Fun and Games Dept

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.

My husband is an hour away from me in this photo.  This was taken on US 70 at the Arizona-New Mexico State Line.  I’m standing in Mountain Standard Time, he is standing in Mountain Daylight Time.

Our new Starbucks opened today. Our favorite location closed two weeks ago so they could move into this new location. It is large and bright and nice and quite enjoyable.

Our webhosting company has completed the account migration activity and things are working quite well in our new server space. There’s one extension that needs to be reinstalled, and until that’s done some photos might appear sideways. You can tell which photos are uploaded directly from my phone versus more traditional avenues; the iPhone photos may go sideways until things are fixed.

I’m happy to have the blog (and other services) here working again, and they’re working much faster across the board. We’ve been with Machighway since 2009 and despite a few bumps in the road a while back, things are good. This makes me a happy geek.

It was time for a change. I’ve had the big mustache for several months and quite frankly I was getting tired of having to wipe mustard and barbecue sauce out of it and waking up with mustache (mine) in my mouth. So I went to trim it. And the trim guard popped off the clippers and I took a chunk out of my mustache, right above the right side of my lip. Apparently the fates determined I needed to just go with an airline pilot style mustache again, so here we are.

If I ever get one my airplanes up over 12,500 feet I’ll have a great seal on the oxygen mask.