Ponderings and Musings

It has been a low key, enjoyable Christmas. Earl has a new iPad Mini for his online enjoyment.

The house was feeling festive.

The unseasonably warmer weather has continued in Southern Arizona, so we were able to enjoy Christmas dinner outside.

I am filled with gratitude for the life I have. Today was a good day to just “be”.

I snapped from photos last night before going to bed. I slept well, and now it is Christmas morning. The house is still quiet, aside from a certain ginger cat expressing his displeasure of me not being awake for the sunrise.

I ended up being awake for the sunrise.

In a little while some family activity will begin and our Christmas will be in full swing.

I am looking forward to a lovely day.

Earl has been busy in the kitchen working on Christmas Eve snacks. We keep it informal at the Desert Compound. I have to keep reminding myself it’s Christmas Eve; the sun is shining brightly with the promise of a beautiful sunset and the temperatures are still well within the 70s on the Fahrenheit scale.

I talked to family back east a little while ago. I’ll be giving them a call again tomorrow.

I’m enjoying sitting on the gazebo writing this blog entry, with a small glass of white wine to sip while composing the bits and bytes. I’m feeling particularly reflective and pensive today. Today was a normal workday for me, but since the team is awesome, I gave them all a head start on their Christmas celebration.

This holiday season has felt like one of the more lower key holidays of my adult life. I’m feeling merry, just not as loudly so.

I just took this photo while running out to the mailbox. I love the color of these flowers. Unlike much of our landscaping, our landscapers have not put a label as to the type of flower seen here, but I believe it’s bougainvillea.

Even though we’ve lived in the desert for nearly four years, it’s hard for me to believe that I am sitting outside in the gazebo, watching a beautiful sunset, and Christmas descends upon us in less than two days.

For this (former) northerner, it doesn’t feel like Christmas, despite the mall speakers screaming about “let it snow, let it snow, let it snow”. The family has done a fantastic job of decorating the house for the holidays, so that’s a wonderful thing.

I’m ready to wind down 2024. I feel prepared for 2025, whatever that may bring.

In the meanwhile, I’ll just keep enjoying the beauty around me.

It’s been years since we’ve been to a Waffle House. Comfort food in a comfort place.

Jamie graduated from barber college today. We are very proud of him. His state board exam is next week.

OK, I’ve kind of lost interest in the litany of superhero movies we’ve been assaulted with over the past few years. However, the trailer for Superman, coming out in July ’25, looks really interesting and has a beautifully familiar feel to it.

As a young lad I was always fascinated with the business calculators in use at the family owned lumber yard and contracting business. I suspect Grandpa Country was a bit of a geek at heart, as he invested wisely in these sorts of pieces of technology. For example, the Accounts Receivables at the store were maintained in house, originally using a Burroughs Bookkeeping machine purchased in the 1950s. I never saw this machine, but being the dork I was and continue to be, I could tell which entries on old ledger cards were made with this machine, just by the way the printing appeared on the cards.

In 1972 (I tracked down the exact date by the change in dated entries on the older ledger cards), the Burroughs machine was replaced by an NCR Class 160 Bookkeeping Machine.

I can easily remember this bookkeeping machine, as it’s what was in use when I did the accounts receivable for the family after Grandma Country retired but before my aunt took over the duties for the family business. I learned how this machine worked by watching Grandma Country do the invoice posting every morning during summer vacation. I found the machine fascinating. It was replaced by a computer in 1990 or so, running software I wrote that basically replicated the functions of this wonderful piece of technology.

Grandpa invested in the right tools and that’s something I learned from him.

The store didn’t have a proper cash register of the time, much to the chagrin of my technological ways. Instead, there was a very large “black box” built into the sales counter. The box had a tractor-fed stream of blank invoices that were there for handwritten detail, and a journal tape where we wrote the sub total of the sale, followed by a dash, and then the amount of tax charged on the sale. When the lever was pulled to advance this journal tape, the cash register drawer popped open. At least, until that functionality was disabled because of the amount of paper wasted just to pop open the drawer in a “No Sale” situation.

All of the calculations were performed on adding machines/calculators made by Monroe Systems for Business. We had a few of these machines scattered around the business, one in the back office, one on the sales counter etc. Because they were so robust and had some nifty features for their day, they lasted for literally decades. In fact, the Monroe 525 calculator, purchased in the mid 1970s, lasted until the store was sold to a new buyer in 2010.

For the back office there were printing models of these Monroe machines and they were the closest thing we had to something like a cash register.

Today I did a little search on Monroe Systems for Business and found that they’ve continued the tradition of quality calculating products, and the robust functionality is present in their equipment over 50 years later.

I was happy to see the layout of the keyboard is nearly the same as it has been for decades, and the approach to separating multiplication/division functions from the add/subtract/accumulator functions is intact.

My geek heart is happy. I might have to get my hands on one of these machines for my office.

For those that follow along on Mastodon, the alternative social media network that is not corporately owned, I have moved to my own private instance.

You can now find me at https://social.realmofmachias.com/@jp

I’ve tried Bluesky, the latest trend in all the social media rages, and while it’s nice, I don’t feel as comfortable there as I do on Mastodon. Mastodon is part of the Fediverse, and honestly, I find the network fits my mindset quite well.

There’s a big light in the sky!