we’d already seen Heroes Square, and took a tour of the State Opera House instead. Much more interesting, and we took the tour that provided a mini-concert of two arias at the end. Beautiful building, with great acoustics.

We saw several castles, and took tours through most of them. We had a couple of extra days in Berlin prior to the start of the tour, so we took a day trip to Potsdam. We toured Schloss Cecilienhof, where the Potsdam Conference took place, then saw the gardens at Sanssouci. We couldn’t get onto the grounds of the third palace in the area (the New Palace, I think) because it was closed for a classical music festival.

In Krakow, we saw Wawel Castle, but didn’t take an “inside” tour.

We did tour Prague Castle, and attended a concert in the Basilica of St. George. If you’re there, definitely pay for one of the inside tours – St. Vitus’ Cathedral is not to be missed.

Český Krumlov Castle is nice, but not as impressive. The gardens are pretty nice, though.

In Vienna, we toured Schönbrunn Palace, which was impressive. We also had a very good meal at the palace cafe. The palace offered nightly Mozart/Strauss concerts, but we attended one downtown. The palace was on the far side of downtown from our hotel, and its concert ran later. Given that we were leaving Vienna the next morning, I wanted to get back to the hotel earlier, so we went with the concert at Palffy Palace.

I’ll probably post a few photos over the next few days, but it’s getting too late to do so tonight.

It’s been a busy week

Friday, June 9th, 2017

Among other historic events, this past week has contained:

  • The 28th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests,
  • The 49th anniversary of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination by Sirhan Sirhan,
  • The 50th Anniversary of the Six-Day War, and
  • The 73rd Anniversary of D-Day.

I intended to write about some of these on their anniversaries, but we’ve been busy at work, and I’ve started looking for another job. The boss has decided to retire, and the company has been kind of limping along for the couple of years. We have also experienced some problems that have had major effects. Among the biggest, we had a dispute with Intuit that messed up our accounting for almost a year, so we never quite knew just how much money we owed or had available to us. Also, customers and suppliers have caused us cash-flow problems that have had significant follow-on effects (hey, we know the economy has been pretty bad for just about everyone, but we’re a small manufacturer, not a bank!), and everything has just added up into a perfect storm.

So far, the job search has been better than the last time I was looking: back then, my applications and resumes were sent out and almost all disappeared into a void … I only got four interviews and no offers over the course of almost an entire year. This time, I haven’t had any interviews yet (one phone interview that was scheduled never happened), but I’ve at least been notified that some of my applications have been received, and received two responses that said I wasn’t a match. One of them, I’m not certain if it was snarky or merely attempting to be “hip.” It was a response, though, so I know I didn’t disappear into limbo.

Dealing with email is taking more time, as well. I normally get between thirty and a hundred spam emails a day, mostly attempts at spam comments for this site. They’re running at the high end recently, and now I’ve got all the job notification emails coming in – around thirty to forty per day. Part of that’s my fault – signing up at one site got me signed up for about nine others, including two resume services. I get what is effectively the same message with the same job listings about three times a day each from around four different job sites. I’m tempted to look into writing some sort of app to filter my emails and only allow emails with job listings through if they contain any that I haven’t seen yet. The listings in the email are short enough and vague enough that I’ve clicked through to several that I’ve already rejected as inappropriate. And almost every one says, “Posted TODAY,” even though I saw it several days ago, and clicking the link produces a “This job is no longer available” message.

I’m also finding that targeting is not necessarily their strong point. While looking for embedded programming jobs in my area, I’m receiving job listing for jobs all over the country (and the world, there’s one job listing purportedly for Denver which actually lists the job as being in Hyderabad) and for things I’m not qualified to perform or have no relation to embedded software (sewage line inspector in Illinois, among others). Not to mention the repeated unsolicited offers to work as an Uber driver open my own State Farm office.

In any case, I’ll probably not be updating this website very often for a while (so, what else is new?), because I’ll be working, trying to get the company prepared for closing down, looking for a job and networking with my various social groups, getting the company’s GitHub page and my GitHub page updated with things I’ve done (I signed up for a page, but have done almost nothing with it yet), and doing anything else useful that comes to mind.

That took a while

Thursday, May 18th, 2017

Marion and I hiked up Mt. Falcon Sunday. It took a little over 2 hours to reach the top, and a little less than 2 hours to get back down. Slower than we’ve hiked it before, but we’re both several years older since the last time, and we’ve suffered broken ankles (me) and broken feet (Marion) since then.

It was a beautiful day for a hike, and we both enjoyed it. I saw a fair number of birds, and got photos of a few. There were some Western Meadowlarks flying around near the parking lot, but they never settled down anywhere I could take a photo of them. There were several pairs of a brownish bird with a white band at the tip of their tales that were flying around the trail, or perhaps it was the same pair several times. They never perched anywhere in the open, and were more-or-less playing aerial tag like the meadowlarks. I presumed they were courting, and I don’t have enough information to identify them.

There were several pelicans flying high over the peak – at first, I thought they were balloons that someone had released at Red Rocks Amphitheater, which is just north of Mt. Falcon, but I noticed some slightly erratic motions and took a couple of photos. Out of focus, but fairly recognizable if you’ve seen American White Pelicans in flight before.

There were a few Rufous-Sided Towhees, one of which stayed in one location and sang, allowing me to get some good photos. I saw two hummingbirds, one of which stayed perched long enough for me to get a couple photos, a scrub jay, and a Scarlet Tanager that kept hopping around the interior of a couple trees, preventing me from getting any photos. I did get several photos of some Turkey Vultures that were flying around.

A good day, but I regretted the photos I missed. The title for the post references the fact that today is the first day my calves weren’t bothering me from overuse. The two hours of dance class I have tonight may bring a relapse, though. Gotta drive through the snow to get to class, though. It’s been snowing all day, and the forecast calls for snow though tomorrow. We had at least 4 inches of heavy, wet, snow at work, but it didn’t look like there was as much here at home.

So, I saw a photo online …

Wednesday, May 10th, 2017

… and thought I recognized it.

This photo is number 39 in this post (note: there are photos of scantily-clad young women on the site and in this post, just in case that either bothers or appeals to you).

I went through my photos, and found this one:

It’s a view of Cathedral Cove, in the Te Whanganui a Hei Marine Reserve on New Zealand’s North Island. The view is looking through a passage between Mare’s Leg Cove and Cathedral Cove. A beautiful location in a beautiful country. Here’s a couple more photos. Click on them if you want to see them bigger.

A new toy and a couple of horror stories

Tuesday, April 18th, 2017

I recently was given an old Windows XP laptop. As XP is no longer maintained or secure, I’ve decided to play with a Linux-based OS, specifically, Elementary. It ought to be educational.

I’ve also run across a couple of horror-related items.

In the first, Warner Brothers is being sued for big money over the “Conjuring” movies, by an author who claims he has a prior, exclusive, contract with the people who provided the source information. The fun part is, apparently the only way WB can win is by proving the existence of ghosts and witches.

The other involves a family who got together to play a horror-themed desktop game, and ended up with more excitement than they expected. I have a friend who says he has a similar story about watching The Exorcist the first time while attending a conference at Walter Reed.