Journal: January – February 2023

• January 8 – Holiday recap, Lantern closes, Sue’s Storyworth project
• January 23 – Billzpage down
• February 1 – February concerts, catching up on January
• February 10 – Bullet points of many topics
• February 27 – Allie comes again to Maryland, dining out, preparing for Punta Cana

January 8

Continuing our recap of Allie’s holiday visit with us…

Sunday, 1/1/23: Once we all woke up, none too early, we had whitefish and bagels procured from Mikey and Mel’s the day before. Barb and Allie spent a quiet day puzzling and reading. Our New Year’s resolution was to finish off some of the leftovers in the fridge, which we more or less accomplished. Therefore, our New Year’s resolutions are more or less complete. Allie and I took advantage of the unseasonably warm weather to fit in a neighborhood walk in the afternoon.

Monday, 1/2: I woke up early with a brainstorm for personal Bingo cards for the year. Allie and I had the initial thought a couple of days ago and we had fun with it for a few minutes but we didn’t actually develop it. Today I tried to put together this format for annual Bingo cards for myself and Allie. After spending a few hours I hit a dead end and abandoned the effort for the time being, though I did find several websites (BonusBingo seems like it may be the best one) that could help at some point.

This was a holiday for both Allie and Barb. Allie and I watched Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. I had seen it before but Allie hadn’t. She liked it and indeed decided it was probably the best movie of 2022. I’m glad she enjoyed it. I quite liked seeing it again as well.

I had tennis in the evening so we had an early dinner at EC Diner. Barb tried the $18 Monday lobster special and liked it, so that may become more of a tradition for us. I tried a broiled flounder or some other fish that was mediocre at best. At least I avoided the temptation to get a patty melt. Allie got a seafood pasta that yielded plenty of leftovers for her lunch the next day.

Tuesday, 1/3: Allie worked from home for most of the day until we left for her flight home around 5pm. She and Perri made it home without too much of a delay later that night.

This nearly two-week visit home for Allie amounted to a nice staycation for her and Barb. Both of them were able to take a few days off, had quiet weeks at work, and were able to relax. It was very pleasant all around.

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The very next day, Allie’s Lantern CEO unexpectedly called an all-hands meeting and announced the company was shutting down just two days later on Friday, January 6. Evidently, the board of directors decided that the cannabis distribution market was not developing as quickly or as profitably as they’d hoped. Certainly the fragmented nature of cannabis legislation from state-to-state and locality-to-locality made the business model questionable. The slow roll-out of the big New York and New Jersey markets didn’t help, nor did rising interest rates and talk of a recession.

The announcement was a shock, a bolt out of the blue for Allie. She was quite upset on Wednesday, a little more accepting on Thursday when she found she would get two months of severance pay, and a bit better on Friday once she could commiserate with her co-workers and got a lead on a new position from her boss. So, as of Monday, 1/9, Allie was officially unemployed and embarked upon a new job hunt. We wish her well. By the end of the week she reported that she already had several screener interviews set up including the one that her boss helped set up. We expect she will land on her feet but it is a period of uncertainty.

On the same day, 1/4, Barb learned that one of her closest coworkers and friends, Diana, has a tumor that might be cancerous. She’s feeling sick and depressed, and that adds to Barb’s worries and anxieties. That goes on top of Barb’s anxieties about retiring and worries about Allie. So, all in all, it was a trepidatious start to the new year.

Sue has invited me to be her editor and something of a collaborator on her effort to document her life along with her climate and peace initiatives. She’s using the Storyworth platform to try to write a book in 2023 that will become an heirloom and guide to her grandchildren and beyond. It’s an ambitious effort which I can’t help but encourage, but at the same time I’m not sure what I’m really committing to. I’ve read the first handful of entries and have spent a fair amount of time responding and researching her article about Martin Luther King’s World House, a concept I did not know about before (it’s hard to even find an authoritative summary online; this one from Duke University is not bad but the best is an excerpt of King’s own writing). King’s metaphor is actually interesting and I’m surprised it is not more widely known. 

But, all this researching and reading has put a dent in my own time to write this journal and work on billzpage, so I have guilt, too. I feel like I’ve been on hold since November, though in reality I’ve had two trips and the holidays to process and summarize. I’m finally catching up. Now let’s see if I can make a dent in my own timelines and finish some other posts, like wrapping up our 2008 trip to Hawaii and the second half of that year, and start tackling my robotics career at some point soon. There’s always more.

Oh, and by the way, this week Barb finally made her retirement announcement official. The date is June 30, as she communicated to her staff and officemates on Wednesday of this week. The news was met with appropriate gasps of disbelief and expressions of congratulations. So now she and they have six months to come to grips with that reality. Which reminds me, I need to look at a new set of documents Barb just got from her HR specialist.

Also, we confirmed that Ada will join us for the Cornwall portion of our trip to England in May. It should be fun to have a traveling companion, for both Barb and me. Ada’s very brave. And on a similar note, Barb started a discussion with Dan and David to potentially go with them to Ireland, maybe next year. We will finally see Dan and David’s new house this weekend and explore the prospects further. Stay tuned.

January 23

Oh my goodness. For more than a week, Billzpage has been down due to a misconfiguration between BlueHost and Cloudflare. I’ve spent repeated hours, mostly on hold, with BlueHost trying to sort out what’s been wrong. Each day we wandered down different troubleshooting trees but hit dead ends as the techs concluded there was something wrong with the Cloudflare configuration but I was at a loss to figure out what it was…and my free account with Cloudflare did not allow me to speak with anyone at their support. Today I finally sought out some local expertise and Googled my way to Mosaic Data Services in Gaithersburg. An actual human being, Josh Martin, Director of Operations, answered the phone and worked with me for an hour or so to sort things out. He convinced me that it would be best to actually have his company host my sites and I eventually agreed to his offer to do both sites for $15/month total. He tracked down the Cloudflare error (something to do with SSL configurations that I didn’t understand) but was also surprised to find that Billzpage was so large with more than 15,000 images and close to 40Gb. He said it would cost more like $40-50/month for hosting and suggested I might be better off staying with BlueHost. So we left it there. He only charged me $50 for troubleshooting. A good deal, as far as I was concerned. At least now I know someone I can call in case of future problems.

The angst of having the site down was a sufficient excuse for me to not deal with this journal or do any writing for the past week or so. Instead, I’ve done some shopping, selecting a new mattress and a sofa/loveseat to replace the existing ones that have done their duties for more than 15 years. I’ve also been recovering a little bit from playing tennis on Monday night and pickleball the next day. My knees were creaky for most of the week after that. From now on I will make sure to spread the games out. 

Allie had a good trip to New York City over the MLK weekend and has stayed busy with interviews for a new job over the ensuing week. She has some second rounds set up and has her first dog-walking assignment coming up this week. I’m still confident she will find something reasonably soon but she has also applied for unemployment insurance, so we’ll all learn a little bit more about that.

In happier news, I got the paperwork for my retirement annuity from Axel Johnson, the former parent company of Hekimian. I will start collecting on April 1, after my birthday. Barb is also coming to grips with her retirement and I think is slowly getting more comfortable with the idea that we can afford to do this. 

I had lunch last week with Jenny – we went back to Vaughn’s Cheese and had a very nice time. She talked me into volunteering to judge the mentor awards at the FLL Championship at the end of February. We each came home with an assortment of cheese. A very happy little spot. Coincidentally, there’s a discussion brewing with the FIRST Chesapeake folks to maybe get a better handle on supporting FTC teams in Maryland. A conference call is scheduled for this week which may include Mike, Amber and maybe some other members of the old gang. I’m not sure how much we can help but it should be interesting to talk.

February 1

On the home front, Barb and I have invested in a few home improvements, our first upgrades to some of our most frequently used appliances/furniture in quite a while. We got a new mattress delivered today, selected a new sofa and loveseat set that will arrive at the end of March, and are still waiting for the new oven we bought on Black Friday after Thanksgiving. We’re doing what we can to keep the economy going, and feathering our nest a bit as we transition into retirement mode. It seems a reasonable investment in our sedentary lifestyle. Our current mattress and sofa/loveseat have done reasonable tours of duty for more than 15 years, and our current oven door has never shut properly since we moved in, much to Barb’s consternation.

What had seemed a quiet winter is quickly filling up with interesting doings, many of them musical. On Saturday I have a concert at the Strathmore in Rockville, Voices of Mississippi, an “immersive multimedia experience” that includes performances by Bobby Rush, Sharde Thomas, and Luther and Cody Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars. The show is a touring version of an award winning 2019 album/multimedia project of the same name by Dr. William Ferris. I’m not very familiar with this project or many of the artists but I’m willing to give the show a try. The Strathmore is one of my favorite venues and it gives me a chance to try out roast pork at Kuya Ja Lechon restaurant. 

In the middle of February, I have a ticket to see the Tedeschi Trucks Band at the Warner Theater in DC. I first saw them 15 years ago at Merriweather, teamed up with Santana in one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen. Barb and I will make a weekend of it, staying two nights at The DC Wharf. We’ll have some good eating and may take in a museum on Saturday, or not. We’ll see.

Sometime last summer I heard about the debut album of Buffalo Nichols and liked a number of his songs and acoustic guitar picking, sort of a cross between Chris Smither, Ry Cooder and Gary Clark. I downloaded a podcast interview and it sat for months on my phone until I got around to listening to it yesterday. That in turn led me to check out Buffalo Nichols’ touring schedule and I found out he’s performing here in a few weeks, presented by the Columbia Arts Center. Typical of our fractured media landscape, I had no idea, but I quickly snapped up a ticket and invited Larry to join me. He will, so we have a date for February 23. So that’s three interesting concerts in the near future.

At the end of February, Barb, Allie and I will jet off to Excellence El Carmen in Punta Cana for five nights, our winter break. That is, assuming Allie is available to join us. I expect she will be. She is busily interviewing for a new job since her Lantern company collapsed in early January. She has two “final” interviews this week with ezCater and Flexcar and she’s hoping for good news from either. Even if she gets an offer, she’s going to try to start after we return from Punta Cana in early March. Fingers crossed on all fronts.

But before we get to all of these February events, I have to get through a colonoscopy this Friday, which means going through the prep and cleansing process on Thursday. I’m not looking forward to either of those events. But I’m reasonably confident I will get through them with no real problem – the colonoscopy is a precautionary followup to my last one three years ago. The doctor found some benign polyps that time and wants to check again rather than wait another decade. So be it. I will keep my mind on the future.

I’ve been able to finally complete a long-delayed post about the Maui leg of our 2008 trip to Hawaii. I started working on it in September and it’s taken me until now to finish. That’s obviously too long, but we have had a mildly busy few months of travels and things going on. Now it’s on to Kauai. Wish me luck. I also decided to write down details of the Jose Andres and Family in Spain series in hopes that I may someday get to eat some of the featured food. 

Other than that, in general I’m trying to be more productive and efficient with my retirement/leisure time. I am enjoying pickleball in addition to tennis, trying to fit in at least one of them each week, sometimes both, in addition to my walking. I find I can’t really do more than two days of tennis/pickleball in a week or my knees and hips start to ache. I don’t want to overdo it. I find that I’m a pretty good pickleball player, but there are definitely some guys and a few ladies who can really crank up and beat me if they want to. I have things to learn. 

I’m trying to read and comment on Sue’s writings, but at the moment I’ve fallen behind in favor of getting my own work done. I’ll try to catch up tomorrow when I’m doing my colonoscopy prep. Seems appropriate. And I still have a lot of things to watch on TV, some of them educational, most of them not. My JustWatch list grows much faster than I can actually watch things. There’s a lot in the world to consume and I always have trouble controlling my appetite. And, to make things worse, I just upgraded my New York Times subscription to include games, cooking and more sports coverage. It’s not easy being retired!

February 10

I have a number of things on my mind, more than I can write about in depth in one sitting. Here’s a bullet list to at least touch the highlights.

• I finished my 2008 Kauai post and started on the Second Half of 2008 post. I realize now it’s been more than a year since I started the 2008 First Half post. 2008 was a very busy year for us, our 50th birthdays and 25th anniversary. I’ve got to pick up the pace.
• When I get to the 2009 Second Half post I will finally overlap with my active Google calendar and Gmail accounts. So I can get even more granular with day-to-day goings on, as if that’s at all appealing. Then I need to really tackle my VISTA/FIRST/STEMaction career which I’ve put off writing about for years. Should be fun. Still a long way to go, but at least once I get up to 2017 I will be close to being current. Sort of.
• I spent some hours rewatching and cataloging the Jose Andres and Family in Spain series. I’ve posted the summaries to Billzpage and Billzdaze.
• Rhiannon Giddens is doing a number of interesting Facebook posts on Black History Month characters. I’ve consolidated and posted them on Billzdaze.
• Rhiannon also appeared on two podcasts this week, one on Speaking Soundly and the other on NatGeo Overheard. I hope it’s the beginning shot of ramping up PR for new music.
• I’ve started a detailed spreadsheet on Howard County Restaurants in the wake of a Howard County Eats post about ethnic restaurants in the county. We really have a rich variety of cuisines available, with more coming all the time, it seems. I figure we have more than 100 restaurants in the county representing dozens of cuisines and hundreds of dishes I want to try. It occurs to me even if I’m methodical about it, it will take me years to get through them and there will always be more. I’ll use the spreadsheet to track restaurants and dishes I’ve enjoyed and those I want to try. 
• Two very appealing and authentic Chinese restaurants have opened in the county in the last few weeks. I’m already starting to test my way through Peter Chang Columbia menu, then also have to try the new Tea Horse Sichuan Bistro.
• I actually finished a book last night: Rock Me on the Water by Ronald Brownstein.
• I wrote up my review of the Voices of Mississippi concert.  
• I’ve watched several Oscar-nominated films, trying to catch up before the awards are presented, including All Quiet on the Western Front, The Fabelmans, and Argentina, 1985. 
• The proliferation of restaurants, movies, entertainment of all sorts makes me realize we are already in an age of superabundance, just starting to learn how to deal with it. But a quick search shows that superabundance may already be a right-wing codeword, so maybe I should take more care in my labels, or thinking.
• Effects of ChatGPT and other AI tech are just starting to be felt. I haven’t tried it yet. Already 100M users? Fastest uptake of new technology? I didn’t realize it would compete with or be an alternative to search, but Google seems worried. 
• It seems we are accelerating our lurch toward a Technological Singularity. Opportunities and disruptions abound. The next few decades are going to be really interesting. I’m glad I’m retired.
• What happens when we have AI-generated music? This also may come much sooner than expected and could doom even more working musicians. The economics of endless streams of auto-generated music may be hard to resist, and may make actual human performance all the more precious.
• Solar power and car batteries – using a car to power your house is closer to reality than I’d realized. I’d like to implement that in our house coupled with solar panels; I’m looking to upgrade our solar panels anyway. Another point of revolution/disruption in power grid and energy usage that could be widely adopted very quickly…maybe.
• Speaking of disruption, Allie didn’t get the top two jobs she interviewed for. She’s heartbroken. She’s now in Lake Tahoe with friends for a few days. I hope she can shake it off and hit the ground running again next week, but the wind is certainly knocked out of her sails for the moment..
• Allie was able to get health insurance figured out. She seems to have found a good deal through Massachusetts Medicaid and Tufts Health, though the process was extremely stressful and confusing for all, including us.
• Laurie started to press on my summer timing. She floated some ideas for July: Huercasa Festival? Kelly and April in Asturias? Trip to Madeira? I still don’t know what I’ll be able to do. I’m not sure I can get a hall pass from Barb until Allie’s status is ironed out.

February 27

We’ve been mildly busy since our weekend in DC. I got my taxes done and dropped off with Bob Tuttle. I played tennis on Monday and pickleball on Thursday. I met with our landscaper to discuss options for removing several trees around our yard. I’m trying hard to keep up with Rhiannon Giddens’ Black History Month profiles. Barb was back at work, dealing with all she does. On Tuesday or so, Allie called to see if she could come down to Maryland early. She still didn’t have a job and was getting worried about spending her own money as opposed to being taken care of by us. We are always happy to have her. 

After Allie swapped her ticket around (and saved a few bucks on that transaction), she got a call from one of the companies she had interviewed with recently. She knew she wasn’t a good fit for the role she interviewed for, and didn’t get that spot, but the company called to say they liked her and her skill set and were going to accelerate a slot that was a better fit for her. The company was Cirkul, a flavored water bottle company that seems to have a lot of market momentum and recent venture funding. Within a few days they created a new position and Allie signed on as a Marketing Analytics Manager. Easy as pie. Unemployment anxieties gone in an instant. 

Allie arrived on Friday and I picked her up midday. We had lunch at the Madrid Spanish Taverna, a fairly nondescript set of montaditos (anchovies, sardines and salami with goat cheese – none were as good as I hoped), good gambas al ajillo and a reliable plate of olives. A nice lunch. We came home and Allie bonded with Manny for a few hours. For dinner we met Barb at Shin Chon but had to wait quite a while for a table. Barb and Allie shared our usual grilled bulgogi and chadolbagyi, but that gave me a chance to try something different so I got a seafood bibimbap. It was tasty but very filling. We were trying to avoid leftovers so we each ate more than our share. Waste not, waist more. After we finished dinner, Barb headed back to work to finish dealing with emails to get ready for our trip. She ended up getting home after 1am. Your tax dollars still hard at work, but at least she claimed to be all done.

On Saturday, I headed off to the FIRST LEGO League Championships at UMBC where I had committed to help Jenny judge the mentor awards. I had a restless night ahead of the assignment and was rather sorry I’d agreed to volunteer once more. I still have a lot of queasy feelings toward FIRST in general and to the arbitrariness of the award judging process, but I looked forward to seeing some old friends. I mainly hoped not to catch Covid or any other bug among the multitude of people at the event.

Jenny and I spent most of our time sequestered in the judges’ room going over more than 100 mentor award submissions. We had to select an adult mentor and a student mentor winner. It was relatively easy narrowing the fields down to our top five and then top three in each category, but selecting a final winner was very tough. It came down to a crapshoot, as it almost always does, with multiple worthy candidates and no really wrong answers but that doesn’t mean we arrived at the right answers. By mid-afternoon, after a fair amount of kibbitzing with old friends who stopped by, including Rose, Jamie and eventually Chuck from Garrett County, Jenny and I wrapped up our selections and headed home, not staying for the final award ceremony. I left with at least as many ambivalent feelings as I arrived with. I’m not at all sure when I might volunteer again.

While I was at robots, the girls went to see the new Antman movie and did some shopping. I beat them home by a few minutes. In the evening, we headed over to the club for dinner to make a dent in our meal quota for the quarter. Barb had a crabcake sandwich (without bread…so was it a sandwich?), Allie had fried catfish and I tried the shrimp and scallop etoufee. All were pretty good. Again, we were in the business of not having leftovers so I scarfed down more than I should have, but it was a nice night together.

On Sunday, Barb cooked up some eggs before she headed off to have tea in Sykesville with her friend, Sheila. I did various chores at home and packed to get ready for the trip while Allie mostly chilled with Manny. For dinner, I had a reservation at Peter Chang’s new Sichuan restaurant in Columbia, mainly so I could show it off to Allie and try some new dishes. We ended up having the Grandma Noodles (good, but not as good as the Wuhan Sesame Noodle), crispy pork belly (excellent!), shrimp and scallop with veggies (which I’d seen recommended and pictured in a pretty little hot pot bowl; excellent), and fried shrimp dumplings for Barb. All four dishes were A+ winners and I was a very happy boy. Allie liked them as well though they were borderline too spicy for her. Barb was still mostly full from her tea so the dumplings were plenty for her. I’m very glad this restaurant has opened in Columbia, along with the new Tea Horse Sichuan Bistro.