I’m sitting in the gazebo watching an impressive rainstorm make its way toward us from the Northeast. You can’t see it in the photo above, but off to my right it’s a solid wall of rain. The desert smells amazing right now and it’s good to see some rain move in. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stay here on the gazebo, this wall of rain moving our way looks quite impressive, but I must say, no matter where we live in the country, Mother Nature is quite amazing.
I’m still getting used to the fact that we live relatively close to cities that used to be very far away. The drive from our home to San Diego is reasonable. I see us making that trek, perhaps in the fairly near future.
Earl, Jamie, and I went out for happy hour tonight. We finally had the chance to meet Homer and Matt in person and we had a very nice time chatting and enjoying a few drinks together. We look forward to meeting up with them again soon. I’ve followed Homer’s blog for many years; it’s always a delight to connect In Real Life.
Afterwards we went to a Mexican restaurant they recommended. The food was very good and I look forward to going there again.
A wonderful evening.
iPhoto reminded me that six years ago today I was on an airplane and snapped this photo on my way into Detroit. Good times.
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.
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.
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!
