I didn’t start drinking coffee until I was in my late 40s. Back in the day I didn’t like the taste of it; and it didn’t make sense to me to add a whole bunch of stuff to a beverage to make it taste differently than it tasted without the additions, so I didn’t bother.
But then I rewatched “Star Trek: Voyager” and when Captain Janeway exclaimed, “There’s coffee in that nebula”, I decided to give it another try. Plus, the man cleaning our condo at the time enjoyed coffee and since it was there, I figured it was a good opportunity.
I have since enjoyed a cup or two of black coffee every day. No cream. No sugar. I like black coffee and I regularly employee a Keurig Coffee Maker for the task. I know, it’s not the best way to make coffee, but it works for me and I recycle the pods.
I’ve tried lots of different flavored coffee variations over the years but lately I’ve been focused on just plain black coffee of various strengths. Tomorrow I’m going to try the two pods shown above for the first time. I’m excited to see how much of a kick it gives my Monday.
A lovely desert morning flight with Earl today. We flew to E77 San Manuel and back, though we didn’t land due to density altitude concerns (it was already in the 90s here) around getting out. This was Earl’s first time through Redington Pass in an airplane. He took some great photos. We passed through at 7500′ MSL, with 9500’+ peaks off our left wing and 7000’+ peaks off our right wing.
Shoutout to the Southwest flight that, when told to watch for us as traffic in his vicinity, “watching for the chicken hawk”. That actually made me LOL. For reference, our call sign today was Skyhawk 912LB. KTUS was fairly busy, nearby DM AFB was doing skydiving operations, and the AZ NG had six jets in the air doing impressive things. As you can see below, we did a few extra turns over the city to get sequenced in. I enjoy playing in the sky with the bigger airplanes. This is something my Dad and Grandfather avoided back in their day, heck they didn’t even have radios.
Truman is insistent on going out on the roof around 9:00 PM every night. I have to accompany him out there, or else when it’s time to get back in he’ll start scratching at the door and weatherstripping and since we haven’t paid for those things yet, we probably shouldn’t let kitty destroy them.
I have noticed Truman is more insistent on going outside when there’s moonlight. I don’t know if it gives his night vision an extra kick or what, but he likes to just go outside and bask in the moonlight. I go out with him and we look at the stars together.
My very first blog entry was written 22 years ago today. I didn’t know the word “blog” at the time; instead I was just writing an online journal. I originally wrote the entry using Microsoft Frontpage; it was be a year or two before I adopted the word “blog” and moved to a blogging platform. My first officially blogging platform was Blogger. In 2005 I moved to Movable Type and then a year or two later I moved to WordPress, where the blog continues to live today.
My first blog entry talks about flying with my Dad in his newly built AcroSport II bi-plane for the first time and mentions that “someday I’ll be a private pilot”. It’s good to know I achieved at least one goal in those 22 years.
In the earlier years of this blog and before social media really took hold I tended to share opinions and thoughts on a somewhat regular basis. That content moved to social media once the chaos relocated to those parts, especially after the 2016 election season was underway, though I did do a fair share of griping about George W Bush’s presidency at the time. To this day I still wish we had a better choices on all sides of the aisle. I want to vote for someone, not against someone else. I’ll leave it at that.
Every once in a while I’ll go back and read a smattering of entries to get a feel for my attitude and feelings at a certain stage of my life, and that’s a good thing to do from time to time. In many ways I have changed and in many other ways I am who I have always been.
That’s a good balance.
As a little bit of a hoot, here’s my first image posted to the site. It was taken with a webcam that was state of the art at the time. I was growing a beard and wanted to share a progress photo.
Ever since I was a young lad and first discovered reruns of “Star Trek” (The Original Series) on CKWS, to be enjoyed after school, I have loved the series. As a Trekker, I have a Starfleet uniform, an outfit I call my “Starfleet Shore Leave” wear, and I have followed along with most of the various series.
“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” is one of my favorite series, and probably my absolute favorites of the “NuTrek” universe. “Star Trek: Lower Decks” is also a series I look forward to and I’m looking forward to season four coming out later this year.
There was recently a crossover between SNW and LD and I was really looking forward to seeing what that was all about. We sat down to watch the episode last night and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I won’t go into details of the episode and my only review is that it is an awesome experience, but there is one element from the show that I had to integrate into my daily life. You see, the structure of Starfleet, and the mind set of most of the characters on the show, is something I work toward. As a kid I hoped I’d see a more “Star Trek” type of society come to fruition with the arrival of the 21st century. I knew we wouldn’t have transporters and the like, but I was hoping we’d start figuring out the homeless and food shortage issues and all try harder to get along. Unfortunately the 21st century has swung us in the wrong direction and sometimes I get mired in the chaos and I find it brings me down.
A fellow fan of the show recreated a Starfleet recruitment poster spotted on the recent Strange New Worlds / Lower Deck episode (entitled “Those Old Scientists”) and I was delighted to find it was in high enough quality to print in a decent size.
The picture frame is ordered and scheduled to arrive tomorrow. I look forward to hanging this in my office, as a daily source of inspiration, before the end of the week.
So last night was a full moon so it wasn’t the best night for stargazing. I still wanted to take the telescope out and see what it could do, and since Mother Nature wasn’t bringing us any storms, I set the telescope up in the driveway and took it for a test spin.
The iPhone app that is used in tandem with the Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ telescope is awesome. It helps you pinpoint what you’re looking for, with a bullseye that turns green when you’ve located the celestial object you want to gaze at.
Even though the sky was saturated with moonlight, I was able to get a good view at Altair through the eyepiece and it was right where it was suppose to be.
I also took a peek at the Moon and it looked awesome, with its lines and craters and little bright spots. I now need to read up on capturing photos with this telescope.
I’m looking forward to taking it out during the New Moon in two weeks.
We all know the evils of Social Media. It’s reactive, it’s explosive, and folks usually post stuff on Social Media just to get attention. Back in the early days of Social Media I was excited about the idea; it was like a message board one would find on AOL back in the ’90s or an expansion of the “blog” concept that had been around, at the time, for a decade or so.
I guess I didn’t see Social Media replacing blogs. And obviously, I haven’t gotten that memo.
Today I am doing everything I can to get away from Social Media; I’ve removed the apps from my iPhone, I make it hard for me to log into the various platforms, etc. The issue is, so many of my friends and family members are dependent on the platforms as their prime channel of communication. Aunt Lulu could drop dead and I wouldn’t get a phone call, just a post on Facebook. It’s gamble as to the timeliness of the news due to algorithms and the like.
I don’t have an Aunt Lulu, by the way, but I did picture Lulu from “Hee-Haw” when I typed that sentence.
Another thing I’ve noticed about Social Media, and specifically Facebook, is that it throws the natural progression of friendships and acquaintances askew. For example, let’s say that back in 2005 I started a new job and worked with a guy named Dirk. Dirk and I became work friends and then had a few beers outside the office and when Facebook started up, we both joined the platform and became friends. 2010 comes along and I have moved onto a new job, Dirk did the same and we haven’t really seen each other in person since our time together at our common employer. Dirk is a nice guy and has moved on to getting married and raising a family and the like, and his new job took him across the country. Dirk and I were never really that close, we just got along well at work, shared some common interests, and connected via Social Media because it was there. I doubt that since it’s been well over a decade since I’ve last seen Dirk, I won’t see Dirk again, unless Earl and I travel to that part of the country or something, but then I feel like I’d be imposing.
By the way, there isn’t really a Dirk.
So, Dirk and I had a good friendship at work and when we both moved onto other places, in the days before Social Media our friendship/acquaintance would have come to its natural conclusion. But connecting on Facebook skewed all that; we’re still connected well past the natural shelf date, neither of us want to “unfriend” the other because of niceties, and honestly, Dirk is using bandwidth I don’t have for information consumption when I scroll through Facebook and see that he’s painting his kitchen or something.
A similar phenomenon happens when one connects with an acquaintance you met at a party years ago, and you met just that one time, and now you’re connected for life through Social Media. Maybe it’s me, maybe I’m just not wired to have a million and five friends scattered all over the planet and I’m trying hard to be too nice to not break connections because I don’t want to be the rude one.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met some great people online, but most of the folks I consider friends I met in the pre-Social Media days, whether through AOL message boards around Macs, or through this blog thingee, or something like that. There are several people I know on social media that I met before social media and I enjoy what they share, but they’re usually like me and trying to get away from Social Media (hello London, hello Arkansas, hello Houston).
I should just do what I want to do and start breaking connections to those folks that would have come to a natural, friendly, mutual ending years ago. Maybe our Social Media connections shouldn’t be called friendships, but subscriptions instead.
Or maybe I should just go with the original plan to move away from Social Media altogether.
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.
