Category: Dittmeier

Not in the weather forecast….

Right before lunch today, Roy, my bicycling priest friend, told me there was water on the floor of the empty room where we keep our bikes. He was certainly right about that. We contacted the maintenance man and he started investigating what was going on.
I checked back later and the maintenance man and a plumber were running a huge industrial snake through the sewer pipe in the corridor outside this door. They said they got out about 100 wet wipes that had caused the water to back up into the room. Now the water is gone and a fan is drying the carpet.

Relief….

For almost a month now my computer has been acting erratically, becoming increasingly unusable. Particularly hard hit was my e-mail and I haven’t been able to respond to messages coming in. I have tried all sorts of troubleshooting, watched repair videos, done re-installs–everything. And still things got worse.

Then an hour ago the PC itself decided it had had enough. I got a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) and an announcement that the system was collecting information about the error(s) and would reboot. No asking if that is what I wanted, just telling me it was in the process of shutting down.

And then when it rebooted, the major difficulties had disappeared and things were back to a normal I had previously known. Deo Gratias!

[For those of you waiting for replies, I hope they will now be quickly forthcoming!]

Biking Together

The Charlie Dittmeier (my father) sons and daughters love to get together and last night’s gathering was about more than food. A bunch of us are cyclists and Mary (L) and her husband Mike had a chance to show off their wheels to all of us. Mary’s bike (pink?, lavender?) is the same model as mine. The black cycle is one of Mike’s. He rides about 200 miles a week now that he is retired, including three or four 50+ mile rides. He also did the Triple Bypass in Colorado last year–three 10,000+ foot peaks in one day in a 120-mile race!

Beautiful Louisville

Louisville is a really beautiful city, something I am becoming more aware of and am enjoying more since I returned from Cambodia and started riding my bike through neighborhoods I never knew before. Today I had a 28-mile ride from Nazareth Home Clifton where I live to Iroquois Park in South Louisville where I used to live. Here is a photo on one of the lookouts in the park. Basically all you see is trees but under those trees are 150-year old neighborhoods and city streets. The city is green, not barren suburbs (we have those, too).

Iroquois Park is one of five parks inside the city which were laid out by Olmsted, the celebrated urban planner who designed Central Park, a masterpiece of landscape architecture, in New York City.

My First Family Home

When I was born in 1944, my father was still in Germany in WWII. He never saw me until he came home when I was 2 years old. We lived in an apartment on South 4th Street in the Old Louisville neighborhood and I believe this is the building. I have only the vaguest recollections of our first family home but this is the only building on the block that I remember that matches my mental image. We lived here for a couple years and I remember Dad’s buddies from the war coming by.

Good to go…and stop

Gone are those days, 70 years ago, when I would flip my bicycle upside down and change a tire or tighten the chain or oil the gears there in the backyard. Today my rear brake–hydraulic, like on a motorcycle–was not working properly so a bike tech had to bleed some air from the brake line with special tools and relevant experience. My brakes work now but it cost me $20!

Old Union Station

I have been amazed at the architecture I have rediscovered in Louisville since my return here, partly because it’s common place and I just took it for granted before, and partly because I’m now riding everywhere on a bicycle and see things more closely and from different angles.

Yesterday I went to get a city bus pass and the TARC offices are in the old Union Station where the L&N Railroad was based. It is a beautiful, distinctive building in downtown Louisville.