Jeff and Mark from North Carolina are visiting for the weekend. Jeff’s family lives north of Phoenix and they decided to wrap up their visit with a stop here in Tucson. It was great to see them.
Mark is celebrating a birthday this weekend, and Chris and Mike made a Guinness-chocolate cake to celebrate. It was wonderful.
Truman is allowed on the bottom shelf of the cabinet in the kitchen. He enjoys this vantage point.
The Sonoran Desert is slowing moving toward it’s characteristic desert look as we move away from Monsoon Season 2021. Things became very green during the uncharacteristically rainy monsoon season. The rain was a good thing, because we needed to break the drought, but now the grasses the popped up are turning brown and I’m a little concerned they will contribute to wildfires later on.
This is a shot from the first or second look out along the road to the top of Mount Lemmon, about six miles to the north of our home.
Tomorrow, ABBA will release another song from their upcoming album “Voyage”. It’s still so weird to type that.
Originally recorded in 1978 but discarded and never finished, ABBA has finally finished “Just A Notion”. Out tomorrow, there are some snippets of the now finished track available on YouTube today.
Enjoy.
Aging gracefully is a beautiful thing. There’s a meme going around on Twitter where we’re encouraged to post a photo if we wear glasses. I posted a photo and immediately lost three followers. I don’t usually notice my follower count, because honestly I don’t really care how many people follow my inane tweets, but the change in number caught my eye and I was a little bit surprised.
I wear glasses. My mustache is gray. I have a gut and I don’t have a six pack that anyone can see. I’m comfortable in my skin, I’m probably in what could be called my mid-50s and I know who I am.
I’m happy being me.
I don’t feel the need to color anything or pull anything tight or inject anything to smooth anything. I’ve earned the laugh lines and I’ve learned to laugh more.
I’m happy being me at 53 and I look forward to what the future brings.
Work just started a company obituary page on the corporate-wide website to do the typical obituary thing for co-workers that have passed. Many have passed recently due to “COVID-19 related complications”. Too many.
I think the biggest thing I’ve lost during the pandemic is my compassion for folks who choose to remain ignorant.
We stopped at a McDonalds on our way home from Vegas this past weekend. The self-serve kiosks were malfunctioning, no one was at the traditional registers, and their seemed to be a sense of panic from the back.
Plus, folks didn’t care if paper was strewn all over the lobby as they picked up their food.
We are not in what I would call “the golden era of American society”.
I was up at 5:15 AM and immediately headed to the airport to fly a 1969 Piper Cherokee 140 for an hour with the instructor that’s checking me out on their airplanes.
The desert is beautiful at this time of day. Unfortunately, I did not take any photos but it turns out I am capable of flying an airplane first thing in the morning. I had never done that before.
After seven hours of driving across the desert, we arrived at home just in time for dinner with the family. And, another spectacular sunset.
It was a very good long weekend in Las Vegas. I feel relaxed. I intend to hold on to that feeling.
Tomorrow we head home to Tucson and I can say it’s been a very nice time in Vegas but I’ve had my fill. We’ve been staying at the Downtown Grand near “The Fremont Experience”. There’s plenty of LED screens, loud music, and people flying by on zip lines. It’s a lot of fun, but I feel like we’ve done it for this trip and that’s all good.
It’s been too long since I’ve done so much people watching. It’s different now than what it used to be. The pandemic changed us all. Politics are everywhere. I passed a Vietnam Vet in a wheelchair who appeared to have Parkinson’s Disease. He was carrying a big poster of President Biden dressed up as a member of the Taliban. Many folks around him were offering to buy the Vietnam Vet a beer. I don’t know if it was for his service or his political beliefs.
And a quick aside, on this trip I noticed gas prices have gone up quite a bit in the past couple of weeks. Someone put stickers all over the fuel pump. The stickers had picture of Biden saying “I did this”. For those that are stupid, the President of the United States does not set the price of gasoline. It’s called capitalism, and gas prices are going up it’s because of supply and demand, not some edict from the Oval Office. Grow up.
I’m going home with a little more money than I brought and we are well under our gambling budget for this trip. We walked “the Strip” this afternoon and had a nice time. The Fremont Street and the Strip are like two completely different Vegas experiences. I like them both, in moderation. Two and a half days have been enough.
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.
Weird? Eccentric!