What's in Dave's Head

I hope 2015 was as good to you as it was to me. I was graced with so many blessings and had so many prayers answered: My contract with Constellation Energy for corporate communications work was extended through October, giving me some relative security for the first time in a very long time. There’s no guarantee, but I’m hopeful this will lead to an employee position. I love the work and the people I work with. Eileen is pregnant and due around the end of March. I'm going to be a grandfather! Kate has a serious boyfriend, Steve Ritchie, who adores her. Jack’s YouTube channel continues to thrive and he is doing really good work. He reached two key milestones this year: two million subscribers and half a billion total views. My relationship with Donna continues to deepen. We are best friends, and she really is the love of my life. Happy New Year to you and yours!

Part 1: Journey to Rockbridge County Our latest adventure took us to Rockbridge County, Virginia, in Southwest Virginia. I picked up Donna from work at one o’clock Friday afternoon and off we went, Maryland Route 32 west to U.S. Interstate 70 west to Hagerstown, then U.S. Interstate 81 south to our destination 10 miles south of Lexington, Virginia.   The four-hour trip wasn’t the easiest, with early-exiting Friday afternoon commuters jamming I-70 and loads of weekend travelers and tractor-trailers, many unable to climb the grades at speed, congesting the two southbound lanes of I-81. So what? The fall foliage, even though we missed the peak colors by a week or two, was spectacular, with the oranges, yellows and red dappling the landscape like an Impressionist painting.   For me, even more magical are the mountains (westerners will scoff at this characterization of our relatively puny ranges, but they are majestic enough for me). On I-70 as you approach Frederi...

Friday afternoon Donna and I drove up to Loveladies, a town near the northern end of Long Beach Island, an 18-mile long barrier island on the New Jersey coast. Donna spent the summers of her youth in Harvey Cedars, one town down from Loveladies, in a house on the ocean and a short walk across Long Beach Boulevard to Barnegat Bay. Her family sold the house in Harvey Cedars and built the Loveladies house around 25 years ago. It was a beautiful evening, warmer than you would expect for mid-October. We unloaded our stuff, turned on the house's heat and hot-water heater, and headed out to one of the few restaurants on the northern end of the island to stay open year round. After dinner, when we got back to the house, we went out on the deck. The stars were spectacular and the night so clear you could see the light band of the Milky Way stretching across the sky. We slept in until 7:30, practically a record for us, turned on the gas fireplace and had coffee at the same table we hav...

Donna and I are fortunate to live so close to so many interesting, varied and fun places. From our home, half a tank of gas is more than enough for a day trip to Annapolis, Baltimore, or Washington, D.C. and back. Or you can visit Civil War battlefields, pre-Revolutionary towns, hiking trails, museums, parks, lakes and mountains.   A full tank of gas gets you to the beach and back, or to Philadelphia or New York. Donna at Carroll Creek, Frederick Frederick, Maryland is a beautiful 45-minute drive out I-70 from us. I grew up in Rockville, and Frederick was considered just a little farm town. Inhabitants were called “Frednecks.” I don’t think I ever went there until Donna and I decided recently to explore it. Painting on an outside building wall Market Street in downtown is an attractive collection of restaurants and eclectic shops and boutiques where you can buy everything from faux retro lunchboxes and signs (“If life gives you a lemon, you just tell that lemon ...