J.P.

Honesty.

There’s thunder in the distance as I type this blog entry. This makes me very happy.

Earl and I just completed lunch and I’m taking a few moments in the gazebo to relax, write a blog entry, and ponder life. I have been shrinking my lunch hour for the past several months. Earl pointed this out to me while we were conversing during our road trip to Flagstaff last weekend. He indicated that I haven’t been taking enough time for myself and that was contributing to my feeling of burnout.

I felt really burned out going into last weekend. This week has been a complete 180 from my feelings last week. And that’s a wonderful feeling.

One of the things that I never considered when the five of us decided to move together to Tucson back in 2021 is the amount of bandwidth it would take my brain to process all the people around me on a continuous basis. When it was just Earl and me living together it was easy for me. Juggling the wants, needs, thoughts, feelings, impulses, and more of four other adults, two dogs, and a cat, well, that can drain my battery at times.

Growing up, if I started to feel overwhelmed by constant interaction I had an out. I could go down in the basement, I could go explore the woods behind my parents’ home, or I could listen to music off my Yorx Record Player. It was usually a Human League record.

With work getting intense lately, worry about the upcoming U.S. elections, juggling the family’s needs, and trying way too hard to be creative through my YouTube channel, my batteries were about depleted. Honestly, I had no juice left. Last week I was completely on low-power mode. Like my iPhone 13 Pro these days, I was running hot and sluggish.

Why do I share these things on this blog? No idea. Well, I guess it’s honesty. There are WAY too many people on the Internet that portray a character through the online activities. For me, life in general is a game ripe for many portrayals. Writing about my internal wiring once in a while keeps me honest.

What you see, right here, is what you get.

22 August 2024 by J.P. Ponderings and Musings 0

Old School.

I am writing this blog entry on the newest addition to my geek space. Today’s addition is a brand new Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB RAM.

This little computer is amazing.

In the background of the window I’m using to write this entry, I have an instance of Firefox showing my local weather radar. I have access to all my files through Dropbox and the household NAS (Network Attached Storage) unit. I can get to my Macs. I can get to my other Linux machines.

All using a computer the size of a deck of a cards.

The software I’m using, as pictured in the screen shot above, is called WordGrinder. It’s an old school word processor; the type of which was found back in my young geek days when I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 1980s. I opt to use a font that mimics the font on my old 12-inch CRT monitor from back in the day. WordGrinder is free and is perfect for those looking for an old school word processing experience. Better yet, it is the perfect way to force focus while writing, as there’s no other distractions going on. I’m using an application dedicated for writing and it throws my geeky brain chemistry into warp speed.

Little things like this is why I love technology.

21 August 2024 by J.P. Geek 0

Pipistrel.

Last night, I took a few moments to relax under the Blue Moon. I didn’t realize it was the Blue Moon at the time; the moon just looked really bright and really big. It was the first evening in a while that we weren’t under cloud cover. The night was pretty.

Off in the distance I saw six slow moving dots making their way westward. They seemed to be following along Interstate 10.

Flying at night in a single airplane through the mountains and over the desert is an interesting experience. I’d be flying along Interstate 10 as well if I was up there.

With modern technology being what it is, I looked them up on FlightRadar. Here’s what I found.

The six aircraft in question were traveling from El Paso to Phoenix. Operated under Mesa Pilot Training, which I believe is a subsidiary of the regional Mesa Airlines, these six Pipistrel Alpha Trainers will be used to train future airline pilots.

Before spotting these airplanes I didn’t know much about the Pipistrel Alpha Trainer. It is a Light Sport Aircraft, which means there are less stringent regulations around pilot requirements to fly it. These trainers are outfitted with a ballistic parachute system, much like the system found on the more robust Cirrus aircrafts. The Alpha Trainer is designed for pilot training in mind, with fairly limited range and maximum weight capacities. The 90 HP engine is similar to something found on a Cessna 150 or 152, the type of airplane my father trained in back in the 1970s.

Looking around at the Alpha Trainer, they look like they’d be fun to fly. I hope the pilots flying from El Paso, Texas to Phoenix, Arizona enjoyed their flight. I waved to them as they flew over the house with minimal engine noise. They probably didn’t see me.

Pipistrel Alpha Trainer. Photo courtesy of Flying Magazine.

20 August 2024 by J.P. Fly. Pilot. 0

Project 2025.

Please carve 30 minutes out of your week this week and watch this explanation of The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025”.

Your vote for Trump is a vote for my husband and me to not only not be married, but for us to basically not exist in society anymore. And that’s just one small part of a incredibly dystopian mess of a plan.

I’ll repeat: your vote for Trump is a vote for Project 2025. Your vote for Trump is a vote for this dystopian nightmare.

And as an added bonus, for any rural folks stopping by, Project 2025 also ends government funding for crop insurance and ends all subsidies for American farmers.

19 August 2024 by J.P. Ponderings and Musings 0

Voting.

Remember, like driving, voting will get you somewhere.

D for forward

R for backward

N for not moving anywhere

19 August 2024 by J.P. Ponderings and Musings 0

Navigation!

Our new(ish) car has Apple CarPlay (and Android Auto) built into the entertainment system. It’s a corded affair but it meets our needs and after going for years without the functionality in our Jeep Cherokee, we have enjoyed using Apple CarPlay.

Most of the time.

I have a love-hate relationship with Apple Maps. At times it shows us traffic lights that aren’t there, or it labels roads with route numbers that never came to fruition. But I think the biggest frustration I have with Apple Maps is that it doesn’t “plan ahead” when displaying maps in rural areas and cell signal is suddenly lost.

As you can see, I have apparently driven off the edge of the planet, even though I still have a 5G signal on my iPhone. Whereas Google Maps will download ahead as we drive merrily along, Apple Maps doesn’t seem to be as proactive in the practice. Google Maps has other issues, hence the reason I use Apple Maps.

Maybe there’s a setting or something that I need to tweak. In the meanwhile, it’s a bit maddening driving in a pedestrian version of a Tron grid.

19 August 2024 by J.P. Apple. 0

Spelling Counts.

I spotted this spelling mistake as soon as I saw this sign in Flagstaff. It’s not “Humphery St”, it’s “Humphreys St”, at least according to the U.S. Postal Service.

The sign that was there in 2011 (as seen in this Google Maps snapshot) is closer, at least displaying “Humphrey St”

As a sanity check, I checked further downstream on Google Maps and discovered that the street is indeed “Humphreys St”.

18 August 2024 by J.P. Ponderings and Musings 0

Flagstaff, Part 2.

When we were in Flagstaff this weekend I spotted some religious-themed candles for some of the Gay Saints.

I also found a display where I had a hard time making a decision.

We also may have gone to a few places for some adult beverages and a bite to eat.

18 August 2024 by J.P. Ponderings and Musings 0

Caturday.

Truman has decided to start hanging out with the rest of the family this week, usually stationing himself on the bar stools between the kitchen and the family room. He’s been quite attentive to the activity surrounding him and seems to be quite comfortable in this location.

He took a moment to pose for me when he saw me waving my iPhone around. He’s tolerant like that.

17 August 2024 by J.P. He's A Feline. 0

Flagstaff.

I took half a day off from work so we could get a head start on the weekend. The original plan was for me to go hiking early Saturday morning up in Flagstaff. However, when we got up there, I reviewed the weather forecast and it was calling for morning thunderstorms.

Morning thunderstorms are not a good thing when you’re hiking on a mountain peak.

So I made the determination tonight that we’d change the purpose of the weekend and just have a relaxing time. It was easy to come to this decision; the both of us have been quite stressed for the past week or so due to a myriad of reasons, so having a “down time” weekend was just what we needed. So Friday night we explored Downtown Flagstaff, which is a wonderful place on a Friday night in August.

Downtown Flagstaff sits at about 7000 feet above sea level. The higher elevation isn’t particularly noticeable to me, but I did have a low grade headache by the time bedtime rolled around.

The first photo is a hotel. We had dinner here together the first time we were in Flagstaff, which was back in 2003. I believe it’s called the Hotel Weatherford.