Ponderings and Musings

It is Sunday morning in the desert southwest. It’s currently 67°F and the sun is shining. Birds are singing in the distance and a few are fluttering around on tree branches. Every once in a while a warm breeze comes down off the nearby Rincon Mountains.

This is peace.

After a stressful end to the work week, some work yesterday morning, and other things that were basically jumbling up my thoughts a little bit, we went out with our friend Marshall last night for dinner downtown and a drink at one of the local gay bars. The particular bar skews older in attendance, and they had a DJ that was playing music from the ’80s. His playlist was really close to what I would have played at that time and I found that rather exciting. We had fun and the stress melted away.

I slept really well last night.

The car is back in our hands; we have a new premium MOPAR battery as installed by the dealer and several sets of fingers crossed that this will fix the issue. The old battery was six months old but the desert southwest is brutal on car batteries. I don’t know how folks with electric vehicles manage it. Maybe it’s the different type of battery or something.

I have a short work week as I’m traveling back east later on to visit family for the annual holiday visit. Insane airline prices have led to an agreement this would be a solo trip; Earl is going to stay home and take care of Truman and the rest of the family. I’ll be sitting in the back of the airplane for this journey, but as I always say, there is no bad seat on an airplane. It’ll be fun sitting in the double digited rows.

Last week I kvetched a little bit about the holidays. Looking over the landscape shown above I still can’t believe that we are 10 or so days from Thanksgiving.

Sometimes it feels like time stands still, probably because of the abundant sunshine and warm temperatures I still haven’t grown accustomed to.

Life could be worse.

So we had an adventure last night. We were on our way home from having a drink and I pulled over into the left hand lane to make our way home. The car turned off at the intersection, as it’s designed to do. We have that feature where the car turns itself off when it’s at a full stop and then starts itself up again when you release the brake.

There’s an IBS, or Intelligent Battery Sensor, that tells this nifty feature to not do its thing if the battery voltage is low. They don’t want you stranded at an intersection with the car failing to start. This feature has worked for us in the past. Living in the desert southwest we go through batteries quickly due to the summer heat. Several folks have told us about this and it’s apparently fairly common knowledge that you’re going to replace your battery once a year. When the car stops turning itself off and on and I subsequently check the battery indicator, we replace the battery. We did this six months ago. Yay for battery warranties!

So the car turned itself off. The light turned green, I let up my foot, and the car tried to start itself and then everything went black. All the lights went off (it’s never done that before, even with a failing battery), I couldn’t turn the flashers on (the indicator on the dash would just flash erratically) and the gear shifter got cranky. It took some effort to get it into park, and even after I did that I couldn’t turn the ignition switch to off. Turning the ignition switch to ‘start’ did absolutely nothing. Even when then former batteries were at their last gasp the car would at least try to start.

I opened the door and a relay under the dash started clicking really fast and a faint, white indicator light under the dash started blinking. The car was acting like the computer that controls everything had lost its mind or locked up, much like a blue screen of death in Microsoft Windows.

The (presumably) homeless folks sitting on the curb offered to help us push the car but we couldn’t get the gear shift to move back anywhere near neutral. So, Earl called a tow truck, while I waved cars around us.

I must take a moment to give a positive thank you and shout out to all the folks that offered to help us. There were a lot of them and many wanted to make sure we were safe.

The tow truck arrived 30 or so minutes after the call, and friendly Chris took apart the gear shifter so he could get the car into neutral. The car was towed to the Jeep dealer and we called home so someone could pick us up at the adjacent Walgreens.

We’re waiting to hear back on the diagnosis of the car. We bought our Jeep Cherokee back when we lived in Upstate New York in late 2016. The car is still in fantastic shape, but the mechanics are starting to show their age. We’ve been on numerous adventures in this Cherokee and it’s been across the United States a few times. It’s been licensed in three different states. I’m not ready to say goodbye to this car yet; hopefully they don’t have to replace the entire computer system and it’s just a cranky battery or something.

I thought yesterday was Friday for a bit. I posted a selfie on Instagram with a tag line echoing my thoughts.

Today is Friday. And that makes me happy.

The holidays are approaching. I know this because we were in Target the other night and “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” was blaring from the intercom speakers in the ceiling and there were Christmas decorations strung about. It’s weird to see displays of snow and other frigid weather and hear things like “oh the weather outside if frightful” when I’m in shorts and the outside temperature is in the 80ºFs. Since moving to the desert I never really know what time of year it is.

I wish I could say I get worked up with joy when thinking about the approaching holiday season but to be frank, I’m not really that excited about it. I don’t know if it’s just that I’m older or the end of the year responsibilities that kick in at work or the crass commercialism of it all, but I’m just not hyped about tinsel and garland moments. Do people still use those things? I miss tinsel. I will admit that.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year and aside from eating too much food, there’s not a whole lot of other things associated with the holiday. I like sitting around the dining room table with our family and talking to friends in far away places and nearby too. I like that stuff.

We have a vacation planned for mid December and perhaps I’ll find some time to relax and reflect on the approaching holidays. Maybe that’ll kick something into a higher gear for me.

I’m a bad gay. I say this quite bit because I find it to be true. While many in the gay community plan their Halloween activities in months beginning with a “J”, I am not one of those people. Even as a kid I didn’t usually plan my Halloween costume until the actual day of the event. On more than one occasion my mother would have a fit because I wanted to cut up a bed sheet and go as a ghost covered in pastel flowers or something. In seventh grade I did throw on a pair shorts and roller skates and went to school as a beach bum on roller skates. That’s the most creative I ever got and I’m not ashamed of this.

Our neighbors up the street hosted a Halloween party tonight, costume optional (thank God). We decided to go as a family except my husband, who decided to stay back with the dogs and not jeopardize his diet with the goodies that would be out on display.

This was the first time we’ve really interacted with our neighbors since moving to the desert 2 1/2 years ago. Earlier this afternoon, while out on my daily walk, I also ran into another neighbor who was decorating his mailbox to make it distinguishable from the adjacent mailbox. He was quite pleasant and we had a long talk about the neighborhood. It was my first time meeting him as well.

The party was a lot of fun as we mingled with the 25 or so guests from the neighborhood. Everyone was friendly and there was handshaking and smiles and pleasant conversation. There were a lot of questions about our home, which under previous owners had been painted a “Pepto Bismol pink”, as they told us, and apparently we still live in what others call the “pink palace” (even though the house is gray now). I don’t believe the name to be a gay slur and that didn’t really cross my mind until typing that previous sentence just now.

We learned quite a bit about the development we live in, and when the city line was moved to incorporate our property into the city (our house was originally outside the city limits) and the like. It was a great way to meet our neighbors and get to know them a little bit.

It was a very pleasant experience. And no, I didn’t wear a costume.

We recently signed up for Sirius/XM Radio again in the car. We swore we weren’t going to do this ever again, but Sirius/XM gave it to us for free for 90 days and then offered us a 75% discount on the first year after that.

I really like my “Yacht Rock” radio.

Local radio isn’t really that compelling here in Southern Arizona. The stations are alright but there is nothing particularly outstanding or local about them. It’s really a shame; back in my radio days each station had its own personality that reflected the vibe of the area it served. Like so many things in the United States, radio gave way to corporate greed and everything is a cookie cutter presentation from a corporate office somewhere outside of the listening area. Only the major markets have local radio stations; medium and smaller markets are an afterthought.

At least the music stations on Sirius/XM don’t have commercials.

With the subscription we can listen on our devices, so I’ve been enjoying Yacht Rock during my relatively meeting-free Friday.

I mentioned the other day that I had was going through old blog entries and noticed a bunch of photos missing. The photos weren’t really missing, it was just that the JetPack plugin (a service I paid for, mind you) was doing something to the images and keeping them from showing. It was also slowing down the performance of the blog. A lot. I’m much happier without the JetPack service activated. Plus, I’ll save a little bit of money.

One of the harder things about reading old blog entries is seeing a difference in exuberance levels between then (usually before 2016 or so) and today. Yes, I purposely picked 2016 because, as well know, the United States changed a lot when Trump won the Presidential election in November of that year. In my opinion, the country has been in a steady tail spin since that day and things only got marginally better once Trump was out of office. The seeds of destruction were well planted during the Trump years, throughout government, and through the populace.

It’s rather depressing.

I don’t like writing about depressing things. I try to find the happy where I gaze and generally I can find it, but since the Trump years it feels like there’s been less happy to be found. Now, I don’t completely blame the Trump years for all of this, because it coincides with a lot of other things, including the explosion of social media, the general attitude shift to one of “less trust” throughout society, and the general tendency for folks to fear science and reason in favor of opinion and superstition.

Ironically, a blog post I wrote in October 2013 talks about me finding little joy in Facebook. Twitter wasn’t completely off the rails back then, but Facebook was being Facebook and I found that depressing. Here it is a decade later and I could write a blog entry today that would probably go word for word with what I wrote 10 years ago on the subject. That’s a long rut.

I will continue to try to find the happy as I look over this world. I will focus on the pleasant. But I will also be a realist. It’s important to keep it real.

But oh, to have that pre-2016 feeling of optimism again.

I noticed a lot of broken images in posts from days gone by and found the issue was with an add-on to WordPress called JetPack. I’ve never really been a fan of this add-on, so I removed it. Things should still run as intended. If you see something broken, please let me know.

And here’s what I look like right now.

“Temptation Eyes” by The Grass Roots is one of my favorite songs from the early ’70s. Here’s a live(-ish) version from The Ed Sullivan Show.

There’s a reason I still find mustaches and sideburns hot.