It’s Caturday! For the last few days, Truman has spent most of the day in my office while I’ve been working. He’s found my chair to be quite comfortable. Occasionally he jumps up on the window sill next to his cat perch to get a look at what’s going on and then stare at me until I have dispensed a treat.
I am asking anyone and everyone that sees this post to share it far and wide. I have winced while walking under this sign in too many Walmart stores for too long. Let’s get this fixed and save the apostrophe.
Dear #Walmart,
For the love of god, please fix these signs in your stores. “Boy’s” indicates the department belongs to one boy.
The boys’ department should be shown as “Boys’”.
This makes your store chain look stupid, and it’s not a good look.
Last weekend I went to a different part of Saguaro National Park East for my first hike of 2025.
I remember the conversation very well. We’d been in the new house for a little over a month. I was in fourth grade. Dad was still installing light fixtures in the upstairs hallway. I was watching the news; it was Walter Cronkite and I was in the living room watching our little 19-inch Zenith. It was the family’s first color television set. I remember the conversation very well.
“Mom, why did that man hit that woman in the face with a pie?”
My mother replied, “She’s not a nice woman. She’s not nice to everybody”.
I was nine years old at the time. I think Mom handled it well.
I learned that day that people aren’t always what they appear, as the woman with pie in her face looked like a pleasant person. But, as we all know, she wasn’t very pleasant, especially to gay and lesbian people.
Today I learned Anita Bryant was still alive except she isn’t anymore.
Winter has moved into the Sonoran Desert. We have a freeze watch or warning for the next few nights. Daytime temperatures are in the high 40s or low 50s.
And there’s snow on the mountains.
Enjoyable.
One of my Christmas gifts this past holiday was a “PiAware SkyAware”. For those unfamiliar, for the past several years, most aircraft have what is known as “ADS-B”, the acronym for Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcast. It’s a groovy way for airplanes to digitally talk to each other and talk to ground stations. Popular websites like FlightRadar, FlightAware, and ADS-B Exchange feature moving maps of air traffic all over the world and I’ve found it quite nifty.
As a nerd that likes to do my own thing, the PiAware SkyAware is a homemade solution for monitoring ADS-B signals from the comfort of my own home. The kit comes just about ready to go, you just have to assemble a couple of parts and find a spot with a clear view of the sky to place the antenna. This was a nifty little Christmas present and I had it installed by the weekend between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
This past weekend I bought a little touchscreen monitor to accompany my newest Raspberry Pi 5, and now I have a moving map sitting on my office desk showing me the air traffic in the area.
Yes, I could just monitor one of the commercial sites for the same thing, but what fun is that? Knowing I’m pulling real live data from the airspace within 200 miles of our home is pretty awesome in my book.
I have been in this life for a fairly long time. Many of my ancestors checked out at this age. I’m prepared to check out when it’s my time to check out, but I feel like I have a few good years in me. The fates will tell.
The biggest impediment to my life, and I speak as the guy running the show in this life, is I have cared WAY too much of what people think of me. “I can’t do this career because I’m gay”. “I don’t have a college education so I can’t apply for this job”. “I have to sit on the sidelines because I’m not the smartest guy in the room”. “I was born on the wrong side of the tracks, so I’ll never fit in with this crowd”. “I don’t like socializing, so I won’t be able to promote myself at a random happy hour”.
I have put a lot of invisible barriers in my life’s path because I cared too much about making sure the people around me approved of me.
I’m thinking of 2025 as the year I embrace “all the flavors”. This means I turn 57 later this year and if you are able to follow along with my line of thinking, you’ll know where “I’m all the flavors” comes from. If you need a shove in the right direction, think of what you wouldn’t do to a steak in a fancy restaurant.
Not caring about seeking the approval of others, and the associated dopamine hit with the sensation, is hard for me to achieve. It’s been such an impediment in my life. I’m getting better at it, but as a person who has relied on mimicry to get through life, it’s hard to be completely who I am without getting an ‘attaboy’ from the crowd.
So what does this mean for the year of 2025 in which I embrace all the flavors? Stepping outside of my comfort zone. Speaking frankly about my spiritual beliefs. Sharing my opinion, if I feel like an opinion is warranted. It’s OK to not have an opinion. And most importantly, stating how I feel in a frank manner.
As Carol Burnett once said in an interview, “learning to accept that ‘no’ can be a complete sentence”.
Whatever remains of this life is not enough time to make up for my previous searches for approval. I’m good with that; besides, we can’t change the past. But focusing on what I can be in the future?
I’m all about that.
Editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit The Washington Post a couple of days ago. She had drawn a cartoon depicting what’s going on in Mango Mushpot land these days: corporate leaders are making personal donations to Trump’s Inauguration fund, apparently to gain favor with him during his upcoming doom administration.
The cartoon was killed by owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos. Bezos also owns Amazon.
Here’s Ann’s rough sketch of the cartoon in question.
Ann posted a full account of the story, and the subsequent reactions on her substack.
While it isn’t uncommon for editorial page editors to object to visual metaphors within a cartoon if it strikes that editor as unclear or isn’t correctly conveying the message intended by the cartoonist, such editorial criticism was not the case regarding this cartoon. To be clear, there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press.
The next four years are not only going to be incredibly exhausting and dangerous politically, but they have the very strong potential to screw up this country for at least a generation.
I’m still blown away that so many people either completely lack a moral foundation or are so incredibly selfish that they voted for a second Trump term.
This is not going to be fun. But apparently America voted for the felon it deserves.
“Fortunate is he who witnesses the sunset.” I like to think I came up with this wise nugget of inspirational prose, but most likely I heard it somewhere and I have forgotten who originally said these words. All the words are common, and if you arrange words in a fortune cookie type format, they sound wiser.
Perhaps my real calling in life was to write fortunes for fortune cookies. I often joke that mine often says, “replace the cyan cartridge”.
I’m off track from my original intent of this post.
I’ve been having a hard time with my sleeping routine for the past month or so, and I decided to rail it in a little bit with the beginning of the new year. For the past couple of nights I’ve made some changes: I’m sleeping with a t-shirt on after sleeping bare chested for over 40 years and I’m trying to adhere to a consistent sleep schedule: in bed to sleep by 10:30 pm/22:30 and up at 6:00 am/06:00. I’m hoping this approach will keep me from feeling I need a nap in the mid afternoon and the constant haze of fatigue I’ve been experiencing for quite a while.
It’s not easy getting older.
The t-shirt thing is interesting to me. I usually end up sweating quite a bit during the night while my husband remarks as to how cold it is in the bedroom, when the temperature is set to a consistent 70 deg Fahrenheit. With the t-shirt on I have not experienced the sweats; I was prepared for the opposite. This has helped a bit. Plus, I see the sexy guys on TV shows always wearing a t-shirt to bed so I feel sexy in a t-shirt, I guess.
Maybe that’s what’s helping me sleep.
I’ve been getting up on time and doing some reading in the early hours. Getting up before the sunrise at this time of the year affords me some beautiful views. Truman and I watch the beautiful colors of the sunrise together and I find the experience inspiring. Truman handles the purring.
I’ve been playing around with some filters designed to be used with the iPhone camera. These filters are from Freewell; this particular filter is the Freewell Sherpa Snow Mist filter.
I’m quite happy with the results of catching last night’s sunset. The filter does a fantastic job of taking the sharpness edge off photos taken with my iPhone 16 Pro.
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!