Don't Blame Bush!

Scott McClellan's book has been in the headlines a lot lately. It certainly has resulted in fingers being pointed at our president. Personally, if the main topics in Mr. McClellan's book are news to you, I think that you have not been paying attention.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't blame him because enough people voted for him to get him elected (at least the second time). No, I look at it another way. If you blame Bush for the mess that our country is in, then you would also blame Bernie for all the things that happened in the movie, "Weekend at Bernie's". Dubya was never in charge. The decisions were made by those around him. Dead from the neck up is still dead when it comes to making decisions. We could have had an inflatable giraffe sitting in the oval office and the results would have been the same (minus the vocabulary and grammar blunders).

Change Is Good, I Think

Since I have been blogging now for almost six months, I decided to make a change in the appearance of Time To Play. Let me know what you think of the new look.

Potomac Avenue, Minus Some Trees

We went to Erie yesterday to see Sue's dad (Grandpa Moomy to some of you). He is doing well and we had a good visit. We spent part of the afternoon sharing pictures that had been taken at Andrew and Kim's wedding and also pictures that we had taken in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.


The Moomy homestead has a different appearance since we last visited. The electric company decided that the trees that had been in the front yard for more than 60 years had to come down. How sad. Many other trees, up and down the street, were taken down also. It really makes the area look different. On the positive side, it will mean very few leaves to deal with in the fall and no twigs to pick up either. The down side is the lack of shade provided by these big old trees.

We went out to dinner at Syd's, the local restaurant where Sue worked one summer during her college years. The place has changed a little since then. For example, they don't have brontosaurus on the menu anymore. (Luckily. she seldom reads my blog) She was too young to serve drinks to customers back in those days.

It was after 11:00 when we got home last night. The trip takes about two hours, but it's almost all interstates. We chose a good day to travel because the weather was great. Coming and going, we got a view of Mangiamo, the restaurant in Twin Lakes that burned on Monday. It is a total loss. We used to go there when it was called The Black Squirrel Pub, but we hadn't been there since the name was changed. I don't know what the owners plan to do, but it will pretty much need a whole new building.

This morning, I went to the dentist for a checkup and cleaning. He found one cavity and a filling that has to be repaired a bit so I will be going back again next Tuesday. Bummer. Sue got a clean bill of dental health last week. She doesn't have to go back until November. Lucky her.

Wow!!

When I showed this video to my guitars, they all asked to be put up for adoption.

Plantin' Stuff

Saturday was planting day at our house. We had gone to a local nursery and to Lowe's on Friday and picked out this year's plants and veggies. As usual, once you buy them, you have to plant them.















The garden has the normal arrangement of 8 tomato plants. Something new this year is a hanging basket with a cherry tomato plant. Right now it is hanging from a corner of the shed roof. I will probably move it soon, to let it get more sun. We still have some frozen tomato slices from last year. When the new ones start to produce, we will be able to make an early batch of tomato soup. MMMM!

This season's flower hanging baskets are petunias( 2 in the back and 1 in the front). We are going to try a pair of vining, yellow roses on each side of the deck stairway.

Along the rear of the back yard, with the string of hostas, we have planted a viburnum. It is the "snowball" variety and you can see in the picture that the name is well chosen.


















In the front yard, we added an azalea and a rhododendron. They are both bright pink. We don't want any color clashes.

Now we just have to water and fertilize them. Wickett will help with that, I'm sure.

Clear Choice Sings Again

Thought For The Day

Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day.

Teach a person to use the internet and you won't see them for weeks.

After a whole winter of being over 1000 miles away from the rest of the quartet, we had our first gig of the summer last night at Our Lady of the Elms High School in Akron. It was their "end of the year" chorus concert. Various choirs from the middle school and the high school performed. They were very good. The theater was decorated in red, white and blue since the theme was "Made In America". We were the special guests. After all, what's more American than a barbershop quartet? The picture above is from last fall. For this show we wore the red vest/white shirt/red bow tie combo. It matched the show theme very well.

We did three songs at about the midpoint of the show and talked a little bit about barbershop music and the Akron chorus. Then later we did the Lida Rose number from The Music Man with a soprano from the high school choir singing the Marian, the librarian, part. She did very well. Then we finished our part of the show by doing a combined number with their choir. It was a lot of fun and we got lots of compliments from the audience members during the ice cream "social" that followed the concert. We spent about 30 minutes singing requests and doing numbers with small groups from the choirs. We don't need too much encouragement to sing, as many of you well know.

We have a couple of performances scheduled in June already and I suppose that more will come. We have been getting a lot of outdoor "stroll and sing" jobs lately and they are the best kind (as long as it doesn't rain).

Peluqueria Musica Siempre

Alien Geek Squad

Apparently, extraterrestrials prefer the Firefox browser.

Gropius

According to the artwork on the Google homepage today, this is the 125th anniversary of the birth of Walter Gropius. Gropius was an architect, who, as far as I can tell, designed very box-like, but functional buildings. And he became famous for this. He was born in Germany, moved to England before WW II and later came to the United States. It is said that he could not draw, and used others to put his ideas on paper. The main reason that I wrote this post was that I discovered that the last major project that he designed is Tower East, located on Chagrin Blvd, in Shaker Heights, Ohio. That is about 30 minutes from our house. The picture shows the building, which was constructed between 1967-69.

Cincy Wins Again

Reds 6 - Indians 4



Man, this weekend, the Reds were certainly the better team. When does the bus leave for Chicago?

Oh No!!

Reds 4-Indians 2

Too Bad

Reds 4 - Indians 3

The Battle of Ohio

Friday, Saturday and Sunday. A three game inter-league series between Cleveland and Cincinnati. May the best team win.

Mea Culpa

This is a picture of my daughter, Kristin, whom I love very much. She was upset that Wickett got a bigger birthday blog than she did. Sorry. I thought that, after 21, women didn't want to be reminded about birthdays. And also, she's less than 5 in dog years and he's 12. I will be more thoughtful in the future.

Happy Birthday, Wickett

Wickett Halter is having a birthday today. It is the big 12! He is one of the oldest puppies that I know.

He is holding up very well, especially considering his itinerant lifestyle. During the last four years, The Wickster has traveled over 20,000 miles and visited 18 states. This extensive travel is part of his job as second assistant co-pilot and last resort emergency pilot of the family motorhome. Most of his tasks involve sleeping while I drive the bus. He does it well and maybe that is part of the reason for his good health. I try to follow his example as much as I can. Happy birthday, little guy.

Final Score: Bill 1, Dryer 0

Well the mystery of the clothes dryer that won't heat has been solved. After checking out various thermostats, sensors and controls that were working ok, I got a clue from, of all places, an appliance parts store. I had a question about one of the temperature control units that I was checking. I found out that the part was not even available any more, but that it was also not very likely to go bad. The guy at the parts store asked if I had checked the circuit breakers to see if maybe they were corroded. Well, I knew that the breakers were ok, but after I got off the phone, another possibility occurred to me. I wondered if maybe the wall outlet that the dryer plugs into might be corroded. A couple minutes later, I found that it was. The terminal for one of the "hot" wires had completely turned to non-conducting "crud".

I still wasn't sure that this was the total answer to my problem, but I did know that it needed to be fixed. A quick trip to Home Depot and about 30 minutes of work got a nice new receptacle in place and, lo and behold, we have heat in the dryer. The simple truth was that with one of the two "hot" wires not connected, the dryer was only getting 110V instead of 220V. The mechanical parts of the dryer, like the turning of the drum, would work on 110V, but 220V was needed for the heating element.

A real electrician would have probably checked the power source first, but hey, I learned many things about taking a dryer apart and where the different electrical parts are located. It was cold and rainy outside anyway.

Final Cost

Labor(Unskilled) $0.00
Parts $5.97(plus tax)
Total $6.34

Sue had already started looking at washer and dryer sets in the newspaper ads. Our units have a bit of age to them, so maybe sometime in the future, they will need to be replaced. But not now.

Settling In

After almost one week at home, we are beginning to get things sorted out. We did a good job of getting stuff moved from the motorhome to the house during the middle of last week. I still have some sorting to do, especially the music stuff that I took to Florida. Right now it's just kind of randomly scattered around the basement.

We visited my mom on Thursday. She is still rehabbing from her broken hip at a nursing home in Minerva. We don't know how long she will be there, but I would guess it will be at least the rest of this month. She was pretty upbeat, all things considered. My brother, Jim, stopped by while we were there. He told us that his son, Trevor, has been accepted at Marietta College and will play basketball there. They play some schools from northeastern Ohio, so maybe we can see him play before we go back to Florida.

On Friday, we visited my aunt Esther. She has been in a nursing home for a couple of years now. Because of knee and leg problems, she spends most of her time in a wheelchair. We had a nice talk with her. She seems in really good health overall. She had her 88th birthday in January. Wickett went along on this visit, as he usually does. Esther and many of the other residents and workers make a big fuss over him, and he loves every minute of it.

It was great to get back to barbershop rehearsal last Tuesday. The quartet that I sing with is preparing for a performance as part of the end of the year musical program at Our Lady of the Elms, a private girls' school in Akron. It is on May 21st. We will sing two songs with their chorus and then do two more by ourselves. These shows are always fun because we get to hear some really talented young singers.

Sue has been doing laundry today, but we will have to take the clothes to a laundromat to dry them because our dryer quit working just before we left home in January. It runs but doesn't heat. We have had this problem a couple of times before and it was just a part that needed to be replaced. I checked the "usual suspects" and they were all ok, so I dug a little deeper. The heat control didn't check out with the ohmmeter, so I'll get a new one and see if that fixes the problem.

The weather prediction here for the next seven days is: highs in the low 60's and lows in the 40's. Maybe we'll wait until mid-June to come home in the future. Seriously, it's good to be home. We are looking forward to planting flowers and veggies. I have a few house/garden projects in mind and I want to try to resurrect my golf game from 30 years ago. That should be interesting.

Our "economic stimulus" check showed up in our account yesterday. Sue wants to use it to buy lottery tickets, but I'm holding out for a backyard bocce court.

Andrew + Kim = Andrew and Kim

On Sunday, May 4, 2008, Sue and I were honored to witness Andrew Moomy and Kim Bissett become Mr. and Mrs. Moomy. If the Mrs. terminology is not politically correct, remember that I grew up in a different, not necessarily better, version of the earth. Andrew and Kim were handsome and beautiful, respectively. The outdoor ceremony was blessed with sun, blue skies and white clouds. Being an amateur guitar player myself, I was very impressed with the two musicians who provided music for the wedding as well as the reception.

Immediately following the ceremony, everyone moved into the adjacent building for the reception, which featured good food, drink and of course, music and dancing. The couple left the reception by passing through two lines of guests holding sparklers (outdoors. of course).

Andrew and Kim left the next morning for their honeymoon in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. We certainly enjoyed being a part of their special day and wish them many happy years together.

We're Home!!

After a wonderful weekend with family and friends at the wedding of Andrew and Kim Moomy (a post with pictures will follow soon), we drove home yesterday. The original plan was to leave Cary, NC, drive part way, stay overnight in a Super WalMart parking lot. and then go the rest of the way home today. When we left Cary, about 10:30, we decided to see how far we would go before we got tired. Well, we didn't get tired, so we just kept driving. 541 miles later, we were home.

With stops for gas, lunch and to let Wickett water and fertilize the local flora, we still made good time. We even found, accidentally, an RV dump station at a rest area, just before we crossed into Ohio. That allowed us to empty all the tanks and rinse them out well. We arrived in Kent at 10:30, unloaded the car in one of the local shopping center parking lots (easier than in our circle) and then went home. Today we will be transferring stuff from bus to house and reading the month's worth of mail that the Post Office has been holding for us since we left Florida.

I am going to mow the lawn this afternoon, and I should be able to go to barbershop chorus practice tonight.

Edisto Beach

It was a bit warmer today than it has been lately, so we decided to head for a beach. A fellow camper had recommended Edisto Beach. The only other thing that we heard about this place was that the trip out there was very scenic. That was enough to get us moving .

The scenery was as good as advertised. The highways took us through some small towns and the huge trees that lined the road were often so big that they formed a canopy of shade. Add a healthy dose of Spanish moss hanging from the branches and we felt like we were on a plantation. We passed by salt water marshes and eventually crossed a bridge to Edisto Island.

We continued on the main island road and made our way past the many houses that are near the beach. The road looped around and as we drove, the houses got more luxurious. We were amazed at the number of homes that were so close to the beach. Edisto is not a typical touristy location. The residential areas are really the main focus. Shops, restaurants, etc. are there to make the place livable but they blend in to the background very well.

We found one of those restaurants, called The Pavilion, and had lunch. The picture below shows the outside of the restaurant. We were sitting next to one of those big windows and had a great view of the beach and the ocean. After lunch, we took a stroll along the beach. We watched guys surf fishing and picked up a few shells to take home. When we got back to the campground, we started to pack up and get ready to head for Cary, NC tomorrow morning for Andy and Kim's wedding. We are looking forward to seeing our kids and all the other relatives too.

Fort Sumter

As promised, we returned to Patriot's Point on Wednesday and caught the boat for a 30 minute ride out to Fort Sumter. The fort stands on a man-made island at the entrance to Charleston Harbor. We learned lots of new historical facts about Fort Sumter, but the major fact, that this was the location of the first shot of the American Civil War, was something that we already knew. The brick work that you see in the pictures is actually only one third of the original height of the fort. Two other levels were destroyed during several different bombardments of the fort. As interesting as the fort was, a sign that I am actually becoming settled in retirement was that I found equal enjoyment in the boat ride to and from the fort.

Evidently, they have had major musical events on the grounds of Fort Sumter over the years. As seen in the picture below, we found the largest wireless microphone that I have ever seen. They had disabled that big "on" button that you see on the side of the mic, or I would have made this an audio post back to Ohio. I think that it goes up to 11.