Fun and Games Dept

It’s a beautiful May night in Chicago. It’s nearly 70ºF, the air is calm, the vibe is the closest to contentment I’ve felt in a while.

It’s nice to have spring here in The Windy City.

I haven’t really been too worked up about the lingering rain and cold we’ve been experiencing during this quarantine; there isn’t much we can do outside so why worry about what it’s doing outside, right? But the temperatures zoomed up to nearly 80ºF today and more importantly, I was able to get some time in the Cessna 182 RG with an instructor and continue my training for my high performance and complex endorsements. After not flying for over six weeks I didn’t do too bad today. I still need to work on the landings and do some stalls up there but overall I’m happy with today’s flight and I’m looking forward to going up again next weekend.

Flying with a mask on is weird and very confining, but I’m willing to do that if it gives me access to an airplane.

Now to do something about foggy sunglasses.

There’s a meme going around on Facebook where someone tags you and for the next 10 days you’re suppose to post an album cover without an explanation. The album is to depict your musical tastes and how you were influenced over the years. You’re then suppose to tag someone else and they do the same thing. I won’t do that part. I’m not really a fan of these types of memes, as they bring up the same angst I encountered when I would get a chain letter when I was a kid. Mean.

Nevertheless, last night I posted the album cover for “The Visitors”, by ABBA. While a little Frida heavy on the vocals for my taste (no offense to Frida or her fans), I have always enjoyed the move to more synthesizers with this album and the theatre style of some of the tracks presented. The title and opening track, “The Visitors” has musical complexities that I find quite delightful.

I listened to the album while working out this morning. Apparently the streaming services have added two tracks not originally found on the album, “The Day Before You Came” and “Under Attack”. These two tracks were to be part of the album that would come after “The Visitors”, but tired of their working conditions and the relationships of the group at the time, ABBA decided to abandon that album and release a two record “Greatest Hits” set instead. The two tracks were tacked onto the end and “Under Attack” was the last original single ever released by ABBA. It didn’t chart very much. At the end of the music video, the four members of the group are seen walking off the set, out of the video, and out of ABBA. A year or two later, Frida would come along with “I Know There’s Something Going On” and Agnetha would release “The Heat Is On” and “Can’t Shake Loose”. Benny and Björn would work on “Chess” and other esoteric musical adventures.

While it didn’t get the appreciation it deserved in 1982, I find “Under Attack” the be a very enjoyable track, especially when consumed through quality headphones. Like all ABBA tracks of the time, it’s rather synth heavy. The vocal layers on the chorus are amazing. As a musician it’s interesting for me to hear the individual vocal parts; they don’t exactly follow what I would call “standard music theory choral arrangements”. The magic of recording in a studio.

I’ll continue to do this meme if I remember but I’m not going to tag anyone. Like the end of the “Under Attack” music video, I’ll just walk away and out into the sunlight.

More and more displays of inspiration like these are appearing in windows throughout the neighborhood. When I’m walking first thing in the morning and the world feels off (because let’s face it, the world is ‘off’ right now), these messages bring a smile to my face.

I appreciate these efforts. I believe they’re important for our mental health. And I’d like to thank everyone that is taking the time to send out positive vibes.

I’ve been on a bit of a nostalgia kick. Last night Earl and I watched the first few episodes from the first season of “The Mothers-In-Law”. Honestly? It’s awful. While shows from the 1960s like “Bewitched” hold up fairly well, “The Mothers-In-Law” feels hopelessly out of date. One of the things we immediately noticed was the obviously stage trained actors of the main cast; television actors today don’t chew up the scenery nearly as much.

One show from that time period that was always fun to watch was “Laugh In”. Here’s a bit from their joke wall. I was surprised to learn today that Jo Ann Worley is still alive and kicking and as upbeat as ever.

My husband and I just finished our binging of Amazon Prime’s “Fleabag”. According to wikipedia, we have watched all 12 episodes of the series and no more are planned.

A comedy-drama with a helping of tragedy, “Fleabag” is based on the one woman show of Phoebe Waller-Bridge. I’m having a hard time writing a quick synopsis of the show because while we found it very compelling, the story is very multi-faceted. She is a café owner in London with a fairly dysfunctional family and has a knack of finding herself in dysfunctional relationships.

I think you just have to see it to get it. We thoroughly enjoyed the experience and were dismayed to see the two seasons are the only seasons we’ll ever see.

I’m hoping Ms. Waller-Bridge changes her mind.

I’m clearly losing track of the days these days. At times it feels like time is standing still but then it’s midway through the week and I feel like I can’t catch my breath.

The trees are celebrating spring!

I’m not getting much sleep these days. A couple people have commented, “you look tired”. I am tired. The past month has been especially exhausting but the past three (and some change) years have been nearly as exhausting.

I’m hoping I’ll sleep tonight. There’s really nothing else to do.

PACS High School computer lab, 1984.

The first time I sat down in front of a computer for any length of time I was a freshman in high school. It was 1982 and through a local foundation, the school district had purchased a bunch of Apple ][+ computers. Adding to the four that were in the high school computer “lab”.

At the time the computer lab was a makeshift affair in what used to the office of the Math Department chair. Computer education fell to the math teachers; the business department was still using adding machines and IBM Selectric or Wheelwriter typewriters.

Oddly, it was my French teacher that first introduced computer use to her curriculum. She would later publish software that we would use to reinforce what we were learning in French I class. (“Michel, Anne, vous travaillez? Non, nous regardons la television, pourquoi?”). We’d fire up a program on a 5 1/4″ floppy and type “RUN VERBS”. The prompt would say “TO WORK” and we’d type “TRAVAILLE”. It was during my first run of this exercise that I escaped out of the program and looked at the code. I had already been reading computer magazines so I was not lost when I saw things like “10 HOME”, etc.

The computer lab was to be used by the few select students that were taking Computer I as an elective for Math, and by the French students. A couple of months into my freshman year they opened up the lab to free time. You could sign up for 30 minutes after school and spend some time getting to write your own program. The school provided one 5 1/4″ floppy disk that we could use to store our programs; I should another student how to use a hole punch to make it so we could use both sides of the 5 1/4″ floppy disk. The computer lab teachers’ assistant, Mrs. LaPlante, said we weren’t suppose to do that because it turns out she didn’t know one could do that.

I signed up for my 30 minutes the following week and spent my free time going through the magazines about writing BASIC and coming up with my game plan to write something for my first floppy disk. I remember I could barely sleep the night before because I was so excited to actually be using a computer doing what I wanted for the first time.

I ended up writing a rudimentary program to emulate a cash register. I even had it printing an invoice; as you entered an item code and the amount, it would print a new line on the invoice. That’s how cash registers worked in 1982. Because we had only two printers in the entire computer lab (which was now up to a dozen Apple ][+ computers), Mrs. LaPlante was confused when the printer in the corner of the room would print just one line at a time. It took her a few moments to figure out who was printing and she thought I was printing out my program as I typed it in and told me I was doing it wrong. When went over and looked to see what I was doing she was confused to see a retail invoice printing and wanted to know where I had gotten the program to do that.

I showed her what I had written. This was shortly before my 30 minutes was up; luckily I’ve always been a very fast typist and remember, I had already planned what I was going to do and I was basically retyping what I had typed on my typewriter at home.

Mrs. LaPlante was impressed enough to have the math department leader of computers (that wasn’t her official title), Mrs. Coniski, come over and look at what I had written and the output on the printout. The monetary amounts were even lined up and right-justified. I was calculating tax. Mrs. Coniski was impressed and told me I could sign up for more time and I should consider taking computer at the next opportunity.

I did just that. By the time I was able to get into Computer I the school had converted Room 201 to a computer lab with over three dozen Apple ][+ and Apple //e computers, with a printer at the end of each row. Mrs. LaPlante and Mrs. Coniski had both moved on to greener pastures, so we had a new young new teacher teaching computer and “Course IV” Math. I had a huge crush on him at the time. He marked down one of my programming endeavors in Computer I for using a “GOTO” statement too early in the program and to this day I occasionally think about his comment scrawled in red pen across the green bar tractor feed print out: “write the cleanest code possible”.

The business department was doing their own thing, teaching word processing on an IBM DisplayWriter, which I also used in typing class. I was in typing class just to pass time, I could already type. The IBM equipment did little to grab my interest but I loved the Apple ][ series of computers. They felt more personal to me.

At home I had a Commodore VIC-20 as a Christmas gift and I put that computer through its paces. I saved some money to buy a 16K expansion cartridge to beef up the 2K of memory available. I also bought the data cassette for the VIC-20. I liked that computer and I was very appreciative of the present but I always wanted an Apple ][ of some sort, it was just not possible with the family budget.

I never did get my hands on an Apple ][ of any sort to call my own. I look on ebay from time to time to see what they’re going for; I still tinker with the idea of buying one, though my husband’s first question is always, what would you do with it and where would you put it?

I’ll figure out a logical answer someday.