Fun and Games Dept

As a full fledged geek I have full fledged geek dreams. It’s not unheard of me for me to remember dreams about school clocks once or twice a month. I’ve fixed clocks for my hometown schools in the past and once in a while I’ll dream about being back in the school and getting the old clocks running again. These dreams are obviously prevalent because of my keen interest in all things connected, including these early and mid 20th century clock systems.

The Historical Society in my hometown set up residence in one of the school buildings closed in the early 1970s. A former classmate has led the effort in restoring the building to its former glory, and the cafe-gyma-auditorium is now a popular spot for banquets, wedding receptions, and other community events. The building has clocks from other schools in the district, including the last wooden cases clock left intact from my elementary school. I’m hoping to get their clock system working again the next time we go back East.

The clock pictured above is a gift from another clock system enthusiast in Central Ohio. Beautifully restored, I am planning on installing it in my office here at home. I’m debating whether to cut a hole in the wall to mount it properly or ask Chris and Mike to build a frame for it. Either way I hope to have it up soon. It’s a touch of class my office needs.

The clock can’t really keep time, it advances once a minute by a 24VDC impulse from a master clock originally located in the principal’s office or something. Originally pendulum based clocks, motorized clocks replaced the function in the mid 20th century and then electronic clocks took over the duty in the late 1980s. My clocks run off a Raspberry Pi switching a simple relay to replicate the impulses needed to keep the clocks on time. Surprisingly, this clocks is not particularly loud.

I look forward to getting this on the wall. I’ll probably dream about these clocks in the next couple of days.

Such a happy geek.

I will never tire of desert sunsets.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a little bit of a storm chaser. When we moved to Tucson from the Midwest I was concerned that I would miss out on excellent storms, but the monsoon has not disappointed.

I snapped this photo while out for a walk yesterday afternoon. I was talking to my mom on the phone at the time; I love the way the rain showers are isolated and easy to spot. A couple of hours after this photo was taken we had a spectacular lightning show that kind of hovered over the neighborhood for an hour before it got bored and dissipated.

As I continue to groove on this old films on YouTube, here’s “A Young Man’s Fancy”, a 1952 infomercial from the Edison Electric Company. Mr. Alexander Phipps loves his friend’s mother’s all-electric kitchen. I’ve seen this one plenty of times; the mother in this movie reminds me of Grandma Country.

I sometimes wonder if the homosexual subtext between Bob and his friend Alexander was on purpose. Of course, it can be attributed to the innocence of the early 1950s, but looking back from a 21st century point of view can make one lift an eyebrow.

And notice young Judy’s flair for language, calling her mother “sweetie”. She was ahead of her time.

I guess I never anticipated this hot, new trend sweeping the nation. Not only are entertainment outlets no longer pretending to strive for accuracy when portraying period pieces, there’s this new fad of the GOP doing everything they can to never teach accurate historical facts again.

I can guarantee the writers of “I Love Lucy” never used the word ‘literally’ in a 21st century way when discussing an episode script with Lucille Ball, but there it was, peppered all over that recent Amazon Prime movie. “Bridgerton” takes wild liberties with language and activities, and now this new “A League of Their Own” series has women dropping f-bombs in public every ten second and lesbians making out in the streets of Rockford.

Look, I know the f-bonb and lesbians existed in the 1940s. But I’m also pretty sure neither were celebrated with this wild “queer rage” being shoved into this period piece. Heck, I don’t even remember these things being shared with such wild abandonment in the mid 1980s.

I guess I have a certain expectation that if I’m watching a television show set in the 1940s I’m not going to hear Janis Joplin singing a track while same sex couples dance.

And as far a the GOP and their idiocy, it does have to make one wonder, if they’re so eager to rewrite history to make the United States all white and perfect, what makes them think the Bible is completely accurate in its storytelling?

Maybe Jesus was a woman or something.

Aunt Clara on “Bewitched” had to be one of the sweetest characters in TV land.

The big software migration at worked happened this weekend. It was originally suppose to happen in December, then February, then March, then June, and now finally August. It finally pushed tonight I worked 18 hours yesterday and 12 hours today. I’m quiet tired and the coming week is going to be very busy.

It was nice to take a walk and catch up on my steps. Now I’m ready for some bed.

Now that I’m in my middle 50s I worry that I haven’t done enough in my life to meet my own expectations of what my life should have been. But then I realize that I have a solid career, am a private pilot, and am currently enjoying life in the desert southwest with my husband of well over 25 years with men we call family.

I am currently sitting on our roof watching another thunderstorm roll in during this year’s monsoon. It’s awe inspiring.

And then I realize my life is more than I imagined as a kid in Central New York.

And there’s zoo much more to come.

Since I’m still in the COVID hot zone and haven’t been out of the house in a week, my husband suggested we do a drive-thru lunch pandemic style. He felt I needed a little fresh air. Armed with a mask for drive thru interaction, we went to Culver’s. Culver’s is our traditional pandemic drive thru of choice. The grilled chicken sandwich was enjoyable as was the company.

Back in my radio days in the 1990s we programmed a weekend of “The Top 500 dance songs of all time”. It turned out to be very popular and we received a lot of positive feedback from listeners on the promotion, but it wasn’t very easy to pull off in the small studio. We were playing music off CD at the time and a lot of the tracks were were looking for hadn’t been released on CD yet. Record company reps thought we were a little crazy for a Top 40 Rhythmic/Dance station to focus on “oldies” for an entire weekend, but ultimately it was a lot of fun. We ended up downloading a handful of tracks over Napster (and subsequently burned them to CD) and playing a bunch of vinyl I had found in the basement of the gay bar I DJ’d at at the time. I borrowed a couple of Technics MK1200 turntables from a DJ friend and wired them into the studio for the weekend. We ended up using a list from a now long-gone Los Angeles radio station (I think it was called Groove 100?) that we found on the a Geocities site; we took their top list and just played the 500 songs we could muster together in order. It took quite a few weeks to put this all together. I wish I had kept the list and I wish I had recorded the weekend because it was a lot of fun playing tracks outside of the usual music rotation. It was 1999 and I had modeled our station after “103.5 The New KTU” in New York, which improved ratings enough to garner enough revenue to make the station financials strong enough for the owners to sell the station for a hefty profit.

Anyway, one of the songs we had a really hard time finding but ultimately ended up being played from a vinyl copy was from 1981. “Make That Move” by Shalamar came after “Second Time Around” and has a similar vibe.

Here’s an abbreviated version from their appearance on “Dance Fever” with Denny Terio.