So yesterday’s storm was quite feisty. O’Hare showed winds gusting over 80 MPH. An EF1 tornado touched down just to the east of us. I thought the clouds coming over the condo looked quite “swirly” as we watched the storm pass through yesterday.
I was surprised to see exactly how much damage was on streets in our neighborhood when I went for my morning walk. As of this evening there are still areas without power; ComEd is working around the clock to restore electricity to those areas. Luckily we never lost power.
So a very impressive storm blew through. All of our devices were alerting us to a tornado warning and to take shelter immediately. We had secured all the furniture on the balcony and made an exit plan. If it looked like it was going to overwhelm us, we’d go into my office, which is the furthest room from the windows and has a concrete wall.
We spent most of the storm on the balcony with our backs to the upwind wall, though at one point we came inside due to the force of the wind. We watched patio furniture fly off the roof deck next to the clock you see in one of the photos. The trees around us bent over in ways we’d never seen before. It was a very impressive site.
Then, in less than an hour, it was over and by evening the winds had completely died down and the sun was out.
It was probably the strongest wind I have encountered and part of me wishes I was out on the prairie chasing the storm.
So I focused on relaxing this entire weekend. We didn’t go flying, I didn’t embark on some sort of weekend project, we didn’t try to go out and have a drink or eat and end up dealing with the stress of maintaining distancing and the like, we just had a weekend of downtime.
It’s just what we needed.
I’ve had this habit of trying to maintain a certain level of productivity as well as not missing out on life (something I’m more aware of as I get older) during the weekend and I feel like I haven’t given myself a chance to relax. The world is stressful enough these days, why add extra stress when we don’t have to?
Hence, a weekend of doing very little. It was quite nice.
So I went ahead and installed Mac OS Big Sur on my mid-2015, 15-inch MacBook Pro. I’ve been messing around with it a bit here and there and while the new UI elements taking some getting used to, it feels more stable than I thought it would. I’m also surprised at the responsiveness, this beta version is running faster than the latest production version on Mac OS Catalina.
I’ve run across a couple of bugs here and there; the label for my clock widget says “City” instead of “Chicago” and the weather widget keeps defaulting back to Cupertino. I was able to reproduce an issue another blogger is seeing, but otherwise it’s a new coat of paint on the status quo. While users will instantly notice the new look and feel, they should still feel comfortable and confident when Big Sur is realized in the Fall.
I sold the Mac Mini I was using as a “BYOD”, or “Bring Your Own Device”, machine at work. Work has completely gone down the Microsoft path and have done their best to lock non-Windows machines out of the network. While my work as a developer that uses Linux (or other Unix platforms) all day long is still entrenched in a decidedly non-Windows environment, the work desktop team feels everyone in the company should be using Windows laptops. So I make do. I can deal and it’ll be nice to use the money from the sale of the Mac mini toward my next computer. I’m trying to decide if I want to try the full-time Linux leap or just embrace this aging MacBook Pro and iPad Pro combo I currently have going on.
Oh well, there’s no need to rush while everything is working just fine.
In the meanwhile, I’ll see what other bugs in Big Sur I can find and provide feedback to Apple. If you’re not filling out bug reports, you’re doing the whole “beta software” thing wrong.
Today is International Cat Day. Truman poses in front of his food dish because even though he’s well over the vet’s recommended weight, he feels he does not get enough food. Normally he’s banging on the entire device with his left paw, trying to get kibble to fall down like a kid shaking a gum ball machine. Nevertheless, he wishes everyone a Happy International Cat Day.
Earl and I finally finished season one of “The Politician”. We started it way back in October and kind of lost interest, but with this whole pandemic thing going on, and the two of us really trying not to mingle with the masses to avoid contracting COVID-19, we’re cleaning out the streaming lists on our streaming services.
By the way, can I just say right here and now we have too many streaming services to choose from. We have the standard fare: Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV+, and Disney+, but now there’s CBS All Access, Peacock! (I don’t know if it’s suppose to have an exclamation point or not but it seems appropriate), a Comcast exclusive channel that we can’t get, something called Bufu, and probably a whole bunch of others I know nothing about. Oh! And Amazon Prime. Without Amazon Prime we wouldn’t be able to watch “The Mothers-In-Law”. Who would be left to chew the scenery? Anyway, too many streaming services; it turns out cable will probably be cheaper.
So we finished season one of “The Politician”. It was quirky. There were a couple of twists and turns that I did not anticipate but overall it wasn’t a waste of time. Speaking of Kaye Ballard chewing scenery, I see Bette Midler is coming along for season two of “The Politician”. Apparently the leader character is now going to run for something bigger than student body president.
Did I give something away? I hope not. After all, it is called “The Politician”.
The thing about programs that Ryan Murphy creates or co-creates or whatever is that he starts to get weird with them. And this feels like it’s getting weird. Will we enjoy Season Two? Only time will tell and for some reason there’s only seven episodes instead of eight.
But Ryan Murphy’s story direction always seems to go in wild directions and there will undoubtedly be a variety of sexual orientations and couplings because that’s what Ryan Murphy does. There’s nothing wrong with it; it makes me wonder if there are more people out there enjoying something other than the standard flavors of coupling and sexuality than what we see portrayed in real life.
With Earl and I watching more television these days, we’ll probably finish up season two of “The Politician” within a week. I don’t think it’ll be a waste of time.
When my husband tunes in a news conference with the Orange One during the workday, I have to shut my office door and put on noise canceling headphones. It’s not that my husband is watching a news conference, and I use that phrase loosely, and I wish to tune out the news of the day, but rather it’s the awful voice of the Orange One that makes me want to crawl up a wall and stick my head in the spinning ceiling fan.
The man will never be known for his oration skills.
Now, I know His Idiocy can’t pronounce Yosemite. After all, he’s just mastered “person, man, woman, tv, camera”, we can’t expect him to go to bigger words containing more syllables in only a week. We should give him credit; he sounded it out and after doing so the world thought he was tremendous.
Actually, they didn’t find him tremendous, but he uses the word tremendous so frequently and so inappropriately, I’m beginning to think ‘tremendous’ is the Boomer version of the Millennials’ ‘literally’.
I literally never want to hear the word tremendous again.
I’m disappointed that the “journalists” (and I use that word very loosely) continue to attend these “briefings” (and I use that word very loosely) when we know they’re going to be jammed packed with a tremendous number of lies. If I had a drink for every promise that was to come to fruition “in two weeks” I’d be more drunk than I am right now and quite frankly I’m in a position at the moment where I’m doing my best Tallulah impersonation and calling everyone darling.
Actually, I’m not drunk. Not tremendously so. But it makes for good writing and hopefully it meets my objective of entertaining the reader.
I wouldn’t waste one drop of fine alcohol in an effort to forget the Orange One.
BURBANK, CA – MAY 24: Ellen DeGeneres during a taping of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, May 24, 2016 in Burbank, CA. (Photo by Brooks Kraft/Getty Images)
So word on the street is the persona of Ellen DeGeneres on her talk show may not be an accurate portrayal of her demeanor off stage. Stories of not allowing the consumption of meat by her employees, or not allowing them to look her in the eye, or just being rather mean when not in stage are peppering the Intertubes left and right. Honestly, these stories have been circulating for years, but recent tweets from the likes of Brad Garrett and Lea Thompson reinforcing these believes have helped propel them to new heights.
First of all, can we talk about the whole “you can’t look me in the eye” thing? What sort of weirdo does this? If this is true about anyone, they should probably be avoided at all costs. It takes a certain amount of some sort of psychosis to tell people they can’t look you in the eye. That’s just stupid.
That being said, are we really surprised to find out that Ellen on stage is different from Ellen off stage? I just take it for granted that most famous people are this way. Earl and I were in the audience of a talk show a couple of decades ago and the show host was quite crabby during commercial breaks and refused to sign any autographs or meet any of the audience members after the show. What you saw on television, a bubbly, happy, sing-songy personality, was nothing like what we saw during the break. I’m surprised this host allowed the audience to witness this stuff without signing an NDA.
I’ve read and heard stories like this for literally decades. Years ago I was chatting with a fellow “Bewitched” fan online, who was invited to a “Hollywood Party” with one of the folks from the set of “Bewitched” and he said he met someone that was quite crabby, or as he put it, “she didn’t really turn the world on with her smile that night”.
Everyone has a bad day, right?
I was never an avid viewer of Ellen’s talk show. I’d catch clips here and there as they were force-fed over airport television or something, but other than that, I knew she danced a bit, told some jokes, and then did fluffy interviews with fluffy people. I’ve heard that lately she’s taken her games to a new level, dousing with water and flames or flinging them out of a slingshot or something but I figured that’s just what the American public wants in 2020. I did see her clips with the old lady from Houston who drank Listerine but someone revealed that was a stage hand doing an imitation of an old lady that drank Listerine and I lost interest.
If Ellen is as awful as they say she is then don’t work for her. I know I won’t. I won’t watch her show either, but like her or not, we have more gay people on television today because she was gay on television in the late 1990s. She was probably too gay at the time and so was I but we all survived it.
I won’t be cranky, though, and you can look me in the eye.
This shop in our neighborhood is keeping their message simple, clear, and concise. It’s brilliant marketing. I wonder how many potential customers take a self inventory before walking into the place. How many get worked up into a huff and take their business elsewhere? I’m sure the owners of this location don’t want the latter in there anyway.
Too often I see folks sharing images of receipts with tips of minimal amounts because the server wore a mask or they wanted their waiter or waitress to go back where they came from. I find it difficult to wrap my head around this concept. I didn’t pay close attention in Sunday school but I know there’s something about “Do unto others…”. Perhaps the cranky folks that leave bad tips with hateful messages think they’re above the commandments. They’re certainly not acting Christian.
So many false prophets here in these “United States”.
I’m occasionally amused by science fiction/alien arrival movies that assume visitors from another planet would start their visit here on Earth in the United States. We don’t have a particular large land mass. We barely qualify for “world leader” unless you want to talk about deaths during pandemics. I should think aliens would be more interested in smart cities, bullet trains, and societies that have universal health care. So many American movies have depicted aliens arriving to this planet as hostile. Years ago, back in the LiveJournal days, someone mentioned there would be no other reason for a race to cross the vastness of space for any other reason than hostile military reasons. It’s like crossing the ocean from Europe to a new land in the west.
I’d like to think everyone should just be kind to their neighbors.
Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
