My Wife

My wife is the best person in the world! No kidding! She has a heart of gold and good sense to go with it. If everyone were as kind, yet strong as she is, what a lovely world we'd live in.

She has a tough job - assistant director of the soup kitchen in Trenton, NJ, a typical eastern city with a large population of very poor (homeless), poor (welfare) and working poor (they have jobs but thyey still don't earn enough for decent housing and food. Most of the people who eat at the soup kitchen (they don't serve soup, by the way, but provide about 3000 "dinners" a week) are "street people". That means that among other things they don't own much and defend it right up front, and are easily goaded into defensive in-your-face behavior. Yet she quiets down skirmishes and bans fighters from the kitchen -- they get their meals at the door and cannot enter the soup kitchen proper for a period of anywhere from a day to several months. And they say, "Yes, Ms Cathy -- see you in a [appropriate time interval]. Have a nice day."

These are people who, as they say, you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley! I couldn't do her job for more than a day.

So on a daily basis, she juggles the needs of every conceivable range of personality and never loses her cool. What a woman!

Incidentally, you can support her work by volunteering some time and making a donation.
Trenton Area Soup Kitchen

Rally-ed Out!

The rally was fun! There were only 5 teams -- 4 experts and 1 intermediate (us) so we were guaranteed 1st place in class. :-) Of course we expected to come in 5th in that crowd and we did, but not by too too much!

We were in North Jersey in the Sparta area, chasing the Lackawanna Cutoff, the last mainline railroad built in the state. We went through many railroad tunnels (some were as short as a few car lengths) along the route. The rallymistress included a number of sneaky traps (i.e., the ones we fell for) and a few easy ones (the ones we didn't fall for!) to try to trick us into leaving the rally route. (This club's rallies penalize you for the miles you travel that deviate from the miles you should travel along the official route -- not my favorite way to compete.) But it was fun although I had several quibbles with the way some of the route instuctions were supposed to be interpreted, and I was not alone. However, the rallymistress rules so we had to suck it up and put on happy faces.

Overall, I clocked 230 miles round trip and I'm tired. {sigh} I wish there were a rally club closer by!

Start of weekend!

Hey, Saturday already!

Did I mention that Cathy gave us tickets to see Michael Feldman's Whad'ya Know live radio broadcast today at 10:30 AM? I did? Oh.

Well, it was fun! We got there early to be sure we had time to pick up our tickets at the box office and be admitted before 10:30. We were plenty early!!. New Jersey Network, an NPR affiliate, was sponsoring the event and they gave away plastic magnifying strips, something I can really use.

Anyway, Feldman - who looks a bit like Robin Williams - had three guests: Marc Mappen, a former NY Times columnist and co-editor of "Encyclopedia of New Jersey"; Charles Webster, political writer for the "Trentonian" ; and Janet Evanovich, author of the "Stephanie Plum" adventure novels that are set in the Trenton of the 1950s. Mappen was a very humorous source of NJ arcana and Webster was much more sophisticated than I had expected of an employee of the local mud-slinging tabloid. Evanovich was in town to participate in "... the inaugural Stephanie Plum Daze Festival", sign autogroahs and sell books. She has VERY red hair.

Feldman interviewed a white-bearded man from the audience who insisted that he met his wife while working as a lawyer at a homeless shelter. He said that he had picked her out, cleaned her up and took her home with him, and she turned out pretty well. She said that while they met at the homeless shelter, she was actually its director. The man bragged of their "intergenerational marriage"; she quipped that he had neckties in his closet that were older than she was!

A man identified as "Grumpy" by the logo on his denim shirt and a telephone caller won the grand prize when they were correctly able to answer 5 consecutive questions, the last of which was "What event in history is associated with Washingtons Crossing Park in NJ?". (By the way, he was a very pleasant man who explained that "Grumpy" was the name he had chosen for his grandchildren to call him -- after the character from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, not his disposition.)

Yesterday a neighbor and I played in a bridge tournament in Cherry Hill. We were doing well (in our class) until the last four hands and Idonwannatalkaboudem!

Tomorrow is our second car rally of the season and I'm looking forward to eliminating the dumb mistakes we made in May. And not looking forward to the dumb ones we will make!

I'm trying an experiment. I suffer from the ocassional leg cramp, generally when I stretch when I'm half awake. I had an excruciating one in the wee hours of Friday morning and it was sore all day. So last night, I put a bar of soap under the bottom sheet as recommended by our local newspaper's medical correspondent. If I don't mention leg cramps in future posts, you'll know it worked.

RED SOX IN FIRST PLACE!!!

My granddaughter!

Here's a picture of my wonderful grand-
daughter, taken on her 2nd birthday.

Mid-week notes

I forgot to mention that Cathy got me a neat Fathers Day present -- tickets to see Michael Feldman's "Whad'ya Know", an NPR live radio show from the War Memorial in Trenton. See the show's website for more on the show. He's going to have Janet Evanovich, author of the "Stephanie Plum" mystery novels (set in Trenton), as a guest.

The window washers are here, the window washers are here! It's nice to be able to afford to have people come in and wash your windows! Now I have to put everything back where it was.

First Day of Summer!

Ah, it's finally here. The official start of summer. Not that it means anything. Our community's pool

has been open for almost 3 weeks, and faithful readers will note that I recently complained about August-like heat and humidity. None-the-less, we have the longest day of the year. Weather Underground says that we will have 16 hours and 7 minutes of daylight today, and tomorrow will be 3 seconds shorter than today.

Went to a board of trustees workshop yesterday. Those are when the board meets to discuss and decide on issues and to prepare the motions that will be made at the next board of trustees meeting. I was the only resident there (again). I feel that if I don't go, they will once again close the workshops and then we'll never know what they really talk about.

We're having a problem in our fitness room because the TVs can be played at whatever volume the exerciser chooses. Some want to make earphones mandatory and others are much against that (this is a group that watches the same channel when they exercise!). But the board is going to disable the TV speakers so if you want to watch and listen, you'll need to bring a headset of some kind. This matches what most commercial gyms do and circumvents a lot of the nastiness that has occurred.

A resident has out a feeler for solar panel installation. We looked at some websites and they are big and ugly! Some states have laws that prevent a homeowners association from denying them but NJ is not one of them. I suspect the HOA will permit them if they can be installed so that they do not face the street.

Finally it's cool again!

The spell of August weather finally broke late yesterday afternoon and the temps were in the 60's overnight. Unfortunately, we had left the ceiling fan on high so I woke around 3 AM shivering. Cathy and I have really different internal thermostats -- I could have used the quilt last night but she had already packed it away.

There was a front page story about my old employer, Mercer College, Trenton, NJ, in the "good" newspaper this morning. Someone is trying to make political hay about some minor ethical infractions. A college employee split a $44,000 order into 11 parts so that he could bypass getting the board's approval; the college spent $19,000 for rings for the national champion soccer team; fundraising didn't properly document an $1100 dinner party; etc. Definitely wrong, but pale in comparison to the patronage jobs at the college (that has a $35 million budget!) and infinitessimal when it comes to the ethically-challenged actions of a significant number of NJ pols, local and state. To my mind, it's worth pursuing to correct the transgressors, but front page? No way. Strangely enough, it wasn't mentioned in the local tabloid! LATER--oops! Cathy brought home a copy of the tabloid and it was on page 5.

Speaking of MCCC, one of my good buddies was appointed dean of the college's liberal arts divisions and a bunch of us got together at JoJo's to hoist a couple in his honor. Immediately we started a pool to guess how long it would be before the job brought him to tears. I picked the second week of the Fall semester.

We had a little brouhaha here this week. Our board prexy mentioned that "...resale of homes requires approval of the Board of Trustees..." and several residents went ballistic. "The Board approval of the resale of homes is something that truly needs to be eliminated. It is a waste of time and paper. If the board did not approve the resale of a home, the legal rights of the owner would prevail in any type of legal action. Why would the Board even waste time on such nonsense" was typical. The truth is that the board has a responsibility to the state to see that the new owners fit the age requirements for our age-restricted community and ut has a responsibility to us to make sure that the seller is fully paid up and that there are no outstanding violations before he or she can finalize the sale. Truly sensible, but some people were thinking that the board could reject new buyers for "whatever" reason. Hmm, we have many different ethnicities, religions and sexual orientations already represented. What were they thinking of?

Time to throw in some laundry and go to the library. This is what passes as multi-tasking for the retired.

HOT!!!

Whew!!! It has been HOT here. This is the 6th consecutive day of 85-plus degree temps with humidity to match, following a month of temps in the 60s.

Now I long for Arizona's fabled dry heat!

Watched a very funny movie called The Colony. It's kind of a Stepford Wives for gated communities. The funniest lines occurred when, acting on the complaints of neighbors, the community's veterinarian service offered to "adjust the vocal chords" of the offending dog.

Apparently there's an episode of The X-Files called The Falls of Arcadia that also features a Homeowners Association (see my posting Life in an age-restricted community) as the villain. Have to check my local listings, as they say.

No one liked the picture of my house, so I removed it. Here's a picture of my patio featuring Cathy's garden.

Another dinner...

Last night was the 6th annual "International Dinner" held by "Welcoming the Stranger", a group that provides English, Computer Skills and Citizenship Preparation classes for adult immigrants and refugees in the Lower Bucks County (PA) area.

WTS is run by an old friend from Philadelphia, Sturgis Poorman, and we support it with donations and a website.

They've had 1075 students from 73 different countries -- most from India, Russia and Liberia -- in the 6 years they've been operating, and have given the US 175 new citizens. 175 volunteers have provided the classroom training.

Students prepare meals that represent the cooking of their countries. It was great!

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By the way, Friday's bowling banquet did have a bar. One drink was included in the price of the meal and after that, cash was accepted. We had a great meal, considering that banquet food is usually not as good as a restaurant's regular menu.

Why live under these conditions?

Back to living in an HOA (homeowners association) community...

Why would anyone choose to live under restrictions that border on loss of constitutionally-granted freedoms?

There's actually a lot of appeal for older folks.

1) The HOA maintains the lawns and removes the snow and you don't have to call vendors, etc .
2) They provide a clubhouse with the facilities mentioned earlier, and it's a short distance away (1/4-mile for me).
3) They provide a lot of activities that you might have to go looking for in a "normal" community.
4) It's nice that your neighbor can't paint his house purple, or mount an old-fashioned TV antenna on his roof, or put 7 million chotchkes in his front yard, or put in a dog run and not clean it up without having a committee of his peers examine a proposal. Drive through (if you can get past the gate!! ;-) and see what a nice community we are.

I thought there'd be a lot of like-minded people and folks from the same socio-economic stratus, but we're more a microcosm of the surrounding towns.

We have the entire political spectrum -- a little surprising in a community of about 700 people. We have folks retired from almost evey job you can think of, also surprising when you consider that homes sold for $200,000 six years ago. We have ex-prison guards, cops, teachers, nurses, CPAs, lawyers, judges, mom'n'pop business owners, small business owners, computer people -- you name it!

TGIF

Quiet day today...rainy. cool...

Just the kind of rain Cathy says is good for her garden, but it's wet enough and cool enough (high 50s) to keep me off my bike.

Went to the library. My, but books are getting shorter! Maybe it's just the crime/mystery/adventure stuff I read, but it took 8 books to fill my bookbag where it usually takes only 5!

And the library has a new self-checkout system. Librarian said it was installed on the initiative of the county board of freeholders! He didn't say whether he thought it would affect job security. The system is not bad. It does ask for a PIN even though the librarian-operated system does not. Wonder if they are afraid that someone with a stolen library card will check out too many books?

A resident of this community asked me today if I thought that the Architectural Control Committee (ACC) would likely deny an installation of solar panels! The ones he's looking at are sold at Home Depot in NJ, PA and NY, so they must be practical. But they are huge and pretty ugly; they don't blend in with the roof at all.

Tonight is our bowling league banquet. The restaurant is supposed to be good. Last year, they had an unlimited open bar and spent way more than they had anticipated! The organizers had to beg for donations to make up for their mistake. Hah! This year, the wird "bar" does not appear in the announcement. :-)

Life in an age-restricted community

My wife, Cathy, and I moved to this over-55 community in January, 2001, a few weeks after I retired. Looking back, I think I would have gone nuts from boredom -- and I'm not the kind of person who gets bored easily! -- had we not moved. This community has lots of things for me to do and I'm happy for having them. We have tennis courts, an indoor and an outdoor swimming pool, a putting green, a workout room, a movie theater, a dining hall, and activites galore. I even resurrected my bridge-playing (I recommend Bridge for Dummies for anyone). I started a community website (sorry, it's for residents only) and this is my fourth year as a member of a committee.

Under every silver lining, there's a cloud. Ours is that the community is run by a Homeowners Association (HOA)!!

You see, when you buy a property in a communty like mine, you sign a non-negotiable contract. It's called a contract of adhesion -- I guess because you're stuck with whatever the other party has written. And that contract contains "covenants, easements and restrictions" and the HOA by-laws. Essentially, it gives the board of trustees absolute power over your life.

That's only potentially bad. There are horror stories on the Internet...anything from a resident not being permitted to hang a POW banner to widows experiencing foreclosures. However, a lot depends on whether the board consists of power-hungry jerks or well-meaning fols who listen to the concerns of the residents.

Our board is much closer to the latter than the former, but it it could be better.

You have two ways to fight a bad board: vote out the worst members at each election, or sue them. But, suing them is a no-win situation because if you win, the HOA pays for the cost of the lawsuit by assessing the residents! And if you lose, you're out a bunch of money!!

I have to say now that I would rate our previous board as a 6 (out of 10). They didn't cause too much stress and didn't make any onerous new rules. We recently elected three new member to the 5-member board.