January 9, 2022

Today we did a little hiking on Sentinel Peak here in Tucson. It was our first time up the mountain and there are some decent trails up for short hikes. The park was quite busy on this warm winter day. It’s fun wearing shorts and the like during the first weeks of January.

Sentinel Peak is also called “A Mountain”, because of the big A that’s been up there for over a century. That’s the white bit you see in some of the photos below. It’s much too warm for snow (though there’s still a trace of snow up on Mount Lemmon).

It’s 12:37 AM Mountain Time and I’m still in front of the computer tweaking things in my little Realm of Geekdom. I’ve had a couple of beers, I’ve been working on an old gaming PC, and I have an episode of “Maude” playing in the background.

This activity is giving my brain the reset it needs.

The vibe started this morning when I started cleaning up my work home office. Every weekday I work in what our blueprints call “The Library”. It’s a nice little space, with plenty of sunshine, super high ceilings, and ample room for me to have a comfortable work area, some nice shelves, and the aforementioned space for Truman to stretch out on the floor. The Library is much larger than my old home office in Chicago.

I’ve never felt fully settled in the home office space. Cords are not neat, my desk has a little too much stuff on it (mainly monitors and cords) and it just felt slightly to the left of chaos, at least to me. I like a clean desk. I don’t like cords. So I ordered a couple of inexpensive monitor arms for the two monitors on my desk and some cable wraps and the like. They arrive tomorrow.

I also have the flight simulator and gaming computer up in what the blueprints deem “The Observatory”. The room was originally designed to have a big telescope mounted in the middle of the room, in fact, there’s a cement in the workshop underneath the observatory that was meant to support the telescope. The room was never finished for this purpose as the original owner and designer of the house passed away about a year into the project, his wife ultimately finished the house before selling it to the owner we bought it from. If you look over my right shoulder in the selfie photo you’ll see counter height electrical plugs and wall plates for data cables, speaker cables, and the like. This room is also rather fortified with cement block walls. If we ever have a tornado in the Sonoran Desert, this is where we’ll be. Directly under the room is the workshop, where Chris and Mike do woodworking and Chris has his 3D printing set up for his graphic design business.

Speaking of wood working, Chris and Mike finished the table they designed and built for the living room today. I’m very impressed with their craftsmanship. My dad’s side of the family all had craftmanship like skills that I never inherited. I’m lucky to have others in the family that can build furniture like this for our home.