Ponderings and Musings

I had a nice stroll around the property this morning. I went for a walk around the neighborhood, well sheltered by the sun, and the exercise was good. By the time I got home I was quite sweaty, even more than when I go hiking on Saturdays.

It was well worth the sweat.

Photos from my hike off the Broadway Trailhead.

The gate preventing the dogs from climbing the stairs to our bedroom has been removed. We have decided the gate is no longer needed.

Truman now keeps watch on the staircase the entire day. Every once in a while he switches position to stay parked in the sun. He’s fluffed his tail up once when the dogs came up to see what’s up, but for the most part he’s been very chill about the whole situation.

I have always loved the midwestern United States. My love for the area goes hand in hand with my love for the Great Plains. I guess I’m just one of the guys that loves rural parts of the country. I’ve been thinking about my upcoming storm chasing trip and exploring towns in these parts of the country. It got me thinking about my first time in Iowa. Surprisingly, my blog is well over 20 years old and it turns out I wrote about the experience.

You can read it here.

I’ve taken my next step in my video editing adventures and purchased an M2 Pro Mac mini. I bumped up the GPU on this machine so I could have as much graphics processing goodness as my budget would allow. Apple told me it’d be here on Monday; it arrived today.

It’s a very capable little machine that flies along nicely.

My M2 MacBook Air still does a fantastic job and its duties and will be my go to machine for my day to day stuff. And I have always found the MBA to be quite fast. This new Mac mini blows that performance a bit out of the water.

I know Apple should have an M3 Mac mini coming out soon, but I wasn’t in the mood to wait around for it. For what I am using this computer for, I am more than happy with my purchase.

Strap yourself in for some video goodness. Less than a month until my storm chasing adventure!

Earl and I have been together for 28 years. For some, this seems like a long time. For us, time flies when you’re having fun.

Actually, our first date was 28 years ago. We had dinner at very nice place called Cielo’s here in Tucson. I look forward to going back.

I am on United 2407 from Raleigh-Durham to Houston. It’s a pleasant flight. The air is relatively smooth, the passengers are calm and my flight status with United automatically upgraded me to Economy Plus at no cost. My connection from Houston to Tucson has been upgraded to first class and I will enjoy that every much. I’m not much into health food, I am into champagne.

I’m sitting here in my seat looking down on the U.S. landscape and I can easily discern that we are somewhere over Alabama. Not only because it makes sense, but because my husband and I have been fortunate enough to have driven in all 50 states and we have experienced each of them. I sometimes forget that the average American had been in only a handful of states and then I realize how lucky I am to be where I am in life at this stage of my life.

Even though we’ve done a lot of traveling over the years, I’m still wanting to do more. The big cities are alright, but I want to see more small cities, more villages, more small towns. One of my favorite traveling experiences ever was driving across Minnesota and coming across the village of Litchfield. It was Autumn 2013 and the main street was closed off to traffic. I parked the car and cheered on a football team and band for a school I’d never seen with people I’d never met. When the band went by and did a small routine I was high-fived by proud parents who didn’t care who I was. I was just there, being me, smiling, and enjoying the experience.

We all need to do things like that more often.

As I’m well into what I assume to be the latter half of my life, I want to seek out more of that. I don’t want to put up lawn signs declaring who to vote for. I don’t want to get incensed by the news. I don’t care who loves who or what does what or why they do it where. There’s so much more to the big picture and I just want to enjoy the big picture.

The big picture is so awesome. Why do people forget that?

I am standing at gate D20 at RDU for the flight home, via Houston. The people watching is fascinating.

If I could go back in time and have a conversation with my younger self, it would be to reiterate, “Never lose hold of your dreams”. Drawing out computer and cash register keyboards to pretend typing? In 2024 I can’t get away from computers. Focusing on getting the second hand on every clock in the house in perfect sync? As an adult you have a system at home that does that. Flying airplanes? Yep, even a gay man like you can do that with relative ease.

And your love of Star Trek, including imaging being in full uniform with friends and “talking Trek”? You’ll even do that once in a while.

What worked for the generation before us may not apply to us Gen Xers. We were often left to figure out things on our own and we did. Holding onto a playfulness seems lost in today’s world.

As I try to move a little further away from social media, I find my mind wandering a bit while I’m work. Traditionally I’d grab my phone and look at Mastodon or something, but I find social media being a bit cantankerous these days. Watching a YouTube video might be a good diversion, but then YouTube starts recommending “Bewitched” episodes and then people throwing chairs at a wedding or something and I end up going down a rabbit hole with those shenanigans, so I try to stay away from the videos as well.

What to do, what to do.

I’ve been doing quite a bit with ChatGPT lately, mainly in the space of feeding it some code I’ve written and asking it to “make it better”. The results are surprisingly a strong learning tool for me, because some of the time it breaks the code completely and I have to figure out how to fix it, but most of the time it shows me a coding technique I had not tried before. That’s rather nifty.

When I get an impulse to start playing around with social media, I now try asking ChatGPT some questions. For example, instead of jumping on Mastodon after lunch, I did this:

I’m finding having a brief conversation with ChatGPT around a productive topic is helping me stay on point today. And so far I have an impressive Accomplishments list going for a Monday afternoon.

Yay AI!