It’s been a wonderful Christmas morning here in our desert home.
December 2022
Christmas Eve Swim.
Chris and Jamie lit the pool room with a hundred tea lights and other ambient holiday themed lighting. It was very nice.
Caturday, Part 2.
Here’s Truman, looking like he’s investigating his shadow on the roof on Friday afternoon.
Caturday.
We had a lot of activity in the house this week. Much of the damage from Monsoon Season 2021 was finally repaired and the house is looking intact again. Last Thursday and Friday the drywall company was here and replaced the missing drywall that was removed due to water damage. On Monday and Tuesday this week, our new exterior doors were replaced. The original doors were never installed correctly and the floor and door framing underneath the exterior doors on the second floor were in really bad shape. The contractors had to remove and rebuild the flooring in our bedroom in front of our door that goes outside.
The contractors made a small hole in the floor to inspect the damage. They went to seal up the hole when they noticed cat hair on the edges of the hole. Truman was missing. They were confident he’d gone down the hole.
We searched around the house, searched around the property, searched the roof (where the second floor doors provide access), no Truman. The contractor said, “I see the insulation mashed down, he’s down there”.
Kitty was almost sealed up in the floor while sniffing the floor joists between the first and second floor.
The contractors ended up taking out a much bigger section of the floor and climbing down in to see what was up. A few moments later we heard the unmistakable sounds of a cat being pulled out of a hiding place by his paws and he was not happy. But he was out of the hole and back up in the house where he belonged.
I raided my casino winnings for a very nice tip for the extra work the contractors did to extract Truman from the floor joists. Truman demanded treats upon his extraction.
I Want You.
When I was hired at WOWZ/WOWB in 1994, it was as their Music Director and night time air personality. I was excited about the gig; the Top 40 radio station I had been on was sold, the entire staff was fired, and the station was switched to Classic Rock. This left a gap in the market and I was excited to be signing onto this new station to bring it to the masses.
The station didn’t have a clear direction for its first 18 months or so; they wanted to be “Adult Contemporary” during the day (for at work listening) but at night they wanted to turn up the heat with dance and rhythmic Top 40 music. A radio station will not succeed without a solid identity, a cohesive format, and most importantly, without listeners. Women 18-54 tuning into the day didn’t want to hear the rhythmic music at night and vice-versa. After a couple of poor performances in the Arbitron ratings, the Program Director was fired, I was put in place as Program Director, and I was given the green light to make it a Top 40 Rhythmic Station with a focus on dance music full time.
Earl and I would drive around the state on the weekends and listen to what other stations were doing and I stole ideas from all of them. By the end of 1996 the station had a cohesive sound in both identity and music, was starting to get traction with the audience, and most importantly, started showing decent ratings giving us two things: more advertising dollars and “reporting status” in Radio and Records. Record companies didn’t care about radio stations that didn’t have reporting status. Once they found out who we were and that what we played matter, I was suddenly everyone record company rep’s best friend.
One of the challenges I faced at the time was filling in the back catalog with music from the mid to late 1980s. The disco stuff was easy to find; there were plenty of CD collections out at the time with the likes of Chic and Blondie and Pamala Stanley and Gloria Gaynor and the like. It was the dance music that had been released in the mid to late 1980s that was hard to find, as it didn’t make it to collections on CD yet and cassette singles sounded awful on the air.
Up until the days of Napster and Limewire (and I will never admit that I played music obtained through those services because of course I didn’t, wink wink), we relied on 12-inch singles found in record shops. I’d end up recording the 12-inch singles onto reel-to-reel tape and then editing down the longer formatted tracks to a friendly radio length. Because of this we would play versions that were familiar to listeners but weren’t quite the radio edit heard back when the songs were originally released. One or two of these edits caught the attention of record reps that were visiting the station and they made their way back to the record companies to get released on compilation albums or other music services.
One of the songs I had a really time getting my hands on didn’t actually do that well in U.S. Top 40 radio but plenty of folks knew it. (It had hit #40 on Top 40 radio in 1989). The song had done fairly well in U.S. clubs but had done really well in Canadian clubs, so there was enough familiarity with the track to put it into the back catalog. The 12-inch single was scarce, but I finally scored a copy while combing through the record collection of a club DJ. I never edited down the 5+ minute mix and instead just burned it as is to a CD-R; I figured the DJs could use the track to step away from the console to use the bathroom. We’d often jump in 20 seconds to start the song, but some of the jocks didn’t do that.
From 1989, here’s Shana with “I Want You”.
Pause.
We decided to run some errands after dinner on Wednesday night. We had some gifts to pick up, so we made the rounds of the neighborhood. I asked my husband if he wanted to stop for a drink and he thought that was a great idea.
There’s a couple of nifty bar and restaurants in our general vicinity. I’ve been telling Earl I would like to find a happy hour situation for a once in a while visit with perhaps other folks that work full time from home. I really enjoyed going out like this once in a while when we lived in Chicago (until the pandemic brought that to a halt) and I said we’re not doing it enough now that we live in Tucson. So we’ll probably do this a little more.
I just remember that’s it’s a drive, and not a train that gets us home afterwards.
Reflections.
We are fortunate to have a glass fireplace that faces both into the living room and out to the patio. I snapped a photo of the fireplace and found the reflections fascinating.
Skin.
Since moving to the desert I’ve had some impressive dry, itchy skin, especially on the lower half of my body. I’ve been using Aveeno lotion to treat the issue and it’s done a fairly good job at keeping things under control, but after swimming I would be so uncomfortable with itching that I figured I needed to get this checked out.
I also hadn’t had a skin cancer full body check in a long while. Being a (former) redhead with lots of Irish skin makes me susceptible to this sort of thing, so it’s good to get checked out once in a while. Back in August I made an appointment with a recommended dermatologist; the first appointment available was today. I just completed my visit.
As a bald guy I have lots of bare skin on the top of my head. I don’t like the feeling of sunscreen on my body and I opt to always wear a hat outdoors and/or stay out of the sun whenever possible. There’s a couple of spots on top of my head that have been peeling a little bit. It turns out these were precancerous spots. The young Dr. Harold froze those spots today. He mentioned I might have a couple of red blotches for Christmas and I was fine with that. The other option was a chemotherapy cream that would cause my head to blister and turn tomato red and I decided to stick with the red blotches from the freezing effort.
Dr. Harold checked over the rest of my body and things are looking good for a (former) red head of my age. He recommended I switch from Aveeno lotion to Aveeno or another cream for the dry skin and he also recommended an anti-itch formula. I stopped at the store on the way home and picked these things up. I go back to the dermatologist in a year for a check-up.
I look forward to swimming tonight.
