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 . . .

Greece 2023

Athens, Naxos, Paros, Antiparos, and Kifisia the easy way.

September, 2023 we returned to Eleni's motherland with her sisters and their husbands.

Upon our arrival in Athens, cousin (once removed) Christos picked us up at the airport, dashing our plans to lug our luggage through the train system. That led to lunch with his mother, Pavlina & Taki, Margarita, and more kids. A nice change from the long flight! We then met up with the sisters, who had arrived the previous day, at the hotel. I believe shopping, drinking, and eating ensued.

The next day, Sean & I took the ferry to Naxos while everyone else flew. I don't know why the ferry cost more than the flight, but it was a nicer and more interesting trip. I sat with a couple from the UK and an UK expat Aussie (randomly assigned seating).

One dinner on Naxos featured fish stew for 2 (motto: a fish in every spoonful!)

Eleni, Sean, and I hiked to visit Zeus' cave.

The trail up

The watcher of the cave

Inside the cave. The colors are from growths on the rocks, rather than human painting, I think.

There were a lot more goats in the area, but only the one that hung out near the trail.

The view from somewhere near our lodgings on Naxos

Then we all got on the ferry for a short trip to the island Paros. 

The front of our Paros lodging

Our first adventure (Eleni, Sean, me) on Paros was a "secret" cove 36.9771, 25.1739. It is a little pool that can only be accessed by swimming around the point and under an arch. Sean & I did that. Actually others jump off the arch, but we are too old for that level of adventure. It's worth several pictures:

and the nearby beach (Tripiti2)

we didn't even swim from because we had to go to another beach (Tripiti1) and another taverna (Glyfa) for lunch.

Sunday was a good day to tour the cathedral:

The garden outside

The front

Inside

Saint Eleni, easily confused with our Eleni

Greek version of a "red tag." Perhaps Sandoval County could use these for our more rural homes?

Another Eleni, Sean, and John adventure day started at the "butterfly" refuge. They are actually moths, but attractive ones:

Up close. When they fly, their wings are red underneath.

Bunches! There were quite a lot of them around.

This unfortunate person bent over to look at a sign and a cat jumped onto her back for a nap. She patiently waited for it to take a little snooze.

The refuge was also a bit of an arboretum. There are many types of trees, mostly fruit-bearing! A nice stop, even if it was not that "Greek."

Then, a short ferry ride and onto the Antiparos Cave! This turned out to be quite the tourist destination, and for good reason. At the entrance, there is a cairn garden:

At 279 feet deep, the cave was spectacular:

If you look closely, you will see the stairs!

Then on to the southern tip of Antiparos to see rocks, swim, and eat:

Too rocky to swim here

But this was nice. The most sheltered-from-wind beach of the trip.

In Lefkes, we found a Greek fire truck, but no firefighters:

Then back to the mainland to stay in Kifisia, visit Zina's family, and more hiking for me. A long hike through suburbs and up the mountain got me to Davelis Cave:

There is a little chapel at the front of the cave

Inside are two altars. This is the newer one.

The older altar, with fading icons

Nicholas, the patron saint of the cave

No cave is complete without a (dead) bat. There was a live one flying around for a moment, but too quick to photograph.

The view from the inside, out.

Our last adventure day, just Eleni & John, walking around the old town:

A Greek UPS driver. Scooters fit better than trucks.

The Greek equivalent of U52, near the Acopolis

An ancient tortoise near the Acropolis

These are my highlights. Sorry if you expected food pictures. Check out others' posts and you will likely find more.