As soon as Linda got up this morning she busied herself making collard greens cole slaw while I made our morning coffee.  Once the cole slaw was assembled and in the refrigerator we had breakfast.  We were due at our daughter and son-in-law’s house later in the afternoon for a family gathering so we decided not to take on any overtly physical tasks today.  We both got cleaned up instead and settled in to more sedentary tasks.

Linda has been getting somewhat regular text messages from Mara apprising us of her travels and I have been getting text messages from Jarel with photographs of the progress on the construction of our custom walnut desk/workstation for the bus.  Linda worked at her desk and I worked in my office transferring the photos from my phone to my computer and working on the design/drawings for the built-in sofa.

Linda restarted her Samsung laptop computer (for some reason that I do not recall) and was presented with a choice of four user profiles for logging in.  One was hers, one was named ‘Diane,’ and two of them where random letters.  Until that moment we were unaware that these other accounts existed on her machine.  She selected her usual account and logged in.  I checked my ASUS laptop computer and discovered that I also had a user profile named ‘John’ of which I was unaware.  We noted that we have, coincidentally, been good friends with a couple named John and Diane for 36 years.

I e-mailed Mike (W8XH) to ask him about this situation.  He is a friend from our local SLAARC ham radio club who works part time as an independent computer service provider and has become our ‘go to’ guy for computer issues that do not involve the bakery software or VPN.  Because he is often working during the day I do not always hear back from him immediately, but we knew we would see him at breakfast tomorrow and decided not to do anything until we had talked to him.

We plinked away at our tasks until it was time to get ready to go to the family gathering.  Brendan and Shawna were headed ‘up north’ and needed to borrow a few things.  We had previously gathered up our portable induction cooker and battery powered camp lantern and loaded these in the Element along with the Thule car top carrier.  We loaded the cole slaw, a bottle of wine for dinner, and a bag with a couple of gift bottles of wine and cards for Brendan and Shawna’s upcoming birthdays, and headed for Dexter.

Meghan and Chris are very interested in professional sports and today at 4 PM EDT was the trading deadline for 2015 Major League Baseball season.  That’s a big deal if you are really into professional baseball.  They had the radio on when we arrived and were following the trading action closely.

Meghan had obviously been hard at work on dinner preparations long before we arrived.  She and Chris had acquired a Sous Vide, a countertop appliance for cooking foods in sealed bags immersed in hot water, and she was cooking country style pork ribs with two different sauces. The bags had been in the Sous Vide for over 24 hours and from comments during dinner the meat was obviously very moist, tender, and tasty.  Meghan had also prepared tempeh for us.  She had soaked it and then pan grilled it with the same two sauces; a classic bar-b-que and a mustard.  Except for the meat everything else was vegan; collard greens cole slaw, corn-on-the-cob, potato salad.  Meghan had a pudding bar for dessert that included vegan tapioca and chocolate puddings in addition to regular chocolate pudding, and lots of toppings.

Before dinner Brendan and I tried to figure out a way to mount the Thule car top carrier on their Subaru Outback but it became clear fairly quickly that we did not have the correct adapters and could not engineer a way around that.  There was no possibility of buying them at this point so we put it back in our car to take home.

Grand-daughter Katie and boyfriend Josh arrived late having run into traffic on their drive back from Iowa.   Brendan, Shawna, and Madeline were still there but getting ready to leave.  After introductions Katie and Josh had dinner.  Meghan then got out the “Ticket To Ride” board game.  We played one complete game with me and Linda working as a team.  This is Katie’s favorite game and she came in first.  Katie is very bright but is also, apparently, very competitive.  This was a side of her we had not seen previously.

By the time we were done it was dark so we all gathered up our things and bid each other fair well.  It was a clear night and the full moon had just risen and now shone brightly over the land.  It was a Blue Moon, the second full moon of the month, and the kind of evening that you could see well enough to go for a midnight hike in the woods.  The next Blue Moon will be in January 2018, so that are not common events.