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:

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. 

 

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 (it actually took close to a year), 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, a more manageable home, NM MRC (Eleni is finally divested), 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 - pretty good
• Midnight Run - ditto
• Rockwell - Disappointed
• Steinhardt - very nice people/place 

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.

John Barth was my first favorite author

Update: 2 copies of "The Sot-weed Factor were found and packed to go to Maryland. Ask me when we get there if you want to read it.

Sadly, I know of no one specifically to share this with.

Bill Hutchison handed me a copy of "The Sot-weed Factor" in high school. That, and knocking bullies off me one time, etched a permanent memory of him in my mind. But we never really connected and never stayed in touch after high school. And nobody else that I ever handed the book to ever finished reading it, to my knowledge.

So I will share this obituary - https://www.npr.org/2024/04/03/1242508803/john-barth-novelist-author-obituary - with my blog.

Thank you John Mathew Smith

He was my favorite author for many years. While none of his other works ever reached the level of immersion I got in "The Sot-weed Factor," he wrote several others that are "classic" in my mind. Would he have objected to that term?

I took 2 literature courses in college that I selected by seeing a book of his on the syllabus. I still have a copy of "Why the Floating Opera" that I wrote for one of those. While the paper was above average - inspired by the book - it was still the product of a sophomore. So maybe I should resist sending it through the OCR and attaching it . . .

"Giles Goat-boy" was my second-favorite of his books. If it had been written in this century, it might have been labelled "fantasy" and ended up on Netflix. I fell in love with the name "Anastasia" from that book and our daughter got that name. I must clarify, though, she is not "named after" the character.

I read everything John Barth wrote for a long while. Every book was literature, not just a product for the printing presses. After many years though, it seemed that he was no longer writing for me, the reader, but for other writers to learn from. Being a consumer of fiction, I eventually stopped looking for anything new from him.

That's when somebody turned me on to Neil Gaiman. Hopefully, I will need really strong reading glasses to read his obituary (or vice-versa). Neil has also moved on from works of classic adult literature, so I need a new favorite author.

The Jemez 500

Video of The Start

Zak & family visit for "one last time"

 Zak thinks he hears that we will move to Maryland before next year's holiday season. Maybe . . .

Regardless, Zak, Janae, Kaitlyn, & Alexis came to visit us for a whole week over Thanksgiving! Zak helped work on the deck A LOT, and it is getting close. Yiayia spent a lot of time teaching Kaitlyn & Alexis all sorts of stuff. Janae's mother & Max came for Thanksgiving day. Max may have made the favorite dish - Mac&Cheese. The turkey was ruined by malfunctioning meat thermometer.

So far, only 2 photos to post:

At the top of Coyote Call trail. Some altitude sickness occurring.

At Soda Dam with Yiayia

The Bears Return!

Got any honey? 

And the original . . .