Olive and Lucy Visit and Condo Needs New Management

UPDATE - September 23 - September 29

-- Time for New Management for our Condominium

Winter from our front porch

The President of our Condo Trustees visited with me on Monday to inform me that they were about to start a search for a new management company. The Trustees and the current management team had mutually agreed to make a change effective at the end of the year. Rachel indicated they would like me to help seek out the new company. I had participated in previous searches and had helped with other contracts that we entered into and maybe she knew I was retired now and might have some spare time. We'll see. I need to start some research on this.

Don't kid yourself on how important it is to have the right condo management company. When you get over 100 inches of snow and the plowing costs reach 30, 40, or $50,000 a season, it's important to have somebody looking out for our best interests. A recent let-down by the current company on repair and repainting contracts has led to the need for change.


-- If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium? (No, it must be Olive and Lucy)

Lucy as the illustrator

Olive as the Grandaughter

Olive and Lucy brought their mother Corinne today. Corinne is still on her maternity leave from work so she can get used to managing an eight-week-old and a four-year-old at the same time. On Tuesday's, we try to help. The weather was a little grim, so we engaged in a lot of indoor activities, which included drawing, painting, playing board games (not well) hide and seek, book reading and building castles out of pillows on the couch in the playroom. This was mostly Lucy's activities. Olive concentrated on nursing and soiling her diapers. When not nursing, Olive will take a bottle, which lets Nana Patti exercise her skills as a newborn baby expert. Thank goodness Lucy is potty trained. She's very low maintenance.

-- Planning for the trip to Washington DC

Next week, Patti and I will drive to Washington DC to participate in my bi-annual reunion with the men with which I served in the Air Force. We all took basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio and then we trained as radio intercept operators at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas. After seven months of training, most of us were assigned to USAF Security Services headquarters at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio. After serving two years state-side we all got overseas assignments, which included Vietnam, Japan, and Turkey.

Of our group, only one stayed in the Air Force and made a career of it. The rest of us escaped after our four-year hitch was up. But, since then we have held a reunion every two years to keep in touch and reminisce about life in the Air Force. One of our guys, Dick Mason, has arranged for a private tour of Arlington Cemetary and the Cryptologic Museum in Annapolis Junction. These are two places I have never been to, although I have been to DC many times. I'm looking forward to this trip. I have confirmed our room at the Crowne Plaza so we are all set.

-- 16 Loose-leaf binders filled with history

Since mid-summer, I have been sorting and cataloging the news commentaries that my Dad wrote for the Evening Gazette from the mid-1960's through the 1970's. His wife Sue painstakingly assembled the clippings into binders over the years and I have been reviewing them to see if I can make a useful compilation worthy of printing.

It's not an easy task. But, reading the columns as I go along has been very interesting and entertaining. I hope I make some progress this fall.


Reading Update: Having been a news reporter in my own time and growing up in a family where broadcast news was a daily event, I have always been fascinated to read about the legends of television, radio, and print newsgathering. I just finished a biography by Bob Edwards called, "Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism." The book tells about a time when "broadcasting live," actually meant something. Today, when a suspect is due in court later in the day for an arraignment, the "news" person sets up a camera at 5AM, outside the courthouse so they can claim "reporting on the scene." What rubbish.

When Murrow was reporting "on the scene," he was on the rooftops of London while Nazi bombers terrorized the city with nightly raids. That was "on the scene."