January 2023

I enjoy reading. My mom used to joke that once in a while she’d come down to the kitchen while I was eating breakfast and find me reading the phone book because I couldn’t find anything else to read. At 16 years old that was absolutely true. At 54 years old that doesn’t happen because we don’t have a phone book in the house.

Computers and the Internet have kind of thrown my reading habits sideways. I still enjoy reading, and I read a bit before falling asleep every night, though I use the Kindle App on my iPad Mini and I don’t find that experience to be particularly fulfilling. I need to get a Kindle so that I don’t have something with harsh backlighting. I’m convince that mobile devices are straining our eyes far more than books ever did.

With the tendency for Internet experiences to be short spurts of reading material, I’ve found that my already scatter focused mind drifts a bit while I’m reading, much more than it did when I was younger. I found a new approach to placing type on the screen and it’s called “Bionic Reading”. Bionic Reading places emphasis on the leading letters of words, creating a somewhat unnatural pattern in a line of text, which trains your eyes to move across the entire line of text instead of skipping around a little bit. While designed to help the reader comprehend text better, it also helps those with wandering focus to stick to the text instead of looking at the squirrel jumping around outside the window.

Because I’m an elder-Internet user with an old-school blog, I still use RSS feeds to aggregate my reading material of the day. My application of choice to consume this information is Reeder 5, available on iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS. While I don’t pay for an RSS aggregation service (I have my own server doing that job for me), Reeder 5 has built in functionality for your own aggregation lists and more importantly, it has Bionic Reading built in as an option.

As I’m tying this blog entry I’m realizing WordPress may have a Bionic Reading plugin that I can make available here for this blog. That’d be rather nifty.

I often write down bits and pieces of a blog entry throughout the day and then try to formulate the mess into something a little more coherent before winding down and heading to bed. Occasionally the winding up and posting the entry for the day happens in a batch effort on the weekend. Sitting down and making my thoughts a bit more tidy before releasing to the masses for consumption is a bit of a cathartic activity, and it gives me a chance to see where my head was at various points throughout the day.

The pressures at work, which are not really that unusual for a person in my position and management level in a corporation, can sometimes get to me. Balancing the needs of my retired husband, my family back East, my family here in Tucson, and my personal needs can sometimes be overwhelming. As a loner and introvert (even though I can fake extrovert quite well for short amounts of time), I can easily become overwhelmed with too much sensory input. Driving a car in a rural locale, flying an airplane, or sitting at my desk, gathering my thoughts and writing them down through various medium, keeps me sane. As the Internet has opened up the world to the individual user, reading the experiences of others with similar thought processes and challenges is somewhat comforting to me. Even though there are times when I want to be alone, it’s good to know that my hyper focus on one thing and lack of focus on a lot of things is not a unique situation. And this is where technology has been an asset to my life.

In addition to this blog, I have a personal journal that I maintain on a daily basis. I’ve been doing this for a little under a decade and it’s a bit of a hoot to go back and see where my head was at on the same date several years ago. I notice many patterns, and where we’re living or what I”m doing doesn’t seem to make a difference, I still have definite patterns in my thoughts and dreams and struggles and successes.

The key is to keep the patterns moving in a positive direction.

At work I manage a team of nine software ware developers scattered across the country. They’re all really good at their job and in addition to my management responsibilities, I am also a full time software developer. Luckily my team is good at being autonomous and are all trustworthy, so I just have to keep things moving in the right direction, assure they have what they need to do their jobs well, and speak to upper management on behalf of the team. I’ve had much worse gigs in my life.

I used to be able to manage all of this stuff in my head, keeping track of the status of various projects and the like, and then able to recite the status without referencing notes. My brain chemistry provides surprisingly robust memory powers, but unfortunately, it’s more geared to things I’m very interested in, I’ve witnessed or experienced, or how I felt during a recalled situation. I can remember project dates and statuses fairly well but the details seem to fall out of my cranial rolodex with some regularity. I know my husband gets frustrated when I ask for the same details of an upcoming event over and over again. I attribute this all to growing old because after all I am in my mid 50s.

I still can’t believe I’m in my mid 50s, but that’s a whole different subject.

The reduction of memory bandwidth in my head frustrates me from time to time as well and admittedly it worries me at times. Even though Earl is eight years older than me, I’m convinced I’m going to lose my marbles before he does. Forgetting things along the way just reiterates this belief for me and that doesn’t help the situation.

I’ve taken to writing things down, when I remember to write things down, and it seems to be helping but with all the notes we were forced to take in junior and senior high school and college, I don’t seem to have developed a great skill set when it comes to note taking. I’ll write down a few sentences on a given subject during a work meeting and an hour later I have no idea what I meant. I end up focusing really hard on how I felt and some other obscure detail during the meeting, for example, “Matt was wearing a green flannel shirt when he said this” and then I can occasionally remember the details around the paragraph I wrote down. I need to get better at note taking.

The solution to all of this is probably realizing that as I get older I can’t go as fast as I used to with writing down notes and paying attention and all that stuff. Slowing down a little bit seems a little contrary to the way I’ve done things for over a half a century but it’s a reality I just have to accept.

If I remember to.

While my computing experience is decidedly a mix bag of ecosystems and companies these days, one of the things I love about my Apple Watch and our Apple One family subscription is Apple Fitness+. (How many times can I type Apple in one sentence? Wow).

If you’re not familiar, Apple Fitness+ offers a slew of fitness activities oriented around the Apple Watch, Apple TV, and your iDevices. One of my favorite features is “It’s Time For A Walk” structured around going for a walk. The new season just started up. For the first episode this season we went for a walk with Jamie Lee Curtis.

I’ve always found Jamie Lee Curtis to be pleasant and I know that’s she created and/or been involved with a bunch of humanitarian efforts over the years. Her conversation on this week’s “It’s Time For A Walk” was very inspiring. The vibe of the episode just pushed me in the positive direction I need to be shoved towards and it left me feeling happy, but more importantly it created a wonderful sense of groundedness that I was missing at the beginning of this work week.

The crowd at the local hockey games yell a lot. Always eager to put my own spin on the experience, when the ref did something stupid (in the crowd’s opinion) tonight, I yelled, “Go back to the Ice Capades, ref!”

That got my point across with a little flair.