Fun and Games Dept

FOMO.

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.

Old Times.

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.

Make That Move.

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.

Drive.

This was the drive out on Wednesday.

The drive home was pretty much the same, though Apple Maps had us take I-10 all the way from Palm Springs, “Indio and other desert cities” to Tucson.

The drive was not unpleasant either way.

Stairs.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a fan of elevators. When people find this out about me they sometimes find it surprising, since I fly airplanes that are much higher than any elevator I’ll ever be in. It’s not the height, it’s not even the fear of the elevator dropping, it’s not being able to see outside or get out of my own free will that bothers me. If I can see outside I’m fine.

The elevators at Disney’s Paradise Pier Hotel are very small. Actually, three of the four elevators are small; the fourth elevator is a glass elevator and I find that to be wonderful.

The elevators work a little differently than your average elevators. There are touch pads in the elevator area where you select the floor you’d like to go to. The touch pad then tells you “go to elevator A” and you get in the elevator and it takes you to the floor. There are no buttons to select a floor in the elevator, just a door open, door close, and alarm button. The lack of floor selection buttons surprisingly made my claustrophobia worse. It’s definitely a lack of control thing.

In this sort of situation I usually hike myself up the stairs. I don’t mind walking 12-14 floors if I have to, but Disney doesn’t let you do that. You can go down the stairs, as long as you go all the way down to ground level and depart onto the street, but you can’t leave the staircase to go to another floor nor can you enter the staircase from downstairs. The doors from the stairwell to the various floors of rooms are locked. So, I had to either suck it up and hop on an elevator with other people going to the same floor as me and just ride it out or, and this is what I did, I had to keep hitting my destination until I was told to go to elevator D, which is the glass elevator.

Sometimes it took a few spins of the touchpad lottery, but most of the time I’ve able to get elevator D in a few moments.

Every time I had to head downstairs, I take the stairs. And it is wonderful.

Wetzel.

In Onondaga County in Upstate New York is a county road named Wetzel Road. It’s a fairly prominent road in the area as I believe there’s an elementary school or something educational along it.

Back in the mid 1990s when I encountered my first Wetzel’s Pretzels store, probably at Disney World, I erroneously associated the chain with the roadway and got it in my head that Wetzel’s Pretzels was founded in Upstate New York. It wasn’t. It was founded in California in 1994 or so but every time I see a Wetzel’s Pretzels I think of Wetzel Road in Onondaga County. The road is in the Town of Clay, to be exact.

Now that I think about it, there may have been a Wetzel’s Pretzels at one time in Carousel Center, the huge mall that turned into Destiny USA in the mid to late 2000s. Perhaps that was actually an Orange Julius which has nothing to do with Wetzel’s Pretzels, nor educational adventures on Wetzel Road in the Town of Clay.

Enjoy your pretzel, Shelby.

Leaks.

As the monsoon season continues here in the desert southwest, we are still seeing leaks in some key locations in our home. We still haven’t settled with the insurance company from last year’s monsoon damage and that has been an incredibly frustrating journey in frustration. Hopefully we’ll see some action on our claim next week when we return from vacation.

Unfortunately, some of the work we had done after last year’s monsoon needs to be redone this year. Good times. It’s not often wet in the desert, but when it is, we know too much about it.

Golden Hour.

On the way back from the airport this evening, my husband and I stopped at a local restaurant for a bite to eat. This is part of our typical Wednesday night, because Wednesday is the night I fly.

The sky was beautiful after supper. We call it the “Golden Hour”.