Kyle nearly had a heart attack when his Robinhood app reported that his cryptocurrency investment dropped by $43,000 in 1 minute. Fortunately, it turned out to be a quickly resolved technical glitch rather than the Russian cyberattack he was starting to imagine.

Last week I had my annual eye exam which was very uplifting. Apparently, my eyes are the only parts of my body that are improving with age. The severity of my astigmatism has been decreasing over the last couple of years. Given how bad they were to start, that is not saying much. Nevertheless, I will take the win. Suspecting that my prescription had changed, I have been waiting for over 6 months to replace my glasses which are in a sad state of affairs. When I was working at Digital Alloys, I did some metal grinding and the red hot grinding dust hit the surface of my glasses (better the lenses than my eyeballs). This caused the coating on the lenses to begin deteriorating and the result is what you see above. Two weeks ago the nose bridge broke free of one of the lenses and I made a crude repair with a combination of cyanoacrylate glue and epoxy. Today, in a final attempt to cause me grief, one of the nose pads broke off. Fortunately, my new frames and lenses are due to arrive mid-next week.

When we started out to design our new River House, we asked the kids for their input. One of the requests was for a secret door somewhere. I believe this may have come from Maya. I am happy to report that we have found the perfect place and today I worked out the implementation details (which are anything but straightforward.) From the outside of my office, the entrance will appear as a built-in bookcase.

When you wish to gain entrance, the bookcase will pivot like a door all the way to the inside wall of the office where it will mate up with a matching bookcase on the inside.

In practice, the “door” will remain open almost all of the time. When we have guests or when I have teleconference meetings, it will be closed. I have not yet decided whether to motorize the opening and closing. I am leaning towards manual operation so I do not have to deal with an override to handle a power outage.

Meet Charley who celebrated her second birthday this week. She is the daughter of Jeanine’s niece, Erica. We are both looking forward to meeting her in person now that travel once again feels like it may be returning to normal.

At Jeanine’s request, and with the help of Maya and Lauren who were here last night, I installed this wall mural in Jeanine’s office. I took this photo while on a hike with Jeanine in the Swiss Alps. Of all the photos that Jeanine reviewed this one worked really well because of how the roof lines in the photo match the roof lines in the room. I was extremely amazed at the printed resolution. You can see a single water droplet falling from the cantilevered gutter. The mural arrived in three panels. Hanging the first one alone was something of a challenge and I was wise to wait for help with the second two where alignment was even more critical. Jeanine is very pleased with the result as is the photographer.

For the past few weeks, family dinners have shifted from the weekend to Tuesdays. Today, Nico is in Los Angeles practicing with the US National Amputee team in preparation for next month’s World Cup Qualifiers and Kyle was busy with work. Fortunately, Maya invited her friends Fiona and Lauren, and Jeanine invited our good friend Eliza. We had a great meal and watched a few family videos featuring Fiona and Maya.

One of my new clients is currently based out of One Kendal Square in Cambridge. I had a meeting there this afternoon and made this photo looking straight up while inside the atrium.

While on a walk today, I took this photograph of a bird’s nest with my camera. If you study the photo carefully, you will discover at least two things that do not make sense. If you can figure out these two mysteries, you will know how I made this undoctored image.

All the kitchen cabinets in the Road House feature adjustable magnetic latches. Combined with the self-closing hinges it makes for a very definitive closing action. Adjustment is accomplished by rotating the magnet assembly. When we first moved in, I spent several hours adjusting all the hinges and magnets to get perfectly centered and flush doors. Unfortunately, over time, the magnets rotate within their housings. Today, I took a couple of hours to remove them all, apply a thread locker, reinsert and adjust them. It was not exactly a fun project but having the doors constantly go out of adjustment would have driven me nuts over time.

Visiting from Indianapolis today was our nephew, Gabriel. He arrived in Boston earlier this week to take the CMS Level 2 Certified Sommelier exam which he passed. I picked him up in Boston and gave him a car tour of Boston and Cambridge before returning to Concord for dinner with the family. Nicolai had to leave early for the state wrestling tournament being held in western Massachusetts. Several members of the Concord Academy team of which he is the assistant coach qualified. Jeanine served specialty cod cakes which she prepared earlier in the week. I preferred the other cake on the menu.

Photos of Maya’s previously reported motorcycle ride on a frozen lake have surfaced calling into serious question the intellect which she is otherwise known for. Exhibit A: No helmet!! Exhibit B: Driver is a total stranger!! Exhibit C: Ice is slippery. Rest assured she received a serious admonishment from her parents on the matter.

After more than a week of back and forth, we have settled on what I sincerely hope is a final floor plan for the River House. Changes to this version were the result of moving the main hallway from the left of the stairs to the right. The office now gets a window with a long view of the river, access to the rest of the house is from the foyer rather than the living area, the mudroom gets a window, and we pick up a cleaning supply closet. The trade-off is that the laundry is now smaller and will require a stacked set of machines rather than side by side. Because the stairs moved, changes rippled to the second floor and basement. In both cases, this resulted in improvements to the layout. The woodshop and photo studio are now 600 sqft each.

Amputee soccer world cup qualifiers are scheduled for March and will be held in Mexico. Today, the roster for the national team that will represent the United States was posted and Nicolai will be among its members. He is tentatively set to play center midfield. I will be traveling to Mexico for the tournament and there is a good chance Jeanine will be joining me.

During my recent annual physical, my doctor asked me if I was experiencing any health issues that he should be aware of. My only real complaint other than the normal stuff related to aging was the fact that I felt my cardiovascular endurance had diminished far more so than my contemporary soccer teammates. I expressed the same concern five years ago and he ordered an echocardiogram stress test. It revealed some undesirable EKG waveforms but my coronary blood flow was deemed to be good. He thought it would be a good idea to get another stress test to see if anything had changed from my baseline. The results of the test I did today showed the same anomaly in my elevated heart rate but no change from my last test. This test did not include the ultrasound component and based on the outcome, I have to come back again and repeat the whole thing again for the more comprehensive test. The good news is that we live so close to the hospital now that it was faster to walk there than drive. I could also see our house while running on the treadmill. It is located in the clump of trees in the background. Below on the left are my at rest waveforms with my elevated heart rate waveform on the right. Apparently, my pattern shows an ST-segment depression outside of the normal range which can be indicative of reduced blood flow to the heart. According to my very friendly technician, my pattern was identical to the one five years ago and he is fairly confident that a repeat of the echocardiogram will not turn up a blood flow problem this time either.

Last October, my mother performed an Argentine Tango at a dance demonstration held at the Mall of America in Minneapolis. My sister Alissa, who coordinated her participation, just shared a great article that appeared on SheerDance.com. It tells the story of how my parents met through dancing and how it has been a sustaining passion for my mother to this day.

Jeanine and I spent a good part of the day at Kyle’s house. I helped him install two more replacement windows in his basement while Jeanine gave the upstairs a thorough cleaning, a much-needed intervention after all the cement dust we created last week when removing a portion of the concrete slab. Kyle is rapidly picking up many new construction skills and I can assign him projects with high confidence they will be done right. Although there remains much work to be done, the space is starting to take shape and much of the less enjoyable work is behind us.