I’m taking a few moments to sit in our back lawn during a lunch break. I’ve been focused on trying to be more focused at work this week and spending a few moments outside during a break helps me maintain an even keel.
September 2023
Tuesday.
I posted this photo on Instagram. I don’t know why I did; I was just in the mood to take a selfie, a snapshot of a moment, a reminder in 10 years of what I looked like today.
Activity.
When Grandma and Grandpa City retired in the 1970s, they still were awake around 7:00 a.m. eating breakfast and doing their morning routine. They both seemed to look forward to the newspaper each morning; and one of them would always be working on the crossword puzzle. Grandpa City would also read “the funnies”. As a youngster I had the impression this was something they looked forward to.
Today, as a man in his mid 50s, I get that.
There are two activities I must complete daily for my day to feel fulfilled. I’m hooked on Wordle and the daily goals of Solitaire on my iPad.
My husband and I tried Wordle results each day, usually first thing in the morning. He texts me a screenshot of his results (without the actual letters, just the number of tries required) and I then do the same.
My Solitaire app has four daily goals. Three of the goals are tied together for bonus points and there’s a fourth “arcade goal”, which compares with what others are doing on the platform. I also play the daily challenge and oddly I always find that easier than the other games of the day.
The Solitaire game does allow me to try another goal if I find the original proposed goal too daunting, but I usually stick it through until I solve the original goal. I will skip a goal and ask for a new one if they want me to solve a multiplayer game as a goal, because it’s Solitaire and if I wanted to play multiplayer card games I’d go to a casino or something.
So while I don’t read “the funnies” in the local newspaper anymore, I do look forward to my two rounds of games every day. I find the experience relaxing and rewarding.
And relaxing and rewarding is always a win in my book.
Notes.
I write a lot of things down at work. I’m in a lot of meetings, I lead a team of 15 developers that are all working on different projects, and our team juggles the technicalities and mechanics of over three dozen different applications.
I’m completely reliant on my personal knowledgebase, or in the newer vernacular, my second brain.
I tend to remember written notes versus typed notes. I usually end up writing notes and then typing them into a searchable interface along the lines of Microsoft OneNote or even plain text documents, but it’s the handwriting activity that’s locking data into some sort of memory in my cluttered brain.
I’ve tried writing my notes using my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil directly into Microsoft OneNote, and the practice is a bit more efficient, but I don’t enjoy writing on my iPad Pro with my Apple Pencil nearly as much as using a good quality gel pen and a decent notebook. I prefer a dot grid over lined paper and I alternate between blue and black ink gel pens.
I was reading social media comments around the fact that many schools are no longer teaching cursive writing to students. It’s a shame to see the practice become a lost art, but students still need to learn how to write, and as you can see by my own penmanship shown above, it’s more about writing for legibility and efficiency, and if a student is writing in printed letters instead of using cursive, well, at least they’re writing.
One comment noted that most Gen Zers won’t know how to sign documents because without cursive they won’t have a signature, but there’s nothing that says a person’s signature has to be in cursive. A person’s signature has to be a consistent, understood mark of a person’s identity. There’s no rule in a book somewhere that says it has to be in cursive. I know a lot of folks that have beautiful signatures. My mother, both my grandmothers, and especially my sister have or had impressive signatures. My signature is functional and legible. I’ve seen plenty of young adults scrawl a bunch of lines as their signature and I know more than one person that’s just put an X or something close that on the dotted line. An impressive signature dazzles at times, but as long as the younger generation maintains the ability to hold a pencil or pen and make legible marks on a piece of paper (or slab of silicon), the world isn’t going to fall apart.
I still can’t get used to writing large amounts of information on an iPad Pro. Let’s hope pen and paper don’t go extinct.
Flipped.
My husband occasionally tells me I get too worked up with road rage as we’re navigating the roads, streets, and stravenues of Tucson, Arizona. For those not familiar with Tucson, as the city has grown the citizens have struck down any and every suggestion of building a crosstown freeway, eschewing the fast roadway experience for a consistent, “it’s a big city but still feels like a small town” experience. Instead of freeways we have arterials with plenty of traffic lights, lowered speed limits to make six- to eight-lane roadways “pedestrian friendly”, and folks driving quickly on surface streets because we don’t have freeways.
Now, I’m not an overly aggressive driver, but because I’ve done a considerable amount of college-grade studying in the whole civil engineering/traffic engineering arena, I know what the books say about highway design versus what the city of Tucson and Pima County have opted to do instead, and there’s a lot of weirdness out there. Add to this the fact that a sizable number of motorists don’t even know how to work their headlights, let alone pay attention to driving instead of using their cell phone like they’re talking into a pop tart, and the plummeting average IQ of the American citizen and I’m pretty sure we can figure out why I occasionally exhibit road rage behavior. It’s not that my husband finds I’m too aggressive, it’s that he has to hear my screaming when no one else on the road is aware of my screaming.
I’ve been doing my best to keep it inside lately. We are too far along our life paths to die in our sleep after listening to the rantings of a bald man.
The thing is, people are stupid, and driving forces everyone down to the least common denominator, especially without freeways. If someone is doing something stupid in front of you, you have to slow down and let them make their dull-normal decision to turn right from the very left hand lane. There’s never a turn signal involved with this, it’s just “oh the GPS just told me to turn right and even though I’ve been in the left lane for the past 65 miles, I’m going to dart across and turn right so I can get into the Walmart parking lot”.
I’ve recently discovered that if drivers can manage to turn their headlights on, they can’t figure out how to use their high beam switch, so in addition to these needlessly bright headlights on trucks that are too tall to begin with, drivers are navigating the stravenues of Tucson with their high beams on because no one knows what that stick on the left side of the steering wheel is suppose to do. Left, right, high, low: just ignore the switch and hope for the best.
Luckily, I’m one of the few remaining Americans that knows what this is.
For those unaware, the little switch hanging down from your rear view mirror switches the mirror from “day” to “night” mode or vice-versa. Night mode dims the entire scene displayed in the mirror so the $100K Ford F350 with a nuclear fusion powered headlight system of eight, ten, or twelve lights barreling down the ass end of your Jeep Cherokee isn’t burning your retinas completely out of your head.
Unfortunately, I live with a few people that don’t know what that switch does and they leave the switch in the night position in the day time and opt to just swing the mirror around instead.
And now you know why I might yell a lot in the car.
Caturday.
Truman is on wildlife patrol this morning. After sitting on his perch watching the back yard for wildlife for an hour or so, he moved down stairs to check out the gazebo area.
It’s a good distraction from constantly requesting food.
Frasier.
Today I learned “Frasier” is coming back to television. I wasn’t a huge fan of the show back in the day, but I’ve seen plenty of great moments from clips and this latest resurrection of an old sitcom doesn’t look too contrived. Since we pay a boatload of money for Paramount+ (Star Trek, The Good Wife), might as well give it a go when it comes out. It looks much better than when they tried to reboot “Murphy Brown” a few years ago, so we’ll give it a shot.
Onion.
Earl and I were talking about memories of days gone by and I mentioned a vague recollection of “Onion Nuggets” at McDonalds. My husband didn’t remember them but I did some digging around online and found a little bit of information.
McDonald’s Onion Nuggets came before the Chicken McNuggets. Introduced to select markets in the ‘70s, Onion Nuggets were around until the early 1980s.
I must have enjoyed them in one of the select markets back in the day. I can easily remember trying them and liking them, but I don’t remember where this occurred.
Time.
I figure I have about 30 years left in this life. Of course, that’s an arbitrary number subject to countless variables unaccounted for in this declaration, but it helps keep my sights on the future in perspective.
Of those 30 arbitrary years remaining, I’ll probably end up working a third of them. For those not quick with the maths, that’s 10 years. I plan on retiring at 65, if my company will have me for that long. If not, I’ll find another gig to pad out the arithmetic. I don’t know what tech company would want an aged team leader but I could probably bluff my way into something fruitful.
These thoughts of remaining time on my odometer are not morbid. They’re realistic. And quite frankly, my plan is to make these the best 30 years (give or take 30) of my life.
