Ponderings and Musings

When we were in Flagstaff this weekend I spotted some religious-themed candles for some of the Gay Saints.

I also found a display where I had a hard time making a decision.

We also may have gone to a few places for some adult beverages and a bite to eat.

I’m sitting outside after having a nice lunch with my husband. The breezes are pleasant, and it’s mid August, so the temperature is currently around 100ºF with the humidity on the low side. I’m used to this desert weather now. Everything is fine as long as I’m not in the sun.

Several of the folks I follow via my “Resurgence” blog roll (see the sidebar) have paused their social media activity and are concentrating on just their blogs. I like this. At times my social media feeds are filled with way too many opinions and nearly not enough facts. It’s good to step away from the noise from time to time. It’s not like pandemic times when we didn’t have a choice for interaction with other people.

Earl and I are planning a little road trip this weekend that involves my most strenuous hike to date. If I reach the heights I hope to reach it’ll be me hiking at my highest elevation thus far. I’m looking forward to the challenge.

This guy bonked himself on Mike’s office window yesterday, but sorted himself out and got himself together while sitting in the palm tree adjacent to the window. He’s was only about seven inches tall.

Another reason for sitting outside is because I enjoy the fresh air, regardless of how warm or hot that air is. Air conditioning is a wonderful thing and a necessity in the desert, but sometimes I just want to feel Mother Nature’s natural breezes.

I find it refreshing.

Please view and heed. You don’t want to be talking to a pop tart in public.

I think I’ve written about this before but I’m too lazy to go through 23 years of blog entries to see if I have actually put these thoughts to paper, so to speak.

I recently had a birthday reminder pop up in Facebook and the face associated with the reminder was unfamiliar. I then realized it was a co-worker from a job I had 14 years ago. We haven’t spoken or interacted in any way, including on Facebook, since I left that company back in 2015.

I have no idea why we are maintaining a connection on Facebook. So I removed them from my friends list.

Social media, and in particular Facebook, allows us to make electronic connections easily, sometimes judiciously, and often frivolously. Here’s ago I was at a going away party of a friend in Chicago and I met one of their friends, who promptly friended me on Facebook. He seems nice enough. Our paths are most likely never going to cross again. I have no idea why we are friends on Facebook, as we don’t have common interests. He had some laughs, good conversation, and a couple of beers during this one event and then we moved on. In the pre-social media days, this would have been a fond memory and nothing more, but now there’s this electronic connection and I felt a couple of pangs of guilt as my mouse pointer hovered over the “unfriend” link. I don’t want to tarnish a happy memory that I can vividly remember, and admittedly, they may or may not remember, by severing a connection that wouldn’t have lingered had it not been for Facebook.

As we navigate our way through this chaos through life, there are folks that are meant to be in our lives for a long time and folks that are meant to be in our lives for just a moment. I truly believe this is how we are wired and this is how this whole existence thing is suppose to work. We have memories of folks that we have crossed paths with, albeit good or bad memories, and then we move on. Building a connection through Facebook, and to a lesser extent, other social media platforms, artificially extends a connection that was probably not meant to be. I believe our minds and/or genetic makeup in general is not designed to handle all these extra connections.

Hence, just more ammo for the constantly growing ball of chaos.

I’m on another quest of sorts to clean up some of the chaos in my life, and a good chunk of this extends around technology, and in particular, extraneous connections. “Unfriending” is such a harsh term that evokes an emotion it shouldn’t have the right to evoke. But social media is engineered to tug at the emotions a lot so that you forge a dependence on the dopamine, which in turn helps build a data profile for profit purposes. Selling data is first and foremost the purpose of social media.

Don’t let your happy memories linger beyond their intended expiration date just to become a profit opportunity for a corporate conglomerate.

“We had a nice time together, it’s time to move on, have a pleasant and happy life.”

I haven’t been posting as many photos from my hikes as I’d like. So here’s some photos I took on my hike on Saturday. I apologize for the four possible cover photos for my YouTube thumbnails.

‘Twas a beautiful day to hike. Right click an image to open in a new tab or window or to save to your computer. Enjoy.

I am writing this at 06:06 Mountain Standard Time. I have just completed a 32 mile walk around the neighborhood, following the same route I have taken every morning this week. I have waved to the neighbors out on their walk, at just about the same location along the route, with maybe 50 feet of deviation from the norm at any given interaction.

I cleared the same 11 spam email messages out of my inbox this morning. I’m never going to buy anything from these companies again and for the life of me I can’t figure out why all the A.I. magic in the world can’t figure out this fact.

I will eat a homemade “egg bite”, as prepared by my husband this past Sunday. It will be the last one in the storage container in the refrigerator. I will have two cups of coffee, black, before 10:00 a.m. and then a cup of coffee, black after lunch to get my afternoon a little pep, unless I feel extra frisky and ask Earl to bring me home an unsweetened iced tea from Dunkin’ Donuts or Starbucks while he’s out running errands.

I’ll finish up my work week around 04:00 p.m. / 16:00 Mountain Standard Time, in which I will either have one beer or a glass of wine as I look over the news events of the day. I enjoy one alcoholic beverage after work on Fridays because it’s the last work day of the week. I will also review my list of work accomplishments of the week, which are many but I couldn’t list them right now for you if my life depended on it.

I’ll be in bed by 22:00 / 10:00 p.m. Mountain Standard Time. This is in preparation of getting up to go hiking in the morning. In between supper and bed I may do one of three things: 1. watching thunderstorms, depending on Mother Nature’s mood, 2. go for a ride with Earl and drive to a scenic spot to enjoy a few moments in nature and some together time in the car, or 3. watch some television. Whichever ends up happening, I will spend a few moments putting together the video equipment for tomorrow’s hike and jot down a few notes of where I want to go and what I want to talk about on my next video.

My life is too predictable at the moment. While I enjoy structure in my life, there are times when I need a few fits of spontaneity to keep the structure making sense.

I’m feeling the need for one of those fits.

I’ve been on a casual, retro vibe t-shirt craze lately. Here’s the latest t-shirt to enter the paradigm. This limited run UNIX t-shirt from Cotton Bureau arrived yesterday and I am very much enjoying it.

For those not familiar with UNIX, it’s an operating system that’s been around for decades. Technically, Apple products run on a variant of UNIX, and Linux is based on the principles of UNIX. When I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, they had a variant of UNIX called Ultrix, which was frowned upon within the company because it competed with DEC’s VAX/VMS operating system.

My husband and I are seriously considering selling our Disney Vacation Club membership. There, I’ve said it out loud.

The past few trips to Disney properties, namely Disneyland in California and Walt Disney World in Florida, have not lived up to the memories we cherish from earlier trips to these venues. There’s a few reasons for this, and at the top of the list is the cost. Even with our prepaid accommodations, a trip to WDW for four or five days costs an incredible (to us) amount of money. From park tickets that are way over $100 per person, per day, to the cost of meals, to the cost of extra like ride photos and whatever “FastPass” is called this week, to now having to pay for the (non-)Disney bus from Orlando International Airport to the park… it’s just too dang expensive.

And honestly, the “magic” I once found in Disney seems to have dwindled a bit. It is impossible to escape the outside world. It used to be that you passed under the big arch and things were more colorful, the cast members were groomed to a certain standard, smiles were brighter, and in general, you were leaving the big, frustrating world behind for a while.

Now, Disney wants you constantly on your phone, with meal reservations and ride reservations and photo reservations. The male cast members that were originally required to be clean shaven and now required to grow a “neat, short beard” during their vacation, in actuality are all scruffed up to “meh, I didn’t shave for two days and I’m not brushing my teeth anymore”. Exiting attractions is often through the “back stage” area, where we see Mickey without his head on a smoke break. There’s more and more money required for anything beyond getting through the gates.

The magic has broken our bank a bit.

Yes, as I’m constantly reminded by my husband, I have old fashioned expectations for this modern world. I get that. That’s why there’s no one on our lawn. But when you’re paying sums of money equivalent to several house payments for a week in the Floridian humidity, you want a little bang for your buck.

I recently stumbled across this four hour review of the now closed “Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser” two day immersive experience. A lot of what is mentioned here can be attributed to the entire Disney experience.

It’s quite sad to me.

I love the sound of the classic analog synths of the late ’70s and ’80s. I stumbled across a YouTube channel that features these wonderful sounds, and here’s a sample.

Here’s a recreation of “Holiday” by Madonna.