South Lake Tahoe Family Reunion - Day 4 On the beach

Having seen 3 beautiful days in a row at SLT, we decided it would be a great time to actually visit the lake, spend some time on the beach and give those who wanted it a kayaking experience,  Unfortunately, we had not reckoned with the wind.  It started out as less than a gentle breeze, more like gentle puffs of wind that gradually grew stronger and more invasive.  It didn't seem to bother the children  playing in the sand or those sleeping in the lounge chairs.  But those who braved the lake found that rowing the kayak upwind was considerably harder than downwind.

South Lake Tahoe Family Reunion - General comments #4

Accidents, breakdowns, and illnesses happen.  When people get together for reunions like ours, one has to expect certain problems.  Ours started right off when Tiffany began to drive home because of previous obligations.  Carolyn and Edward followed and it was lucky they did.  About 10 miles out, Tiffany's van stopped and had to be towed back to South Lake Tahoe.

Monday morning Ed and Tiff tried again with their truck.  Edward returned to our reunion but again had to leave to take the boys to some appointments.  On the way back up he got a call from Camdan's daycare saying he was throwing up.  Tiffany had to handle that one as Edward needed to get here to pick up Richard and get him back to the airport.  All in all, Edward has probably spent more time on the road this reunion than with his siblings.  He made three times as many round trips.  He was gone so much of the time that somehow he escaped all our picture taking.

South Lake Tahoe Family Reunion - Day 3 Horsing around

It just so happened that Tiffany's van broke down around the Camp Richardson resort are which gave Carolyn some time to  check out services in that area which included, among other things, a horseback riding facility and a state park highlighting the marsh, meadowlands, and forests around Lake Tahoe.  Fortunately, the nature trail around Taylor Creek was wheelchair accessible and I was able to use my power chair around the whole area.

The Corral was not so disability friendly.  I knew ahead of our visit there that my weight was 15 pounds over the limit so I would not be able to ride a horse.  But I hoped that I would have better access for photographing the three horse riding teams that our family fielded. Judging from the after-event discussions the riding will long be remembered and appreciated.

Edward drove back up to take care of the van and head back to Sacramento with his boys for some scouting event.  He'll be back on Wednesday.

South Lake Tahoe Family Reunion - General comments #3

I appreciated having the pool cues as walking sticks but I was concerned about breaking them or scuffing them in a way which would obviously look like they'd been misused.  So I was delightted when Lee and Staci gave me for a birthday present a pair of professioinal grade aluminum walking sticks.  

The sticks took some getting used to.  They seemed to really help me in sand at the beach. Unfortunately, however, there are some days I can't seem to get them going at all, sticks or not.  While I can get my walker up and down stairs only with considerable effort, I can easily transport the sticks up or down stairs by holding them both in one hand and still have a hand free for holding the banister.  On the other hand, they have no provision for holding things like plates, cups or utensils.  They're not the answer to all my walking problems but I certainly wouldn't have been able to get around as much without them.  

South Lake Tahoe Family Reunion - Day 2 Planning

While some of our group attended the beginning meeting of the local Mormon congregation, the rest of us were finishing up breakfast and collectively planning what activities we would like to take advantage of.  Some of us are already beginning to wonder if the seven days may end up a bit much.

Whiner alert:  The following paragraph is pure self-pity.  It does not add to the narrative.  I'm also finding that a 3 story home without any special arrangements is about the worst possible environment for my disability.  I can't use my power chair at all and my walker is really only useful on one floor.  Moving it between floors is more work than it's worth.   I've also noticed that virtually all my family members ignore any extra service I need such as helping me through a buffet line or trying to carry out a package.  Makes me wonder how observant and helpful I've been prior to my disability.

One of the concrete plans for the day was for some of the group to visit the Donner Pass State Park.  It was also decided that Ed's family would take two vehicles so that Tiffany, who needed to attend a work-related function, could just go home from there as it cuts down the time going that way.  Unfortunately, their van broke down just out of South Lake Tahoe.  While Steve and Lisa continued on their way Ed and Tiff returned to SLT in the cab of a tow truck with Carolyn following with the boys.  Talk about throwing a monkey wrench into the plans.  It was only the first of many to plague Ed's family.

In the meantime, the Brimleys tried out the gondolas which climb from SLT to Heavenly ski run offering a gorgeous view of the lake and the valley.

South Lake Tahoe Family Reunion - General comments #2

After feeling so disabled at Blue Haven, I rode somewhat more optimistically with Carolyn to our timeshare condominium in downtown South Lake Tahoe.  Figuring our room wouldn't be that far away, we didn't even get the power chair from the van.     What a mistake!  The bellhop loaded all our stuff on one of their carts and  then took us on what must have been a 1,000 yard tour of the building.  I decided I couldn't go back out the same way and Carolyn graciously agreed to retrieve my chair.  I think it was the first time she had unloaded the chair all by herself and the first time she had driven it that far.  She was a bit frazzled by the time she made it back to our apartment.

By using the pool cues, I was feeling a little better about getting around at Blue Haven --- until dinner.  With my hands full of walking sticks, I had no way to hold a plate and go through the buffet line.  I looked around for a sympathetic glance or a knowing look.  No luck.  I called to Carolyn but she was too busy and there was too much noise in the room to make myself heard.  I  sat down and stared at the empty spot in front of me and trried to luck hungry.  Within a couple of minutes, my oldest grandson Ben bent down and asked if he could get me something.  I really appreciated that.

South Lake Tahoe Family Reunion - Day 1 The Gathering

This year we finally gave up on getting the whole family together in Hawaii.  Our Marriott timeshare still makes all sorts of promises about getting you a resort where and when you want it.  But reality is that you're  lucky to get 1 out of 10 of your requests.  So when we got a week at South Lake Tahoe, we decided to try to make it into a family reunion. Since we have 6 kids, their spouses, and 14 grandchildren, we needed to accommodate 28 people.  Our timeshare accommodates at most 8 but only 6 comfortably.

Through Vacation Rentals by Owner we were able to find  a facility called Blue Haven which complimented the time share well - a recently built 3 story 8 bedroom 5 bathroom mansion.  The owner was willing to negotiate because they want to  debug this rental.  Pictures just don't do the facility justice but maybe you can get some idea of how much we were "roughing it".

So on Saturday all six of our kids and their families converged on South Lake Tahoe.  Actually, two of them had started a day or two earlier to either make the trip more tolerable or get in some sightseeing along the way.

Even though the house is a mansion it still has limited space so some thought had to be put into assigning the bedrooms to maximize the social integration among cousins and minimize bullying and homesickness.

By the time everyone had arrived and the rooms had been assigned and we had had our first meal, there was no time for anything other than sitting around talking and working on a puzzle and just renewing acquaintances.

South Lake Tahoe Family Reunion - General comments

I will be posting every day for the next week to describe a great family reunion we just spent with our kids and grandkids.  Although it was written in real time, some of our family didn't feel comfortable announcing to the world that we were all away from home,  I apologize for any resulting confusion when my blog says I'm on retreat and I'm obviously at home.

I felt the impact of my walking disability more than any other time so far.  We pulled up to the vacation "mansion" and it sank into my brain for the first time that this was a three story building.  I couldn't get to any floor without a minimum of 5 steps.  I tried taking my walker up and down a couple of stairways.  That was not going to work.

Finally, on the bottom floor I noticed a full complement of pool cues in the pool room and took two of them as walking sticks.  They weren't perfectly fit for that purpose but they were better than nothing.

Sing Along with Mitch

An unusual and beloved performer, Mitch Miller died recently at the age of 99.  You can read about his many accomplishments on Wikipedia here.

But I remember him most for his popular 'Sing Along With Mitch" TV series and piano song books.  His orchestra, chorus, and especially his musical arrangements all lent themselves to singing along.  Somehow, you didn't feel uncomfortable singing when a Mitch Miller record was playing and the words on the TV screen like a karaoke screen helped job your memory.  He also managed to select songs that lent themselves to be sung by groups of people who fancy they can sing but aren't the best voices in the choir.

Anyway, thanks Mitch, for all the enjoyment of singing along.

Be careful what you delete

I've often heard that you should delete the pictures from your digital camera card only after you  have copied the files in two different places.  And I've just as often ignored this advice.  After all, the software that came with the camera had as it's default to erase the pictures as soon as they were transferred.  And there was no special routine to check out the pictures so I wouldn't know when it was okay or not.

The situation was brought home when I was trying  to select some pictures for this blog.  I could see the thumbnails of the pictures I wanted but I couldn't edit or review the pictures.  With the help  of my more computer literate sons Philip and Steven we determined that somehow the pictures never saved on the camera properly or never transferred to the computer correctly.  By now, of course, we had erased the original pictures so there was nothing to retrieve.  In this case, I was able to recreate many of the pictures but I definitely learned a lesson about deleting pictures after they've been transferred.

Picture this

As I began sorting through our various computer files and folders of digital photos, one of the things that immediately concerned me was that we have dozens of photos which have the same name as other photos.  Of course they aren't the same size or creation date but not all programs look that deeply to see that the files are really not the same.  I'm beginning to wonder if we haven't already lost some pictures by archiving them to CD and skipping "duplicates".  

Once I get a handle on the scope of the problem and decide what I can do about it, I want to make sure that each photo has at least a unique name.

When I scanned all our slides, I realized how easy duplicate names would be to create and took steps to make them all unique.

Chasing the bugs

Strange as it may seem, for me one of the more satisfying aspects of being a computer programmer was finding and eliminating the bugs that inevitably showed up in whatever program you were working on.  Of course, NOT finding the bug(s) or NOT being able to eliminate them was one of the most dissatisfying and frustrating aspects of computer programming.

Today I  felt vindicated when I finally was able to track down and solve by way of work around a bug in Microsoft's flagship communication program - Outlook. I call it a bug because it does disaastrouss things without warning, things that don't need to happen and could be easily identified if not circumvented with today's technology.  And there's no indication that anyone at Microsoft is working on this problem or, for that matter, even cares.

Briefly stated it is this:  Under certain circumstances email addresses, especially in a distribution list can end up with an "Unknown" tag.  This tag shows up in only a couple of strange places so it is not obvious.  Mail sent to an address with this tag will NOT get delivered even though the address is perfectly valid.  Furthermore, this email will NOT return to the sender as undelivered or undeliverable mail.  In other words, the perfect black hole.    We didn't believe the intended recipients until we saw a copy of the undeliverable mail heading and saw email addresses which should have been converted to converting instead to (john@mail.com). 

It turns out that Outlook sees the undeliverable addresses as something to hand off to one of the internet servers where it is somehow lost forever.

And the workaround?  To identify tagged addresses either (1) look for the parentheses in the address conversion; or (2) hover the mouse pointer over the beginning of the name in the distribution list producing a pop-up box with SMTP or UNKNOWN.  SMTP is good.  UNKNOWN is an address with a bad tag. Then to fix the problem simply open the contact's information record form and save it to disk again.  Then the entry in the distribution list must be saved again as well. Verify that the hover will now show SMTP.

Hooray!!!  One less bug in this world.