Ponderings and Musings

I am content with my current lineup of Apple products, including my iPhone 13 Pro. However, I’ve been toying with the idea of redecorating my home office in “Apple Store colors”, and I wanted to go to one of the stores here in Arizona to get a better idea of the color palette. We decided to drive to Scottsdale to the Apple Store at Scottsdale Fashion Square, a lively mall with renovations in progress and several upper crust brand names populating the store fronts.

The line to get into the Apple Store was over 30 minutes long if one was looking for a new iPhone. A lot of future iPhone owners were queued up in front of the beautiful space.

We were able to go right into the store to browse, where we immediately engaged in our tradition of taking a photo on one of the demo machines. We decided to use a MacBook Pro for our typical adventure,.

I was able to get a better sense of the colors needed for my office renovation project; Earl doesn’t like the idea of “toasted almond” as a color choice, but it’s the best way I can describe it and I know I’ll enjoy the change of pace.

The particular store reminds me a bit of the flagship store on Michigan Ave in Chicago in that it has two levels, lots of glass, and a super open feel.

There’s a few other Apple Stores I want visit in the Phoenix area in the near future. Our store here in Tucson is quite enjoyable but not particular noteworthy. At least everyone there is friendly, in typical Apple fashion.

Truman has a small rash on his back so he was off to the vet on Monday. It’s a small case of ringworm; he needs a few drops of medicine each day for two weeks. Earl did the honors of escorting him to the vet; he was well behaved but for a few moments he was planning his escape. Chris modified this photo to depict the trigonometry that was going on when he was trying to figure out how to work the vet’s door handle.

I’m taking a few moments to sit in our back lawn during a lunch break. I’ve been focused on trying to be more focused at work this week and spending a few moments outside during a break helps me maintain an even keel.

I posted this photo on Instagram. I don’t know why I did; I was just in the mood to take a selfie, a snapshot of a moment, a reminder in 10 years of what I looked like today.

When Grandma and Grandpa City retired in the 1970s, they still were awake around 7:00 a.m. eating breakfast and doing their morning routine. They both seemed to look forward to the newspaper each morning; and one of them would always be working on the crossword puzzle. Grandpa City would also read “the funnies”. As a youngster I had the impression this was something they looked forward to.

Today, as a man in his mid 50s, I get that.

There are two activities I must complete daily for my day to feel fulfilled. I’m hooked on Wordle and the daily goals of Solitaire on my iPad.

My husband and I tried Wordle results each day, usually first thing in the morning. He texts me a screenshot of his results (without the actual letters, just the number of tries required) and I then do the same.

My Solitaire app has four daily goals. Three of the goals are tied together for bonus points and there’s a fourth “arcade goal”, which compares with what others are doing on the platform. I also play the daily challenge and oddly I always find that easier than the other games of the day.

The Solitaire game does allow me to try another goal if I find the original proposed goal too daunting, but I usually stick it through until I solve the original goal. I will skip a goal and ask for a new one if they want me to solve a multiplayer game as a goal, because it’s Solitaire and if I wanted to play multiplayer card games I’d go to a casino or something.

So while I don’t read “the funnies” in the local newspaper anymore, I do look forward to my two rounds of games every day. I find the experience relaxing and rewarding.

And relaxing and rewarding is always a win in my book.

I write a lot of things down at work. I’m in a lot of meetings, I lead a team of 15 developers that are all working on different projects, and our team juggles the technicalities and mechanics of over three dozen different applications.

I’m completely reliant on my personal knowledgebase, or in the newer vernacular, my second brain.

I tend to remember written notes versus typed notes. I usually end up writing notes and then typing them into a searchable interface along the lines of Microsoft OneNote or even plain text documents, but it’s the handwriting activity that’s locking data into some sort of memory in my cluttered brain.

I’ve tried writing my notes using my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil directly into Microsoft OneNote, and the practice is a bit more efficient, but I don’t enjoy writing on my iPad Pro with my Apple Pencil nearly as much as using a good quality gel pen and a decent notebook. I prefer a dot grid over lined paper and I alternate between blue and black ink gel pens.

I was reading social media comments around the fact that many schools are no longer teaching cursive writing to students. It’s a shame to see the practice become a lost art, but students still need to learn how to write, and as you can see by my own penmanship shown above, it’s more about writing for legibility and efficiency, and if a student is writing in printed letters instead of using cursive, well, at least they’re writing.

One comment noted that most Gen Zers won’t know how to sign documents because without cursive they won’t have a signature, but there’s nothing that says a person’s signature has to be in cursive. A person’s signature has to be a consistent, understood mark of a person’s identity. There’s no rule in a book somewhere that says it has to be in cursive. I know a lot of folks that have beautiful signatures. My mother, both my grandmothers, and especially my sister have or had impressive signatures. My signature is functional and legible. I’ve seen plenty of young adults scrawl a bunch of lines as their signature and I know more than one person that’s just put an X or something close that on the dotted line. An impressive signature dazzles at times, but as long as the younger generation maintains the ability to hold a pencil or pen and make legible marks on a piece of paper (or slab of silicon), the world isn’t going to fall apart.

I still can’t get used to writing large amounts of information on an iPad Pro. Let’s hope pen and paper don’t go extinct.

I love the contrasting light at sunset here in Sonoran Desert. I’ll never tire of this.

Today I learned “Frasier” is coming back to television. I wasn’t a huge fan of the show back in the day, but I’ve seen plenty of great moments from clips and this latest resurrection of an old sitcom doesn’t look too contrived. Since we pay a boatload of money for Paramount+ (Star Trek, The Good Wife), might as well give it a go when it comes out. It looks much better than when they tried to reboot “Murphy Brown” a few years ago, so we’ll give it a shot.

Earl and I were talking about memories of days gone by and I mentioned a vague recollection of “Onion Nuggets” at McDonalds. My husband didn’t remember them but I did some digging around online and found a little bit of information.

McDonald’s Onion Nuggets came before the Chicken McNuggets. Introduced to select markets in the ‘70s, Onion Nuggets were around until the early 1980s.

I must have enjoyed them in one of the select markets back in the day. I can easily remember trying them and liking them, but I don’t remember where this occurred.

I figure I have about 30 years left in this life. Of course, that’s an arbitrary number subject to countless variables unaccounted for in this declaration, but it helps keep my sights on the future in perspective.

Of those 30 arbitrary years remaining, I’ll probably end up working a third of them. For those not quick with the maths, that’s 10 years. I plan on retiring at 65, if my company will have me for that long. If not, I’ll find another gig to pad out the arithmetic. I don’t know what tech company would want an aged team leader but I could probably bluff my way into something fruitful.

These thoughts of remaining time on my odometer are not morbid. They’re realistic. And quite frankly, my plan is to make these the best 30 years (give or take 30) of my life.