Fun and Games Dept

It has been an interesting week. Tomorrow is Friday and due to circumstance and the like, have absolutely no plans for the weekend.

I took a few moments to sit with Truman and gaze out the window to ponder the meaning of life. It was nice to enjoy the quiet. He is true to form even when I’m not feeling well, he’ll be nearby to offer support but he’s not going to cuddle.

It’s been a day but all is OK. Earl and I drove a little ways up Mount Lemmon. It was pitch black and a wonderful opportunity to try the night mode on my iPhone 13 Pro.

Today has been an interesting day. Let’s just go with some humor. Here’s a fun scene from “The Golden Girls”.

I took this photo while out for walk in the neighborhood the other night. It was taken about an hour after sunset and it was dark enough in that I couldn’t really see where I was walking without a flashlight. Yet, I decided to snap this photo to see if I could get a picture of the surroundings.

Night mode on the latest iPhone is very impressive. The sky was nowhere near that bright. I like the resulting contrast in the photo.

I fell down a YouTube hole, looking at old clips from radio stations and stumbled across a brief video from June 1993 at WRCK Utica-Rome, New York. Of course, this is where I started my decade long radio career as a weekend DJ and then I filled in for folks during the week. I had started interning in late 1992 with nighttime DJ B.B. Good.

Here’s the video; I’m the one wearing the baseball hat in the first few seconds of the video. B.B. is. running the board and we are coming out of the :20 stop set (commercial break), I recognize the placement of the jingle. The jingle is part of a package from JAM Productions, if I remember correctly it’s called Z World, and was originally produced for Z-100 in New York. When a jingle package is produced for a big radio station like Z-100, it’s essentially syndicated and available for other similarly formatted stations, just with re-sings over the original instrumentals. When I first became Program Director at WOWB/WOWZ we purchased a few Z World jingles before moving to a company out of Seattle called Reelworld Productions.

Anyways, here’s the video from 1993. It’s amazing what one can find on the Internet.

We had to drive Chris and Mike to Sky Harbor (airport in Phoenix) for their flight to the Midwest so my husband and I decided to make a day trip of it. After the stop at Terminal 3 we headed north out of Phoenix and meandered our way up to Prescott.

Prescott is home to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. I know a few pilots that have gone to Embry-Riddle in both Prescott and down in Florida, and I wanted to see what the campus was like. We’d never been to Prescott before but it’s a seemingly nice city situated in the typical scenic surroudings of that part of Arizona. The campus of Embry-Riddle is very nice. It feels quite new. We then made our way over to Prescott Municipal Airport where there’s a bunch of Embry-Riddle airplanes as well as the typical things you’d find at a municipal airport. Everything felt quite new. There was the unmistakable sound of a Cessna 172 doing engine out landing practice. We watched the pilot do a very good landing.

On our way home we made our way up to Camp Verde and then down through the Coconino and Tonto National Forests. We stopped to see some snow in memory of our winters in the Midwest and back East.

Today we did a little hiking on Sentinel Peak here in Tucson. It was our first time up the mountain and there are some decent trails up for short hikes. The park was quite busy on this warm winter day. It’s fun wearing shorts and the like during the first weeks of January.

Sentinel Peak is also called “A Mountain”, because of the big A that’s been up there for over a century. That’s the white bit you see in some of the photos below. It’s much too warm for snow (though there’s still a trace of snow up on Mount Lemmon).

It’s 12:37 AM Mountain Time and I’m still in front of the computer tweaking things in my little Realm of Geekdom. I’ve had a couple of beers, I’ve been working on an old gaming PC, and I have an episode of “Maude” playing in the background.

This activity is giving my brain the reset it needs.

The vibe started this morning when I started cleaning up my work home office. Every weekday I work in what our blueprints call “The Library”. It’s a nice little space, with plenty of sunshine, super high ceilings, and ample room for me to have a comfortable work area, some nice shelves, and the aforementioned space for Truman to stretch out on the floor. The Library is much larger than my old home office in Chicago.

I’ve never felt fully settled in the home office space. Cords are not neat, my desk has a little too much stuff on it (mainly monitors and cords) and it just felt slightly to the left of chaos, at least to me. I like a clean desk. I don’t like cords. So I ordered a couple of inexpensive monitor arms for the two monitors on my desk and some cable wraps and the like. They arrive tomorrow.

I also have the flight simulator and gaming computer up in what the blueprints deem “The Observatory”. The room was originally designed to have a big telescope mounted in the middle of the room, in fact, there’s a cement in the workshop underneath the observatory that was meant to support the telescope. The room was never finished for this purpose as the original owner and designer of the house passed away about a year into the project, his wife ultimately finished the house before selling it to the owner we bought it from. If you look over my right shoulder in the selfie photo you’ll see counter height electrical plugs and wall plates for data cables, speaker cables, and the like. This room is also rather fortified with cement block walls. If we ever have a tornado in the Sonoran Desert, this is where we’ll be. Directly under the room is the workshop, where Chris and Mike do woodworking and Chris has his 3D printing set up for his graphic design business.

Speaking of wood working, Chris and Mike finished the table they designed and built for the living room today. I’m very impressed with their craftsmanship. My dad’s side of the family all had craftmanship like skills that I never inherited. I’m lucky to have others in the family that can build furniture like this for our home.

One of my earliest memories is playing around with my Uncle Gary on Grandma and Grandpa City’s living room floor (in front of the Davenport) and the Bewitched credits rolling by on the big RCA television that sat at one end of the room. The little Samantha-the-witch graphic turned into a “Kodak” logo while the credits played and then it was bed time. It’s funny, I hadn’t thought about that in a few decades but tonight I was thinking about the show and that flashed into my head.

As a kid “Bewitched” and “I Dream of Jeannie” were on in the afternoon on WSYR-TV 3 and Grandma Country would let me have a couple of homemade cookies and milk and stop her housework and watch the shows with me. They came on after “The Edge of Night”. I enjoyed this time very much and it’s among my fondest memories; I’m lucky that we were close to both sides of the family.

As I grew older I grew more interested in “Bewitched” and to this day it’s my favorite show of all time, especially the first, third, and fourth seasons. For years, local television stations, as well as WTBS in Atlanta, would only show the color episodes (seasons three through eight) but then in the very late 1980s Nick at Nite started showing the first two seasons and I instantly remembered them. The original Louise Tate played by Irene Vernon. Serena being sultry instead of kooky. Samantha and Darrin as newlyweds, long before Tabatha (later Tabitha).

The first season of “Bewitched” is my very favorite because it had so many more adult themes. Larry Tate had a wandering eye, Louise Tate was a little more icy than Kasey Rogers’ interpretation, and Elizabeth Montgomery had a bit more of a sultry, newlywed look about her. Alice Pearce as the original Gladys Kravitz was hysterical and Endora was more into an up-do than her wild bouffants in the later seasons. The show was focused on the trials and tribulations of newlyweds with a bit of magic thrown in, instead of crazy farcical scenarios of warlocks turned into the Lochness Monster or Mother Goose popping in.

I always include the third and fourth season among my favorites as well, because the third season had a new producer and Samantha and Darrin had some pretty impressive argument scenes during that run, and the fourth season introduced the new batch of sound effects for the choreography of witchcraft and I always found that intriguing. By the time Dick Sargent as Darrin came around in season six the show felt a bit more “designed by committee” and while there are some stand out performances, it got a little too silly for my tastes. But not nearly as silly as “I Dream of Jeannie”.

Not finding anything modern to watch on television tonight, I made my husband sit through two episodes from the first season, including “It’s Magic”, an episode about Samantha, as hospital fundraising committee chairman, finding The Great Zeno, a drunk of a magician saddled with an assistant played by an actress that chewed the scenery of every moment and every show on adjacent soundstages. There’s some, by 1960s standard, risque dialog about small costumes and the love of vodka. The other episode we watched was when a bored Samantha popped over to Paris with Endora for dinner while Darrin was at work and runs into Larry and Louise. Again, Irene Vernon’s Louise is slightly icier and seems more inline with the wife of a guy with a wandering eye, and I just enjoyed the slightly more adult tilt to the vibe of the episode.

Endora riding on the back of a 747 and declaring, “it’s the only way to fly”, notwithstanding. By the way, “it’s the only way to fly” is the motto of Western Airlines back in the day.