My how time flies when you're having fun.  Uncle Jack just realized that it has been a week since he last took laptop in lap and fashioned a blog entry.  This kind of lackadaisical behavior could get him thrown out of the Bloggers' Society if he isn't careful.

       Looking back on the past seven days puts him in mind of Garrison Keillor's weekly review of the news from Lake Wobegon which is often almost terrifying in its banality.  Uncle Jack's news from Bawlmer this week is of a piece.

      The high point came on Friday when Mrs. U.J.'s granddaughter Isabella Sabatino, age five, had her first sleepover at grandma's new apartment.  In honor of the occasion grandma decided to take Isabella and Uncle Jack out to dinner before settling in to an exciting evening of watching DVDs on the 52-inch you-know-what. Choosing a restaurant was difficult because there are two in Little Italy that seemed equally appropriate for this special occasion.  One is called "Isabella's Pizza" and the other is "Sabatino's Restaurant"---located only a block apart in the heart of Little Italy.

     Not surprisingly Isabella preferred "Isabella's" and her choice, as always, was pepperoni pizza.  Thanks to Isabella Uncle Jack has consumed an inordinate amount of pepperoni pizza in the past three months, the vast majority of it mediocre, and he can tell you that Isabella's "stone oven" pizza did not rise significantly above the mean.  Unfortunately Uncle Jack was spoiled at an early age (about 40) by prolonged exposure to Mineo's on Murray Avenue in Pittsburgh, producers of arguably the world's finest pizza at that time. Every pizza he has tasted since leaving Pittsburgh in 1980 has been disappointing in one way or another.  The Curse of Mineo's.

     The rest of the week was uneventful, thank goodness.  The Farmers Market was delightful as always and the 52-inch you-know-what served up a splendid assortment of NBA games and gave promise of bringing a new dimension to March Madness.  The mute switch works perfectly which is comforting for Uncle Jack, knowing as he does that the insufferable Dick Vitale will need to be silenced frequently.

     The week was not without its downer. It came when Uncle Jack discovered that the refrigerator magnets he bought at Target last Monday do not work on his refrigerator. They work fine on the dishwasher but he is too old and creaky to bend over that far every time he wants to check his doctors' appointments.  

     Speaking of which he has a biggy coming up at 9 a.m. Thursday when the comely Dr. Hininger will do battle with his hernia somewhere in the bowels of the Johns Hopkins Medical Center. With any luck he will be allowed to go home Thursday afternoon where he will commence his recovery while propped up in front of the 52 inch you-know-what.  Will Oprah help or hinder?  Stay tuned. 

     Most of Uncle Jack's battles with balky computers have ended in ignominious defeat.  Either he winds up forking over a huge sum to some tattooed twenty-something, usually arrogant, who can charge what the traffic will bear because his customers are both stupid and desperate, or he winds up buying a new computer because it's cheaper than paying the repair bill.  

      He was faced with this Hobson's choice last weekend when Mrs. U.J.'s Sony laptop steadfastly refused to turn on.  Even though it had worked perfectly only a few hours before, it absolutely refused to respond to any known form of beseechment---not even prayer which Uncle Jack resorts to only in truly dire circumstances such as the possibility of imminent death.

     And dire they were.  Mrs. U.J.'s Sony is the repository of countless gigabytes of stuff that she needs to carry out her responsibilities as chief resume writer for a major career counseling company. With her computer in a dormant state she would be unable to complete a couple of promised jobs by their Sunday deadlines which would besmirch her stellar reputation for reliability under pressure, an unforgiveable failure in the high pressure world of corporate resume writing.

     The computer failure occurred on Friday evening but panic did not ensue until Saturday morning when Uncle Jack discovered that Eli the Computer Guy, who had recently brought his own laptop expensively but quickly back to life, did not work on Saturday.  Nor did the hired Geeks at Staples---all of them apparently preferring to devote their weekends to squandering the vast wealth they extract from the wallets of their helpless victims during the week.

     At this time of desperate need Uncle Jack turned for help to his best friend in cyberspace---the omnipresent and omnipotent Google.  He typed "Sony laptop will not turn on" into the search bar and was instantly rewarded with something like 1,350,000 responses to explore.  Apparently Mrs. U.J. was not the first to experience this particular problem.

      His initial elation began to sink to the level of despair as the first thirty or forty entries described possible remedies that were light years beyond Uncle Jack's capabilities. ("First, remove the motherboard......"?)  He was about to give up when he stumbled across a suggestion that he could actually try.  A similarly afflicted Sony owner had called attention to a tiny switch in the lid of all Sony laptops which turns the machine off when a user closes the top while the computer is still on. 

     Eureka!! Mrs. U.J. had confessed that the screen was still illuminated when she last closed the lid and the little switch could therefore have something to do with its refusal to start up again. (A fit of pique, perhaps?). After careful examination Uncle Jack found what he thought could be the recalcitrant switch and in the time-honored fashion of tinkerers everywhere he tweaked it with a paper clip. Then he pressed the "start" button again and was rewarded instantly with a row of flashing lights.

     Readers can only imagine the sense of triumph and elation that swept over him as he realized that not only had he saved Mrs. U.J.'s bacon (for which he would be suitably rewarded later) but he had probably saved at least a hundred bucks Eli would have charged him to unstick the same switch (without telling him what he had done and how long it had taken him to do it).  

     Uncle Jack is no doubt guilty of hubris and Eli will surely take his revenge in the future but it's a great feeling to have beaten the geeks at their own game for once.

     Spring came early to Baltimore this weekend and Uncle Jack and Mrs. U.J. made the most of it by sampling several of the city's delights.  They started early Saturday morning with their obligatory visit to the nearby Waverly Farmers Market where they load up on a week’s worth of fruit, vegetables, cheese, whole grain homemade bread and other goodies at prices that should make the Whole Foods store blush.  One of the vendors specializes in sticky buns like Uncle Jack hasn’t tasted since he was a kid and his mom made them every Saturday morning along with the week’s supply of Swedish rye bread.  Good sticky buns are hard to beat for breakfast after a strenuous hour at the market.

     After lunch on their seventh floor balcony overlooking the Johns Hopkins campus (it was over 70 degrees by this time) they drove a few blocks up Charles street to “Evergreen”, one of the two Johns Hopkins museums housed in elegant old mansions, the other being “Homewood” right across the street which they have already visited.  Evergreen is by far the most impressive of the two in terms of size, ornateness, interior furnishings, and all around opulence.  It was built in the 1870’s by a Baltimore and Ohio railroad executive named John Garrett for his son who eschewed further moneymaking and became a diplomat, serving under five presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to Herbert Hoover.  When the younger Garrett, a friend of Johns Hopkins, founder of the university, died in 1942 he bequeathed the estate (which includes 26 acres of prime real estate nestled between Loyola University and the College of Notre Dame of Maryland on Charles street) to JHU along with a huge endowment to keep it open to the public as a place for cultural gatherings of all kinds.

     Saturday’s event was a concert by the Modigliani String Quartet of Paris who played works of Haydn, Ravel and Mendelssohn in an intimate room originally designed to be gymnasium for the Garrett boys but later converted into a kind of wacky theater where the diplomat’s wife, a dancer, would entertain her dinner guests.  It’s a great room for chamber music as the quartet, made up of four young Frenchmen, demonstrated.  The concert was preceded by a tour of the house and followed by a pleasant reception featuring all manner of elegant hors d’oeuvres and a large cut-crystal bowl of fruit punch laced with something that Uncle Jack couldn’t quite make out even after examining several glasses. A lovely way to spend an afternoon, for sure.

     On Sunday afternoon, with the temperature still in the 70’s, they headed for the Fells Point neighborhood, a once badly run-down area in the harbor east of the the famed Inner Harbor, most of which somehow escaped the urban renewal wrecking ball and has emerged as a thriving community which is a magnet for fun-seekers from all over Baltimore.  It has a wonderfully eclectic assortment of shops, restaurants, and bars lining its cobblestone streets through which they wandered for a couple of hours, fueled by cups of the best gelato they have discovered outside of Italy.  On their next visit, which they hope will be soon, they will make pilgrimages to Ostrowski’s Polish Sausage Shop (not open on Sunday)

and Bertha’s Mussel Shop and bar where, mirabile dictu, Pilsner Urquell is available on draft.

     A walk on the beach would have been nice to finish off the weekend  but for right now Uncle Jack is very happy with what he has found in beachless Bawlmer.

     Uncle Jack is starting to get inquiries about his whereabouts which suggests that it is time to let his faithful readers know that he is still on the planet.  As he said in his last blog entry he and Mrs. U.J. have been up to their ears in the exigencies of moving, complicated by a couple of time-consuming and energy-sapping health issues for the past several weeks.  He is pleased to report that both are now under control and they are beginning to resume their interrupted love affair with Bawlmer.

     He has to confess that since moving he has encountered a number of natives who have seriously questioned their sanity.  The two young furniture movers who accompanied them to Nags Head a couple of weeks ago, for example, after spending a few hours in beautiful South Nags Head, could only shake their heads in wonder.

     Last Saturday's splendid concert by the Baltimore Symphony in magnificent Meyerhoff Hall did much to restore their confidence that this is where they belong at this stage of their lives.  Their recent discovery that the Chinese take-out next door to the neighborhood wine shop offers an extensive menu of delicious dishes at ridiculously low prices also helped.  Both deliver, too.

     They are now settled comfortably into their new digs with only a few more mall safaris needed to fill in the remaining gaps---a lamp here, a wastebasket there, a few of the more exotic kitchen utensils. Several colossal shopping complexes reside within a ten-minute drive which together could probably satisfy the needs and wants of a population ten times the size of Baltimore's.  It remains to be seen which, if any, will survive the current unpleasantness.

     And now it is time for Uncle Jack to hie his hernia over to the Johns Hopkins Hospital Outpatient Clinic for a pre-op conference with some of the folks who will play principal roles in  repairing it on March 19.  So far he has been very impressed with the hospital and its staff and apparently he isn't the only one because Johns Hopkins has been rated the best hospital in the country by those who know for the past 15 years or more. Uncle Jack's surgeon, by the way, is a very attractive  young woman whom he hopes is as competent as she is comely.  

    Look for another episode along about Sunday.  Thanks for your patience.