One of my favorite songs from the 1980s, I didn’t really get into this song until after I had graduated high school in 1986. I’ve always enjoyed the emotional undercurrent and simplicity of this track, and Chaka Khan’s vocals are amazing. I miss real vocals in pop music.
Jaki Graham released a cover version in 1995 that I would spin as a club DJ, and it’d make the crowd scream, but it didn’t have the same vibe as the original. At the time I was spinning the “Love to Infinity Classic Paradise Mix”, which brought it up to 120 or so beats per minute. Jaki’s original cover is closer to the original in tempo.
From 1983, here’s Rufus and Chaka Khan with “Ain’t Nobody”.
The first nine years of my life were spent growing up in a mobile home adjacent to a horse and cattle pasture. Two sides of the back yard were lined with electric fence. Grandma and Grandpa Country lived to the east of our little lot and our front yard faced the south. In the lot to the southwest diagonal, Dad built the two-story colonial home I spent the rest of my childhood in.
The mobile home was made by Great Lakes and I believe it was a 1959 model. The trailer was 10×50, with a very small bedroom in the middle of the unit and the “master” bedroom (that could barely hold a double bed) at the end opposite the kitchen, which was on the east end of the trailer.
I can vividly remember my dad, grandfather, and uncle building the 8×40 addition on the side facing south, which included a new “master” bedroom, a living room, and a laundry room just wide enough for the dryer. The washer continued to live in the bathroom. The old living room windows allowed us to look into the new living room. Mom kept the curtains in place.
Just out of curiosity I did a search and found a promotional photo taken in a 1960 model of a Great Lakes mobile home, and it’s the exact layout I remember from our trailer. In the back of the photo is a wall next to the small hallway; I believe we had a mirror on that wall.
Our stove and refrigerator were both a turquoise blue, with a small broom closet just to the right of the gas stove, and then the Hotpoint refrigerator. The broom closet had a can opener mounted inside. The stove was one that had a pilot light; no “click click” ignition system when you turned it on. In the photo above, the original main entry door is behind the young, handsome man; when dad built the addition that door led down two steps into the new living room. There were notches in the molding around the door noting the growth of my sister and me.
It’s funny that I can remember growing up in that mobile home like it was yesterday, and the sound of rain on the metal roof, the noise of snowstorms coming in off Lake Ontario in the winter and the amazing thunderstorms in the summer.
If you’ve been following along with my blog entries this week, you may have noticed that I have been in a bit of a reflective or pensive mood. There’s a couple of reasons for this. Sometimes I wonder if I’m in the midst of yet another mid-life crisis but then I realize in this day and age I don’t know what defines mid-life anymore. Is it mid 50s? Is it 50? 60? I really don’t know. But then I get lost in trying to figure out the mathematics when it comes to mid-life and I forget that I was trying to figure out if this is a mid-life crisis or not.
I’ve been reading more Stoic philosophical readings than usual. The theme is a continuation of my list of goals for 2024. I am really feeling drawn to reading again, and by reading I mean real books made of covers and pages and the like. I’ve restarted Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations, The Annotated Edition”, as translated, introduced, and edited by Robin Waterfield. When we lived in Chicago I read the “Enchiridion of Epictetus” and found it fascinating and it resonated well. “Meditations” continues this theme.
Every morning I’ve been pulling a quote from a Stoic quote generator and pasting it into my journal. It gives me something to think about. Today’s quote:
I will reveal to you a love potion, without medicine, without herbs, without any witch’s magic; if you want to be loved, then love
Hecato of Rhodes
It really is simple, isn’t it. If you want to be loved, then love. That’s it. In this day and age life seems way too complicated. These studies are helping me bring calm to the chaos.
I’ve kept a journal for over a decade. This particular journal is a personal one with no intention of sharing. While I’m pretty real and open in this blog, there are things that I still keep to myself. The personal journal has been maintained in the Day One app for almost its entire life. I’m not 100% satisfied with it, because I believe there is a certain je ne sais quoi achieved with the handwritten word. I’m thinking of writing some journal entries by hand using pen and paper and then filing them away and/or scanning them into Day One. I’ve also done some handwritten entries on my iPad using an Apple Pencil. For me to write unencumbered I must have as little friction as possible. Day One allows me to use the provided apps or a web interface if I don’t have an app on a particular computer, like my Linux laptop.
But honestly, the mechanics of my journaling are secondary to actually journaling. It needs to be freeform, flowing, and honest.
And now that I think of it, my blog entries are often the same way.
I know that since I’ve been amping up my reading and focusing on philosophies, my mood has been a bit better and I’ve felt more comfortable with being just me.
“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.”
Marcus Aurelius
This quote has been going through my head today. I read it a number of years ago when going through one of the many books I’ve read on Stoicism; it popped up again in a daily quote generator that lives on my “miniframe”.
It seems like society, and the mainstream news in general, wants us to focus on the negative. Everyone knows a car crash is more exciting than a high school graduation (just two random examples), and more exciting is what generates money via clicks and ad-revenue and the like.
But what does all the negativity pounding in from the outside do to our well being? How does it make us feel?
It makes me feel less than stellar.
If we are constantly bombarded by bad news we start to seek bad news. And if we seek bad news, perhaps we start generating bad news. We shouldn’t generate bad news. Look for the sunlight, even on the cloudiest of days.
There’s a reason I’ve stopped listening to news briefs and avoided the cable news networks and the like. Too many clouds that I can’t control obscure the sunlight that I seek.
If there’s one thing to take away from this random bunch of words, it’s this: find the sunlight and share the sunlight as much as you are able to do.
Today has been one of the most productive Mondays I’ve had at work in years. I don’t know if it’s because of the hike, and subsequently clearing of my head this past weekend, or if it’s because of the dream I had last night. The reasoning doesn’t matter. All I know is that this morning I made a list of the things I wanted to accomplish at work and I’ve been checking these items off one by one and it has given me a strong feeling of accomplishment.
Sometimes just having a checklist on a piece of paper that one can modify with a pen is the way to go.
I’ve mentioned before that I keep track of what I need to do via a loose interpretation of the “Getting Things Done” methodology. Everything goes in a bucket, I review the bucket, and then I figure out what I need to do with the things I’ve put in the bucket. It’s as simple as that. There are hundreds of applications out there that are suppose to make this all move in a very easy way by providing an infinite number of ways to slice and dice the information so you can figure out what you’re suppose to do. Many of these applications are quite nice but I get into “fiddly” mode instead of “productive” mode when I use them. So I just have my little text file with a list of everything I want to accomplish someday, and I review it, pick a few things to work on, and go from there. I do have some coding magic so that I can jump onto any of my computers and type the word “inspire” at a command prompt, and it’ll pick some things on the list that don’t have due dates associated with them. Coupling “inspire” with my regular review of my text file helps keep me productive and organized. Plus, it’s free.
Free is good.
Speaking of free… I’ve been working on cleaning up some audio lately and I was beyond stunned when I saw how much Adobe is charging for their sound editing application, Adobe Audition. I remember buying this application for the radio stations back in the late 1990s when it was called “Cool Edit” and it was a very cool application for its time, and more importantly, it was affordable. These days Adobe doesn’t allow you to buy their software, one can only rent it via a subscription model. I considered subscribing for Adobe Audition for a hot moment, until I learned that it was nearly $35 PER MONTH if I didn’t buy a year’s worth of entitlement at a time.
The heck with that.
This whole notion of renting software from a software company rubs me the wrong way, and that’s probably because I’m an old school geek that remembers the delight I felt when someone bought my shareware cash register program back in the late 1980s. I would never think of renting that software to a business. They bought it, they owned it, and if they asked I’d give them the code so they could do what they wanted with it.
So, no Adobe Audition for me.
There are plenty of fully paid or open source sound editors out there. Audacity comes to mind and it runs on just about anything. I’ll just stick with that.
If you took a gander at yesterday’s post about my latest hike, you’ll notice that it’s a video with not a lot of written dialog around it. In the video I talk about one of my core values. I believe we should give more than we take, and that extends to our activity on the Internet, we should do what we can to create more than we consume. It’s better to create content that shows the world who we are instead of focusing on consuming content that tells us who we should be.
Making the video, and then editing it when I got back home, was a lot of fun with me and helped me fill a creative niche. I’m going to be doing a lot more of that type of thing, whether it be making videos while flying, chasing storms, or just little snippets of every day life. As I was telling Earl yesterday afternoon, I used to do this sort of thing back in the ‘00s with a “flip” HD camera and some clever editing in the tools available at the time.
I know Apple and the other smartphone makers want us to use our smartphones for everything, including photography and videography. The thing is, I had a lot more fun playing around with my new GoPro Hero yesterday, a camera that’s designed to be a camera. I’m definitely an amateur at all this, but “use the right tool for the job” sticks out in my head.
When Earl and I were talking the other night about life in general, I mentioned that over the past few years he’s just seemed more relaxed and less concerned about opinions and the like. His response was simple, “when you’ve had cancer to remind you can die at any moment, the small stuff doesn’t really seem to matter anymore”. As I continue to read Stoic philosophy and the writings of Seneca, Epictetus, and the like, I am always reminded of “Memento Mori”, which translates to, “remember that you must die”. When you remember that no one gets out of this alive and any moment could be your last, you tend to not sweat the small stuff and focus on making the moment just be the moment.
For years I’ve been holding back on making practical effects laden videos and popping out “Bewitched” style because I was concerned I wouldn’t be taken seriously in my career or my aviation endeavors or I would be perceived as alarmingly immature for a man of my age. You know what? I’m still a kid with a vivid imagination in a 55 year old body. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Those that don’t understand will drift away. Those that feel a connection will come along for the ride.
I made a nine or so minute video of a hike up to Bridal Wreath Falls in Saguaro National Park. I had some fun with my new camera. I hope you enjoy sharing the experience with me.
Sometimes, when I’m walking up stairs during the workday, there is a moment of judgment from a certain feline looking down over everything. As I make my way up the stairs, the ears await.
No matter the situation, that pair of ears, and the cat connected to them, is not going to relocate. I must step over him and endure his glares of interruption.
After I have completed my workday, Truman comes downstairs and hangs out in the main parts of the house. Once in a while he’ll get situated in his cat tree, observe the dogs, and take a bath.
My new pair of glasses arrived yesterday. While I should be wearing progressive lens, they don’t work very well for when I’m sitting in front of a computer, which is a good chunk of my time. So I have a couple pair of distant vision glasses and a pair for use in front of the computer. If we’re traveling somewhere, I’ll bring along my progressives to keep things easy.
With the advent of online, affordable optical companies like Zenni Optical, picking up a prescription pair of glasses for $30 is a no brainer. While there’s nothing wrong with my 1950s style “Gregory Peck” type glasses, at times they feel a little heavy. So I decided to go with a pair of aviators to add to the mix, depending on my mood.
I snapped a photo while pumping gas last night. The fuel cost more than the glasses..
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.
