The lights and ambience of the rooftop patio across the alley from us. The Sears Tower in the distance.
Fun and Games Dept
Leaped.
So the longest day of this year is Friday, June 21. Regardless of what the clock says, we will have the most time between sunrise and sunset. I’ve griped plenty about Daylight Saving Time and my disdain for it, but this is the time of year when I really feel the effects of it.
I strive to get up early in the morning and get some exercise in before starting the workday. It’s remarkably easy for me to do this during standard time because I feel like my body is in sync with the planet’s “clock”, even though I know that time is really a human construct. Getting up at 6:00 a.m., when my body screams it’s 5:00 a.m., is a struggle for me. Going to be at 10:00 p.m., when my body screams it’s 9:00 p.m., is even harder for me. I end up taking a nap during my lunch break, which slows down my metabolism.
I finally gave in and slept until 7:00 a.m. and did my workout in the evening while Earl was at work. I’ll do the same tomorrow. Today was the most productive day I’ve had this month, and there wasn’t anything remarkable about my work day or my meeting calendar or my workload, other than the fact that I had shifted my exercise from morning to evening.
I know I’m not a morning person. I’ve never been a morning person. But Daylight Saving Time exacerbates that fact and I’m tired of trying to play the game. Mind you, I like it when it’s light outside in the evening, but I don’t like it light outside when I’m going to bed, especially when it doesn’t have to be.
With the insanity that has gripped this country Daylight Saving Time will probably defended as have been documented in the Bible before the end of This Age of Insanity comes to a close.
In the meanwhile, I’ll just do the best I can.
Video.
So I’m thinking of starting to make flight videos again. I love sharing my enthusiasm of aviation in any way possible, and since I’m actively learning new skills as a pilot this year, it might be fun to share the experience through video again.
I’ve spent the past two hours building a new version of my “Intro Sequence”. There’s a little bit of old and a little bit of new in this clip, but I’m happy with the way it turned out.
Final Cut Pro X has some bugs in it, though. You have to cajole the application to add simple transitions at random times. I don’t know why that remains a difficulty in video editing software in 2019.
Perhaps I like quick transitions too much.
Chicago Ribfest 2019.
When we made an offer on our condo in 2017, Ribfest was taking place in the neighborhood. This yearly event solidified our love of the neighborhood here on the North Side of Chicago. There so much to do throughout the entire city, especially during the summer months, but Ribfest will always hold a special place in our heart.
This weekend is Ribfest 2019, just down the street from us. It’s been rainy thus far this weekend, but we went down and ventured about. Good food, some good beer, and good times. Hopefully the weather will be more cooperative tomorrow.
Briefly…
An observation at the movie theater tonight: if your husband has to repeatedly ask you to put your phone away, as you light up the row with an impossibly bright smartphone display, don’t start throwing a hissy fit as you stumble around trying to make an exit without flipping over the railing in front of you.
Our family was trying to enjoy “Rocketman”. We didn’t need the show in the row in front of us. There was to be one queen in the theatre and it was Sir Elton himself. We didn’t need a roadshow Drag Race dropout throwing a tantrum as he flings he Samsung all over creation.
Alone Time.
“John is a loner. He doesn’t play with the other students as often as he should”.
This was a remark on my report card way back when I was in kindergarten. I remember not particularly caring for my kindergarten teacher. Even at age 5 I knew she didn’t get me or didn’t understand my way of thinking. Her approach to teaching in the early 1970s was quite basic, “no child is really any different from any other child”.
For some reason I was telling Earl about this teacher and how I panicked because I got a knot in my shoelace and couldn’t get it out. I coaxed a girl named Charlotte to help me get the knot out; she was quirky like me and then grabbed a pair of scissors from the arts and crafts table. We poked and prodded at the knot together and then it came out and I was relieved.
Charlotte then took the scissors and cut her bangs off to her scalp.
I had no idea why she did that, other than she was quirky like me I guess, but the teacher let out such a ruckus you would have thought her blackboard was on fire. I wasn’t scolded for participating in this barbering event (because I had no participation), but Charlotte was relegated to her own desk, away from the “Group 5” table, and come to the end of the school year was not to be seen again for the rest of my elementary or primary school career.
I don’t know what happened to Charlotte but I imagine her hair grew back.
This is probably one of the reasons I tend to be a loner. The only one that can truly occupy my “loner recharge” space with me is Earl. Others in my space can be a little bit of a drain of my energy, to varying degrees. This is not a negative or a bad thing, it’s just the way I’m wired. I have multiple test results to prove this.
Earl has been working this weekend so I took the opportunity to go off and explore the city, riding random ‘L’ lines to random stops and then getting out and walking around. Now, don’t worry about my safety around this activity, because I’m well versed in knowing what lines and what stops to visit during these exploration activities and I have a really good time getting to know The Second City this way. When I ride my bicycle, the neighborhoods whizz by quickly and I get just a passing vibe of my surroundings. When I walk, I can sense folks, hear conversations, and see what’s happening around me. For me, it’s a fantastic way to get to know a neighborhood.
As I type this Earl is at Wrigley working (Go Cubs!) and I’m sitting in a random Starbucks taking a coffee and blogging break. I was going to head out the Blue Line to O’Hare today but maintenance currently in place would have made that experience too tedious. So I think I’m going to finish this up and head out in another direction.
Just keep the scissors away from Charlotte.
Hell.
Earl and I were recently watching “The Red Line”, a CBS mini-series about many things, including the storyline about a gay couple and their adopted daughter. One of the dads is fatally shot, leaving his husband and their daughter behind. As the story unfolds, their daughter has the opportunity to meet her birth father. He claims to have changed since he ran out 17 years ago, as he found God and religion and he is now in a wonderful place in his life, all because of his new found faith.
During one of their meetings, the birth father mentions his sorrow for the loss of his birth daughter’s dad, and that it’s a shame that he is in hell because of his chosen lifestyle.
The daughter asks him to leave and never, ever contact her again.
The mini series is well written and something I found quite interesting, and I recommend folks watch it if given the opportunity.
While I was watching this episode, I couldn’t help but reflect on all of the family, friends, and co-workers I’ve had over the years that claimed to have been saved through their faith, said they were perfectly fine with who I am, but some still told me that I was going to burn in hell for choosing to be gay. While I don’t have an adopted daughter and all of the trimmings of “The Red Line” storyline to go with it, I related to what the young woman was hearing from her birth father. I’ve been told I’m going to hell on more than one occasion, in fact, a man I hired many years ago for an open position that reported to me told me that he thought I was great but that I would burning in hell for being gay. He told me this during his first week of employment with the company. There was no HR department to report this to. I just had to deal with it. Naturally the owner of the company hired the guy’s equally faith-based sister and she liked to talk about The Flood and The Arc. Apparently the unicorns missed the boat.
I have far flung family that have friended me on Facebook and the like even though I haven’t seen them in decades. Like many of my friends in high school, if I follow them long enough I’ll probably be able to collect every damnation verse from the Bible courtesy of their daily prayer updates. While they profess love and kindness and acceptance, I can help but notice the clutched pearls when it comes to brown people and their fervent support of Trump. Perhaps I go to extremes, but I see MAGA hats as a pseudo-socially acceptable version of the KKK hood. Under the veneer of pledges of light, happiness, and the eternal way, I can’t help but think that if given a dose of “Truth Soup” they’d be telling me how I’d be burning in hell at the next family or high school reunion. (For those that keep score, I’m not talking about my city side). I know they love me, but they love me in spite of me.
It’s kind of crappy when you think about it.
When I was still aged in my single digits I asked my mom what “hell” was. She was honest and told me it was probably made up, then she mused that we were probably in it together. My mom has always been hip like that. The question was prompted because a woman at a church we had been going to told me and my sister that we weren’t properly baptized because we had been sprinkled instead of dunked.
We stopped going to that church. Thank God.
My belief, my truth, is that if I screw this life up bad enough, I’m just going to reincarnate as someone else to learn what I should have learned this time around. If I do it right, I may choose to reincarnate again sometime down my road to experience something new, after spending some time on the Other Side, celebrating life with all the others that did good in their last existence. I look forward to hugging Shirley MacLaine again, just like I did the last time.
At this age I’m not in the mood to tolerate fake compassion, willful ignorance, or false teachings. If you want to believe I’m going to hell, go for it, just don’t tell me about it or try to change me into something I’m not. The universe made me as I am. It’s a undeniable, unalterable truth.
Don’t try to make me live in your hell.
Dilemma.
This is my work Mac. It was assigned to me as my work computer in June 2015. I was a bit of an outlier in the company with this Mac; when I was convinced I should join the company I said I wouldn’t do it unless I could work on a Mac and they relented. I wasn’t the only one using a Mac but the number of us was small. It’s the last generation of MacBook Pro before the new keyboard was introduced to frustrate the masses. I have since been assigned a Dell Windows 10 computer that I don’t use as much as I’m suppose to. My workflow works best on a Mac.
My husband’s iMac is older than this Mac and it’s getting a little long in the tooth. I’ve also been looking for a desktop to use in the same space as my work Mac because I really want to get back into video editing again. I have hours and hours and hours of flight video that I’d like to put together in clever ways to share with the masses. I’m not looking to make money with my flight videos, rather I’m more interested in sharing my passion for aviation as widely as possible.
My husband should have a laptop of some sort. We have tried the iPad Pro route and he doesn’t like the limited experience the iPad currently offers. I know Apple insists that tablet computing is the way of the future, and there are many that use their iPad Pro full-time (in fact, I’m typing this blog entry on my iPad Pro), but in reality, iOS is not there for the average computer user to make the switch to a tablet as their full-time computer. The logical choice would be a 13-inch MacBook Pro with the option of plugging into an external monitor.
Apple’s offerings are so expensive!
So I took a gander through Best Buy last night and I was underwhelmed by every computer I looked at. I typed on premium computers made by Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, Toshiba, Samsung, and Microsoft. The closest thing that came to the quality I would expect from a computer in 2019 was the Microsoft Surface line, but there was something I just didn’t enjoy. I don’t know if it was the power connector hanging off like it 2005 or the overwhelming interface of Windows 10, but I was not as impressed as I thought I would be.
Perhaps my expectations are too high.
I was encouraged to see that Apple bumped up the MacBook Pro line yesterday and also announced that they’ve modified the new keyboard design (again) to address the stuck key issue users have been dealing with for literally years. After Best Buy I went to the Apple store last night and played around with a MacBook Pro with TouchBar. It was interesting. I was surprised at how loud the keys were with each press and I wondered if the TouchBar was actually ever used by the average consumer. Looking at the specs of each device I went into geek mode and realized the computers at Best Buy, while not built as well as the Apple devices, had higher specs at a lower price. I really want to make sure this next computer for my husband lasts for a number of years, so I try to get as much RAM and hard drive space as fiscally possible.
I didn’t make any purchases last night.
I think I’m going to end up waiting until after WWDC in a couple of weeks to see what Apple announces in the way of iOS and Mac OS upgrades in 2019. But right now, I feel like the general computing experience for the average user in 2019 is at a weird, uninspiring, lack of innovation limbo of sorts. Prices go up with no real benefit.
We really need the next Steve Jobs, whomever he or she may be, to share their vision and get us moving forward again.
Lust.
I might be in lust with Brian Jordan Alvarez. We binged his “The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo” tonight and now I’m really wanting another season of the show.
I enjoy people that live their life honestly. They inspire me.
