Fun and Games Dept

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.

It’s been a great day.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

And so I have completed another journey around the sun and lived to tell about it. We had a nice family dinner and the guys made a strawberry cheesecake to celebrate. I guess I’m in my mid 50s now. I’m cool with that.

It’s much too hot to go for my daily 30 minute walk during the day. Last year I walked very early in the morning, which doesn’t really work out well for my schedule on the weekends. This summer I’m walking after sunset and the change has worked out well.

I also gave up listening to podcasts while walking after returning from my storm chasing trip last month. The change has been good for my mental well-being. Listening to tech pundits argue and hypothesize over Elon Musk’s next move was getting tedious and was weighing down my mood. Now I enjoy the quiet of the desert and exchange pleasantries with neighbors also out walking during the golden hour.

We need everything we can do to make life better. These steps and this time are keeping me sane. I hope everyone can find their center or happy place. It would make the world a little more enjoyable.