It was 107ºF this afternoon when we decided to go for a drive. We tend to drive around with the windows down instead of using the air conditioning. Though the air is hot, we still enjoy the breeze and the experience of smelling the world around us. Plus it saves a little bit on gas.
I decided to drive us to the top of Mount Lennon. It was 78ºF at the summit. The experience was recharging for me.
We certainly picked the best year to move to the desert. Reminder… it’s still spring.
No regrets, just slight sweats.
I always enjoyed family gatherings in my Grandma and Grandpa Country’s back lawn. Looking back at things, I also enjoyed the same sort of thing at Grandma and Grandpa City’s house as well. I guess I just enjoyed excuses to eat with friends and family. The country and city experiences were markedly different but equally enjoyable. And this is not me trying to be some sort of mediator or balancer. It just was.
When it comes to siblings, it’s just me and my younger sister. But I always felt part of a bigger family because we would get together with cousins (and aunts and uncles) very often. Living across the street from Gram and Gramps, coupled with weekly gatherings on Sunday, made for this type of closeness. While at school I was often called “weird” or “strange” or “odd”, amongst a wide assortment of other vulgar names that can be attributed to my homosexuality, my cousins rarely vocalized anything about my eccentricities. My sister and my cousins are the only ones my age I felt comfortable around, as they would just go along with my latest scheme of staging a parade or turning one of the barns into a school or buying bags of candy at a general store and having a “candy picnic”, where we chowed down a bunch of sugar and went into subsequent sugar comas. I was nearly equally (is that proper grammar?) as close to my city cousins, but because we didn’t see them as often and there was a little more of an age spread, I’d tone down my grand plans and just hang out in my weird way. It was still a pleasant experience.
As we got older, it was apparent that our life experiences would take us in different directions. Because of this my comfort level around my cousins waned quite a bit but never fully dissipated. I purposely mask my “eccentricities” because I guess at this stage of my life I’m suppose to act like an adult, but honestly this takes a lot of mental effort. Using mental energy in this way is exhausting, in fact, very exhausting. I’m literally tired of doing it.
It’s been a long process for me to make peace with my off-kilter or askew way of thinking and use less effort in trying to fit in. Instead I now just focus on not scaring the heck out of people or at the very least making people wonder if my UFO is parallel parked on the roof.
I still look back on the memories of these family gatherings with a smile and fond thoughts. I also wonder who selected the colors in that afghan on the ground and why weren’t we using a solid color blanket instead of an afghan that was meant for the back of the couch. Or as it was called by my city family, the Davenport.
Sometimes you just have to admit that life isn’t all cotton candy and roses. My mood has been crap this week. I never feel like I’m a genuine citizen of society, but I’ve felt like I’m way out there all this week. My disjointed-ness finally settled down yesterday morning after a decent night’s sleep.
Notice there’s no wardrobe credits for Elizabeth Montgomery or Agnes Moorehead on this clip from “Bewitched”. The ladies in the cast all brought their own clothes to wear in each episode from the third season to the end of the series (unless a spell sent them back in time or something). At the beginning of the week they’d work out what they needed for the production that week, brought in their clothes, and the wardrobe department would clean and press the garments for Friday’s filming.
That’s all I’ve got today.
I see a lot of chaos in this photo. I’ve scribbled the family’s Chinese take out order on my the notebook adjacent to my work computer. The left margin is not flush. I’ve written the letter “e” in two different ways. The blotted out area is my Tucson phone number, written old school without an area code, and of course this is all mingled with a few scant details about a work project I’m working on. This particular work project is one of several projects I’m coding in parallel.
Luckily, the Chinese Food was very good.
So yesterday I declared I was moving from away from the Day One journaling app to something different, most likely Diarly.
Yeah, that experiment did not go well at all.
I fired up the new app on my iPad and the screen started flying around with crazy carriage returns and other random characters just populating with no rhyme or reason. I took my iPad Pro off of the official Apple Magic Keyboard setup, rebooted it, and tried Diarly again with the on-screen keyboard.
Same problem, no joy.
I promptly canceled my Diarly subscription, which was at the very beginning of its trial period and decided to stick with Day One and a “wait and see” attitude around the company’s acquisition.
Sometimes an emotional response is not the best response. Let’s see what happens.
As part of my never ending quest for personal growth, I have maintained a personal journal for many years. I usually grab a snapshot of how I look for the day and write a paragraph or two of how the day went, where my mood was, that sort of thing. For this activity I’ve relied on Day One, available of Mac and iOS devices, to accomplish this feat. When I first started using Day One there was an option to sync using iCloud; later on they moved to a subscription based plan with encrypted storage on their own servers. I’ve gone with this subscription for the past year or two. I’m not a huge fan of subscription based software but I was pleased enough with Day One so I paid the yearly fee.
Today Day One announced they had been acquired by Automattic, the same company that owns WordPress (the software that powers this blog), Tumblr, and some other things. This acquisition gives me pause. I’ve been becoming less enamored with WordPress as time marches on. What was once a very fairly simple blogging experience has turned into something a little too convoluted for my taste. WordPress has thrown a lot of bells and whistles into the platform and the experience is starting to feel “bloated”. Plus, I’m really sure WordPress would preferred my hosting of the blog on their website instead of using the standalone version that I use today. I don’t want to trust my information to a third party like that. This blog turns 20 years old in August. That’s a lot of data. In fact, I’ve been looking for a different solution for the blog and hope to migrate to a faster, less cumbersome experience by the celebration of the aforementioned anniversary.
I’m a bit concerned WordPress will start to add bloat and unneeded “features” to the Day One app, so without an evidence of changes on the horizon I’ve started looking for a replacement. I’m currently looking at Diarly, which stores information in Apple’s iCloud instead of relying on yet another syncing service. This approach involves putting a lot of faith in iCloud, but if any tech company is worthy of my trust, it’s Apple. So I’m going to give Diarly a try for the next week and see if I enjoy it.
I wish Automattic all the success they seek with the acquisition of Day One. I’m just not sure I’ll be part of that success.
Despite the 110ºF and above temperatures, we decided to march around the desert a little bit. Colossal Cave Mountain Park is a short drive from our new home, so we decided to check it out to see if it’s some place the entire family would enjoy visiting in the future, and ideally, when it’s not quite so hot here in the Arizona desert.
We didn’t explore the cave yet, we wanted to save that for the family outing, but we did enjoy the Visitor’s Center and the surrounding area. We’re looking forward to our next visit. It’ll be a target for outings when we have friends and family visiting.
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.
Weird? Eccentric!