Jinx still isn’t sure about me yet.
May 2022
Escape.
I’ve been wanting to escape to our northeast for a week in pursuit of some severe storm chasing. My husband said he’s not really feeling the need to join me on this trip. With his blessing, I’m off for a week the first full week of June.
I’m really excited about this.
I think I’m going to fly to a destination and then rent a car to drive home, focusing on storms and back roads. My plan is to avoid freeways whenever possible.
I’ll be armed with a camera or two, some weather radios, some “real” maps, and a little more than a week of open calendar and open road.
I’ll be blogging about the experience when this takes place. Hopefully Mother Nature will be cooperative.
Flowers.
These flowers along our driveway always make me smile. I don’t need “signs of spring” to bring me out of a funk these days; the lack of snow from living in the desert achieves that for me naturally.
The previous owners of our home did quite well with the landscaping. We’ve had to make a couple of changes due to the intensity of last year’s monsoon but for the most part the landscaping company keeps our grounds looking lively and lovely.
Retro.
Someone I follow on Mastodon posted this ad for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. The ad has some happy cats riding along on the train and this made me smile. I always enjoy these mid-century ads and other artwork, especially when shown in its original context. Memes are fun, but sometimes I the original more fun.
Plus, happy cats!
Ma.
My mother hates being called “Ma”. As kids we were always corrected to use “Mom” instead of “Ma”, usually through loudly executed dialog.
I talked to Mom this morning and wished her a Happy Mother’s Day. She was outside enjoying the Central New York spring weather with my nephew’s dog. As part of the CNY ritual, she was sitting in the garage with the door open watching the activities in the neighborhood. That’s what folks do up there.
Here’s a photo from 2019 that makes me smile. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.
Calmer.
So for the past seven days I’ve reduced my Twitter usage by about 98%. I haven’t deleted my accounts or anything but my interaction time has waned. I miss some of the people I’ve developed a friendship with over the years; I need to find alternate ways of maintaining a connection.
The biggest change I’ve noticed from this new approach to Twitter is that I’m a lot less anxiety ridden about what’s going on in the world. As I’ve mentioned before, opinions and debate from all sides of the political spectrum can become quite shouty over on Twitter. I don’t know what Elon Musk is talking about when it comes to “limitations of free speech” because there’s a lot of free speech being bandied about over there and a good chunk of it is quite ugly.
I still firmly believe that technology has outpaced society’s ability to use it properly responsibly. There are too many people that lack the moral foundation of sharing truth, listening to others, and such and more concerned with the dopamine hit that results from screaming absurdities and getting the audience riled up.
We need to thrive on intelligent dialog and debate, not dopamine hits of this nature. Of course, the dopamine hit approach is egged on by algorithms designed by the social media companies to ramp up engagement so they can get richer. It’s a rather ugly situation but one that is not going to go away any time soon.
In the meantime, I decide to step away a lot. My sanity is much more important.
Caturday.
Things have settled down in the world of cats and puppies and Truman seems much more calm in his usual haunts. He does enjoy eating out of the dogs’ water bowl. He tried a couple pieces of dog chow and decided it was not for him.
Here’s a photo of him checking out the sunset, followed by the relaxation period after enjoying the sunset.
A Night Out.
We decided to go out to dinner this evening. It was a good time; even after 26+ years we still very much enjoy each other’s company
The service at the restaurant was a little uneven. This didn’t deter us from an enjoyable evening, but the awkwardness was noticeable. The server seemed to be struggling a little bit, for example, when he ran down the dessert list he mentioned “chocolate chip, pumpkin, strawberry shortcake, etc.” but didn’t tell us what the dessert actually was. To avoid making things more confusing, I passed on asking “chocolate chip, what?” and just went with strawberry shortcake, which turned out to be a cookie with a scoop of ice cream.
Good Enough?
As I get older I’m finding I have less tolerance for things that are “good enough” or “fine”, especially when it comes to using technology.
As mentioned a few weeks ago, I have a Lenovo ThinkPad t460s laptop. It’s a nice little rig and I’m able to swap out parts and upgrade it all I want, which is the direct opposite of an Apple experience. Unfortunately, the overall computing experience with the Lenovo hardware is several notches below the quality of the experience on an Apple device. Linux works great and does everything I want it to do, and this older laptop has plenty of horsepower for what I expect it to handle, but the trackpad and the quality of the display are a bit of a mess.
I often run into this sort of thing with the computer provided for work. While I am much more productive in a Mac or Linux environment and work insists on everyone using Windows, it’s not Windows slowing me down as much as the cheapest laptop hardware possible. Like my Lenovo ThinkPad, the work provided computer has a tiny trackpad requiring a crazy amount of pressure to click anything, the keyboard is sized slightly off from normal, and the display is just too dim for my aging eyes.
I’ve been using my 2018 iPad Pro in tandem with the Linux laptop and I’m finding I’m getting more acclimated to using the iPad as my daily driver that I carry around with me. If I want to get into full geek mode I still have the Linux laptop, the experience just doesn’t have the fit and finish of an Apple experience. Doable. Good enough?
Sometimes I feel like I’ve earned better than “good enough”. Now, if my budget would only cooperate with my plans.
I know, first world problems.
