The year in review Part 2

Once I got back from Europe in April, I had my fourth and last eye surgery, putting my eye woes behind me at least for now.  In May I picked up running after a two-year layoff, once my eye healed.  I had electricity woes inside my house where half my electrical outlets would suddenly click off inexplicably, including my TV, refrigerator and bedroom lights and then suddenly come back on minutes or hours later, for seemingly no reason.  It cost me three weeks and a couple of thousand dollars to fix (I needed a new outside box) and involved permits from the city, visits from Public Service and many headaches.  If that fix hadn't worked, the next step (inside re-wiring) would have started at $15,000.  I maintained ties with a few former colleagues by having lunch about once a month with somebody or other.  The spring flowers about the neighborhood and in the District were a pleasing splash of color as usual.  I attended a graduation party put on at a local hotel by my neighbors for two of their daughters who had graduated from college, one with an advanced degree.  It represented a timeless American immigration tale, the parents came to America from Bolivia not knowing English and both were schoolteachers by trade.  They took menial jobs, worked hard and long, bought the house next door, sent their children to the excellent public schools in the area, and became citizens.  Now their children are college graduates who speak English but very little Spanish and have good jobs in the cybersecurity area.  The latest in the ever present wave of migrations washing over our shores, making America great.

I continued my return to running slowly and painfully in June by running three times a week, although only a mile and a half or two at a time, running a few times in the District, such as running through the Mary Livingston Ripley Park on the Mall as pictured below.  As the month wore on I decided to skip out of town over the July 4th holiday because I didn't want to be in town while our president commandeered the celebration of our country on that day and made it all about himself.  The Revolutionary War soldiers capturing airports indeed!  I planned a car trip through the south.

In July I drove through North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee to see some sites and attend a baseball game at the new Atlanta Braves park, where I hadn't seen a game yet.  The Braves won that baseball game but Bryce Harper hit a home run for the Phillies, the new park underwhelmed me, the Atlanta Stadium Motel 6 I stayed at ripped me off by double billing me then claiming I had reserved two rooms (yeah, right) and refused to reverse one of the charges.  Effin Southerners with their phony, slow and cloying sweetness.  Places I visited were Corolla on the Outer Banks where I swam in the ocean, the Currituck Lighthouse, a couple of coastal towns in North Carolina, Charleston, Andersonville, Chickamauga Civil War Battlefield, Lookout Mountain, Chattanooga, The D-Day Memorial in Bedford, and Appomattox Court House.  It beat listening to someone bloviate on the National Mall.  Persons I visited were my sister and her family, my college roommate, and my best friend in ninth grade.

In August I took another car trip, this time to the midwest.  I went to Maryland, West Virginia. Pennsylvania and Ohio.  I visited the Flight 93 9-11 Memorial near Shanksville, Morgantown, and spent some time enjoying Columbus at the house of my sister, where I enjoyed hanging out in a college setting with two of her her three sons, like her middle child, below.