Another year, another Boston Cream Pie!

Update: Well, the trend ends. While I was at a brewery in Puerto Rico for my birthday, and happy for that, no BCP until a month later. It came from the store and I was eating it alone (Eleni is in CA this week). 

Dad had yet another birthday, looks like this is becoming a trend.

Dad had his birthday on the fifth! He's realllllly old now. As every year, he gets his Boston Creme Pie. We also went to the fancy movie theater in Santa Fe to see Aquaman and drink beer. Fun!
         Here's last year's cake picture:

And the year before:

And the year before (frown due to pain from surgery):

And the year before:

I think there's usually a lot of beer involved. We have quite the tradition.

Yay!

 

Puerto Rico 69!

 After a one-year hiatus, we spent my birthday week in Puerto Rico again. This time we had Zak's family with us.

Eleni had so much fun she stayed behind when the rest of us went home, though she did return on the 18th.

We did the west coast, specifically Rincón. Rincón is famous for surfing,

which we don't do. There are more food trucks per square mile than anywhere I have seen. And just as many restaurants. That was good, because we do like to eat on vacation. 

Most beaches have rocks just in from the shore. These would not be such an obstacle if the waves were not so violent.

There was a beach just a half-hour walk 

John is ready to walk to the beach

away that was very sandy and calm, so we tried it. Definitely more like the other places we have visited in PR. Everyone else drove 5 minutes in the car to get there.

We rented a townhouse "Steps from the Beach." It was about 120 steps from the driveway to the sand and only a few more to reach water. There was plenty of shade, which was nice. If you braved the waves and got out far enough with snorkel stuff, there were plenty of fishies to watch. No pix of fish.

For my birthday, I visited the town plaza:

Sat with my granddaughters:

And I was serenaded (happily not "Happy Birthday") at a brewery that also had some of the best food of the trip, and certainly the most percussion:

Puerto Rico is very supportive of wall art:

Zach & Kaitlyn spent an entire beach visit with goggles on collecting shells and other interesting stuff from the ocean floor. Zak also found a "message in a bottle" that turned out to be a list of names.

We finally remembered to catch the sunset on the last evening.

And yes, we saw some big iguanas:

Gov. Thomas Johnson High School 2024-25 Term 1 Honor Roll

GRADE 12

FIRST HONORS

Cadence Abbott, Isaiah Adamson, Adebiyi Adeoye, Ahmed Ajmi, Katie Alfaro, Aidan Ambrose, Emerald Appiah-Agyekum, Jasmin Arevalo-Delcid, Charlotte Auth, Edin Avila, Alhaji Bah, Chloe Rose Barnes, Kyle Bauer, Brent Baugher, Tessa Bavari, Elisa Beldon, Daniel Belt, Aleesha Bora, Christopher Borntreger, Shepard Boyd, Dakotah Bright-Brubaker, Milton Canales-Fuentes, Daniela Canas, Marylin Cascante-Cambara, Nathan Chappell, Alex Chung, Ariana Cirincione, Seth Cleveland, Lia Contreras, Micah Cosgrove, Francesco Davies, Kamryn Davis, Tess de Guzman, Brian De Paz Diaz, Kousei DeSantis, Lyla Driggers, Iyanah Duhart, Rebecca Ege, Kaelin Embrey, Addison Fell, Tyler Ferguson, Jocelyn Fernandez-Ramos, Elena Feuer, Beverly Foo, Allahna Foreman, Ian Fountain, Ruby Frank, Kaitlyn Fredlund, Justin Funes, Ashni Gaikwad, Luliana Ghebrengus, Gavin Gieryna, Colbie Gnuschke, Daphnie Gomez, Andres Gonzalez, Sofia Gonzalez-Teo, Christopher Grunwell, Cole Hankey, Jeffrey Harris, Layla Haskins, Kaled Hasna, Brady Helmstetter, Aaron Henry, Cameron Hill, Quynh Huynh, Miles Hyatt, Yocelinn Jaimez, Francesca James, Andre Jimenez-Peacock, Ella Johnson, Taylor Johnson, Logan Keepers, Cesar Lainez Sanchez, Michela Lantella Arocha, Maxwell Leache, Kathryn Lee, Jacob Lin, Tamanii Littles, Julia Lyonga, Jalen Mainess, Hunter Marten, Laila Martin, Naomi Martinez, Thaddeus Mathewson-Wood, Melvin Mendez Gonzalez, Levi Moser, Lihansi Nawarathna, Anthony Nzuzi, Godfrey Omar, Gabriella Page, Benjamin Panford-Quainoo, Paris Parisien, Aarya Patel, Ayush Patel, Andrew Pinto, Cora Preda, Abigail Regan, Jonathan Regules, A’nya Reid, Yolanda Robles, Marisol Robles-Tapia, Matteo Rojas, Alexandria Rudy, Litzy Sanchez Chagoya, Greyson Sims, Wesley Smith, Kirrah Snowden, Ibrahima Souare, Mykenzie Swanson, Naima Thomas, Julianne Traxler, Brenda Vasquez Romero, Kimberly Vasquez-Cifuentes, Alexis Viands, Aaron Villalobos, Brianna Washington, Declan Watkins, William Watkins, Kalcypher Mikael Woods, Nana Ama Yeboah

Christmas 2024

I got Eleni an eBike. She got me a herring.

Kaitlyn, Lexie, and Granddad went to the Adventure Park

Poor Yiayia caught a cold and couldn't come 😢. We tried to have a good time anyway. 

 

Last picture of Mom

 I was going through photos this morning and realized I had never identified this picture as the last one of Mom. She was having a good day - Hershey bars always did it for her. It was not the best time - COVID made visiting pretty much impossible.

We Moved to Maryland

Eleni just hid the For Sale sign from the front of our house!

After 21 years, we left New Mexico to return to the state of our births. NM is "No country for old men," and Eleni wanted to be nearer to her sisters. We bought a house in Frederick without having visited it ourselves (Zak & our agent toured it for us while streaming video back to us). That was kind of too bad, because there was a lot of stuff wrong that we might have caught. But, there are lots of contractors in MD to fix all that stuff.

Goodbye to LCVFD and NM

We left a lot of great memories (detailed in other blog posts) behind - grandsons, LCVFD, our beautiful but too big home, NM MRC (not really), Jemez Pueblo, Santa Fe National Forest, Chewie, Arkoutha, neighbors, lack-of-traffic, and the mountains. We also left behind scarce medical care, horrible roads, horrible education, Starlink ($$ internet), miles to anywhere.

We got granddaughters, Independent Hose (work-in-progress), a more manageable home, NM MRC (really), Gambrill & other state parks, lots of traffic, and "mountains." John has walked and biked to grocery stores, hardware, government offices (service with a smile, but a big fee). We got a selection of doctors😩, a newly-paved road in front of our home, schools everywhere, and Xfinity (oh well). Contractors, of which we have hired many, show up at 7:30 am on the day they say they would show up.

We also got a lot of breweries:

• Idiom - great
• RAK - great
• Prospect Point - beautiful location
• Olde Mother - OK
• Monocacy - biggest disappointment
• Attaboy - haven't been yet - stay tuned
• Midnight Run - ditto
• Rockwell - ditto
• Steinhardt - ditto 

Did I miss any?

This is an old photo. We have MD vanity license tags now

Our garage is just big enough to get our vehicles in. A shed arrives in a few weeks that will allow most of the stuff in the garage to get out of the way!

A short video to show how cool my truck is now (despite it being linked to Elon in many minds)

We biked/boarded downtown with Zak. Happily he was uninjured by the car that turned while is was in a crosswalk

We visited Harpers Ferry in the Fall:

From above

Town center

The railroad station!

The Firehouse! aka John Brown's Fort

The railroad bridge. We never got to see a train crossing.

This sign was hanging in The Rabbit Hole:

We were obviously confused, having been to El Malpais and being pretty sure it was in New Mexico!

John visited Gathland by himself, but later took Eleni:

We walked/slogged the Bay Bridge Run:

Along the way

John at Mile 1. It was cold!

Eleni wearing the MILE 3 signboard

Eleni at the finish line

Two views of the sunrise at Zeta & Sean's:

That's it for now! More blogging from Maryland to come.