Ponderings and Musings

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.

I wasn’t even 10 minutes through the first meeting of the day when I realized that I was starting to feel way too stressed on a Monday morning. Since my meetings start at 07:00, this was not a good precedent for the work day, let alone the work week.

I stepped away from my office desk for a few moments, hugged my husband, and gave Truman some nice pets. He wanted treats. This improved my mood.

A few more things happened at work and I decided it was time to take a few moments and just let my brain reset. Enter my daily dose of Solitaire.

After getting through a couple of goals, I’m feeling better.

Sometimes I have to step back to improve my mental state instead of just trying to plow through the situation. I’m sure the afternoon will be quite productive and ultimately I will have a productive work week.

It’s good to remember to breathe once in a while.

Monsoon season has continued on and I’m enjoying it very much. The afternoons and evenings have been showing promise of some good, albeit slow moving, storms on a regular basis. The pattern looks like it’s going to kick up a bit in the beginning of August as the eastern Pacific Ocean starts doing its typhoon things.

Weather is so interesting, especially with all the change going on.

While I’m always interested in capturing moments of life via video captures and photos, I’ve been trying to take some time each day with my phone in my pocket and enjoying the world around me, just for me. I went for my morning walk, leaving the iPhone behind for 35 minutes and I feel like it was a great way to start the day. This is something I used to do all the time before the smartphone era. Some of my best memories are of me alone in the woods behind my parents’ house just walking, exploring, and lost in my own thoughts. It’s a practice I need to get back to on a regular basis.

I’ve never understood how so many folks, especially those of the younger generations, walk around with earbuds or headphones on all the time. But then again, I don’t understand how private pilots can fly around listening to music in much the same fashion, especially since an airplane engine is a world of music of its own.

I will always be thankful that I am solidly part of Gen X, in that I’ve seen the world without 90% of this technology and I’ve seen all the wonderful things current technology can do. Couple my generational placement with my higher than average memory and I can keep all this loud technology around us in perspective.

The sunrise was beautiful this morning. As hues of pink and orange appeared over the Santa Rita Mountains to the east, I stopped my walk for a few seconds to watch the rays of the new day peek over the ridge. I smiled. I said “thank you” to whatever forces in the universe listen to that sort of thing. There was no impulse to catch the moment digitally, it was impossible with my iPhone back home.

And that’s a brilliant way to start the day.

I have been purposely focused on avoiding distractions at work and in the my use of technology this week. You’d think that at age 56 I’d already have all this figured out and instead be pushing and shuffling paper and work all over the place like some seasoned pro, but I’m not wired that way. I love shiny, new things, especially when it comes to tech, and my mind often churns at trying to find a better way to get myself organized. The result is I often spend more time organizing my organizational methods rather than doing the things I had organized in the first place.

It’s all confounding.

For years I have subscribed to a loose interpretation of the “Getting Things Done”, or GTD, methodology for organizing my life. As iron clad as my memory is to the names and ages of the women that worked in my high school cafeteria back in 1983, I tend to forget tasks that I have to do at work unless I write them down. I have a spiral notebook where I jot things down all the time and then I add them to a digital to-do list. This is where things go sideways. Some folks in the tech space declare you should never use anything but plain text files to maintain this sort of thing. That works great for about 48 hours but then something falls out during a sync between systems, and then I have to remember what the todo list has forgotten, which negates the whole point of writing it down in the first place.

I could keep this all in handwritten notebooks but they can be cumbersome to carry around. My father kept a small notebook in his shirt pocket at all times and wrote things down there but while I’m clearly old enough, I’m not ready to wear shirts that require a shirt pocket at all times.

So then I switch from the plain text file approach to a solution designed for this sort of thing, which is a suite of applications called OmniFocus from The Omni Group. The application is outstanding and since the latest release has been even more fantastic. The thing is, it relatively locks me into the Apple ecosystem, aside from a web portal that has improved by leaps and bounds over the past year. As long as work allows me to get to that web portal from my Windows computer, I’m good.

But then my “be your own tech guru” instincts kick in, usually spurred by the clamoring of my open source contemporaries about “closed systems” and the cycle then repeats.

I have been focusing very hard not to be distracted by the differing voices of what’s right and wrong in today’s technology.

The truth is, I’m at the point in my life and my tech interests where “it just works” reigns supreme over everything else. I have to focus on technology that I trust, and while I don’t really trust any technology, my Apple setup is the closest I get to something I can trust: it should just work, they seem to be making good strides toward privacy, and most importantly, it allows me to achieve a minimalism that helps declutter my brain, my life, and my existence.

Side note, I still want a vintage Apple //e on the back desk in my office at some point in the near future. That’d be fun to futz around with.

The removal of “fiddling with the tech” distractions this week has allowed me to accomplish about 16% more this week at work and allowed me some brain cycles to think about upcoming videos as a creative endeavor. This has improved my mood and well-being.

Writing about this in this here bloggy thing, and making these declarations and discoveries public, has reinforced that this path has worked well for me this week.

I should probably read this blog entry whenever I start to feel distracted. I’ll have to save the permalink somewhere so I remember that I wrote this blog entry to begin with.

Maybe a sticky note on the monitor will work.

Spotted during our walk last night. So simple, but so important.

So here’s a photo of me sitting in front of my video editing computer.

I have an old webcam attached to this Mac mini that I use for testing scripts that I may record in future videos. I’ve been in my “creative flow” for much of the evening and it feels good. Being happy away from work makes it easier to be at happy at work.

Some folks in my social media circles are starting to lose their minds when it comes to the presidential elections. I wretched about it last night so there’s no reason to get my hackles up about the subject today. I rolled my eyes one too many times today so I just shut down the browser and went and did something productive.

My husband and I have been watching Hulu’s “The Bear” over the past couple of weeks. This show, about a family owned Chicago beef restaurant, has been a frenetic ball of chaos since the first moments of episode one. It’s not something I would normally watch, but there are interesting moments and I get the whole “art vibe” of the production. The show has won awards all over the place and everyone is stumbling over one another to declare how much they enjoy the show. It’s the latest in a litany of Internet sensations and has earned its place among “Breaking Bad”, “Orange Is The New Black”, and the one whose name escapes me right now but I remember everyone hated the last season of it.

Chaos is entertainment in these chaotic times of the 21st century, and it’s apparent that folks just want more chaos.

We tried watching “Succession” and didn’t finish the first season; if I wanted to watch the Trump family be insufferable idiots I’d turn on CNN. I know actors like to stretch their craft by realistically portraying these whacked out characters, but watching “Fishes”, the Christmas episode of season two of “The Bear”, threw my anxiety levels through the roof. The direction was amazing, the portrayals were top notch, but I did not find one ounce of entertainment in the entire experience.

If I wanted to watch folks have inexplicable meltdowns I’d drive to the nearest Walmart or Safeway or hang out in one of the seedy areas of Tucson.

For me, entertainment is escapism where I can find something to celebrate. I find no interest in wallowing in completely mental situations of characters cooked up to scream and fling forks and turn over dining room tables while Christmas carols are playing in the background.

I’ll continue to watch “The Bear” with my husband, as he very much enjoys the show and I enjoy spending time with him. But when it comes to entertainment?

I just don’t get it.

I’m sitting under the gazebo in the middle of July. This is not too bad for a Tuesday afternoon in the Sonoran Desert; it’s 98ºF but rather pleasant. There’s a decent breeze. The National Weather Service says we can expect thunderstorms but not until later tonight. I like that. Night lightning shots are cool.

Speaking of lightning shots, I’m very pleased with a shot I took during a storm this past weekend.

There’s a little bit of “lens blowout” (I don’t know the official term) at the bottom of the lightning strike but for the most part it came out well. I’m enjoying storm photography and my life videography in general as a creative outlet.

I have been thinking it’s Wednesday all day, though it is Tuesday. My husband is doing better with COVID; he tested negative yesterday. Mike and I are negative, but now Chris is testing positive. He’s just feeling a little rundown. I just heard that Jamie is coming home from barber school with a little bit of a scratchy throat. He partied in Los Angeles over the weekend, so it could just be that he’s tired.

I’m a few days into 56 and I’m feeling good about that. I’m looking forward to life’s next adventure, whether big or small.

That’s a good feeling.

I’ve been trying extra hard to avoid the news over the past 48 hours. My opinion is not important in the cacophony of analysis over what happened in Butler, Pa., and honestly, I don’t have the energy to care, let alone share thoughts and prayers.

I am at the point in my life where I just want to punch something every time I hear Wolf Blitzer’s voice, so I just put on some news noise canceling headphones and go about my day.