Ponderings and Musings

While going through a few general aviation related forums this morning I came across some sad news. A pilot associated with ATP (a flight school) in Addison, Texas, took a brand new Cessna 172, told Air Traffic Control that he was intending to take off, go up through the clouds and “look at everything”, and that he would not follow ATC instructions and was pulling the circuit breakers on the comms equipment. He took off, flew east to a fairly rural area of Texas. The last recorded flight track showed him descending at a very high rate of feet per minute and he subsequently crashed. I believe his name was Logan and he was in his early 20s.

This prompted discussions about suicide and things that lead to this in today’s modern society. The conversation on the forums swung to discussions about bullying in general. When us middle aged pilots were kids, we might have been bullied at school but that generally fell away when we went home. In today’s always connected society obsessed with social media, youngsters don’t get that reprieve. Instead of being bullied just at school (which is horrible in itself), kids continuing the bullying online using all the available social media outlets, and an incident that may have been forgotten in a few days at a school is now recorded, shared, and endures in perpetuity.

Kids have it very rough these days.

I don’t know what led Logan to take his life in a brand new Cessna 172 last night. I just know that it’s heartbreaking when any person finds no answer or no hope anywhere and decides to take their life.

And this happens way too often.

This alarm clock has been a staple on my nightstand for over 30 years. Every time I wake up in the middle of the night, and that happens quite a bit, I glance at the clock to see what time it is. I then do math to figure out how much more sleep I can get. And the result often causes a bit of midnight anxiety.

I don’t need anxiety in my life.

The truth of the matter is that if it’s dark and my alarm hasn’t gone off yet, do I really care what time it is? The facts (darkness, no alarm) point to my eligibility for sleep and who really cares how much of that sleep remains? Sleep is sleep so get some sleep.

So I have stored this old faithful alarm clock in my drawer for a few nights to see if it helps reduce my anxiety when I wake up in the middle of the night and decide I must know what time it is. A few more steps to controlling the chaos.

Joyce Randolph, most famous for her role as Trixie in “The Honeymooners”, passed away earlier this month. She was 99 years old.

Joyce was not the first actress to play the role of Trixie; the role was originated by Elaine Stritch. Joyce took over the role after Elaine’s first and only outing as Trixie, and in the process the character was toned down a bit with a bit more wholesome image.

Here’s a shot of Joyce as Trixie in one of the early episodes on the DuMont Network, featuring Pert Kelton as Alice.

While reviewing my goals and associated personal accomplishments in 2023 I decided that last year was pretty much too “scattered” in my ways. It was a decent year and I feel like I generally moved forward in my humanness, but I didn’t immerse myself in activities that I thoroughly enjoy. I did some great things and I was able to “escape” into my hobbies on several occasions; I just didn’t feel enveloped in the joy I usually feel when pursuing my hobbies.

So, in 2024, I have decided to focus on my top three pastimes: aviation, weather and space, and retro computing. Things I’m not nearly as focused on this year include the other tech pursuits, including everything going on at Apple, or the latest in the world of Linux. These latter two subjects are covered sufficiently in my professional life and I don’t need to try to have fun messing around with Linux or buy the latest Apple gadget to escape into my hobbies.

I’ve had storm chasing on the mind a lot, and I’m anxious to see what El Niño brings to Mother Nature’s mood in the upcoming storm chasing season. While I had some great flights in 2023, I did not fly nearly enough, and that can be rectified fairly easily now that I’m a member of a local flying club. As far as retro computing goes, I don’t think my husband will let me purchasing an early 1980s NCR minicomputer with four attached cash registers to the system, but I do enjoy reading about these things and how they worked through various reference sources online.

Quality over quantity is the name of the game as I try to have a more focused, intentional life here in 2024.

When I was a kid I enjoyed reading anything I could get my hands on. My mom came into the kitchen on more than one occasion finding me parked in front of a bowl of Super Sugar Smacks reading our phone book.

The telephone directory pictured above is not from our small town but it looks identical to the CONTEL phone book we had of the same year. When my paternal side of the family decided to sell the business, we had a collection of every phone book for the area from 1969 to 2010.

I’m digressing.

I would often be reading the phone book because I didn’t have anything else at hand to read at the moment. I gleaned a lot of information from the phone book, because after all, the phone book holds a lot of information, and I started memorizing phone numbers without even realizing it. For example, today I can still recite the phone number for the main office of my alma mater and for my elementary school, though I have no reason whatsoever to call these people and I have probably never called these numbers in my life. They were just there in the phone book.

Like many geeks I have tried to move from reading books to using their electronic equivalents, namely, the Kindle app from Amazon or Apple Books. I usually try to read using these apps on one of the iPads I’ve had over the years. And with the turning of the clocks to the New Year I have come to one solid realization.

I hate electronic books.

I don’t feel connected to what I’m reading. I don’t like having my eyes lit up in a darkened room by the words on the “page” and I feel like I’m actually just using a bunch of web pages.

Give me a real, printed book anyway.

Now, I’ve never had an Amazon Kindle with E-ink, which doesn’t rely on backlighting, so I don’t know if I would enjoy that reading experience. A couple of weeks ago my husband and I browsed around our local Bookmans, which is a delightful used book store with lots and lots of interesting things to read. I purchased a book on storm chasing that I’m currently reading and before going to sleep for the night it’s quite nice to not have an iPad staring me in the face as I’m starting to feel sleepy.

I’ve often quipped that the reason we have school violence is because students are no longer high on the fluid to make ditto copies. Perhaps we’re all getting cranky because we have too much blue light staring us in the face all the time.

I’m finding myself much happier settling down with a book before calling it a night. It’s a shame we don’t have a phone book in the house, just in case I have a literary emergency.

Like everyone, I suppose, I sometimes think what life would be like if we won the lottery. What would we do with all that money? I have visions of buying an airplane so I can fly the family all over the country and easily fly us back east to visit with the relatives, but after the novelty of that wore off, what would I do? I am easily bored. I like tinkering with things and I like being able to get things, but the things I want to get have been obtained through hard work, which helps sidestep the boredom.

At one time in my life I thought I wanted to be rich so we could hobnob with the country club set, have lavish dinners and expensive drinks, and garner the attention of everyone in the dining room when I loudly ordered a $500 bottle of champagne, “make it two”.

The truth of the matter is, I’m content with where we are on the socioeconomic scale, and we are quite fortunate with our position. Too many people don’t have a reliable roof over their head, way too many people are looking for food, and way too many people live paycheck to paycheck. Because of the smarts of my husband we’ve been able to build a good life for ourselves and provide a bit for those we care for.

That’s much more fulfilling than that expensive bottle of champagne.

On the back half of my life I’m still looking to be a better person, but I’m not searching to be a richer person, at least not in an economical way. Deep down I’m still the guy from rural Central New York that grew up in a small town that was on the wrong side of the interstate as far as his classmates were concerned and you know what?

That’s awesome.

I’ve known a few too many “trust fund babies” in my life. While it’s fun to be able to have what you want without doing much to earn it, where’s the value in that? More importantly, where’s the zest of life in that?

I need to stick to the awesome.

As I build up the blog list in the right hand column of this bloggy thing here, I’m noticing that some folks opt to not show their entire post in their RSS feed. Instead, the feed features a first paragraph, or in some cases a sentence or two intended to entice folks to their website for the rest of their writings. These are all perfectly fine approaches, but as I start to rely on RSS more as a way to discover content on the Internet, I sometimes have an unread feed list of 50+ items from the past day. Again, this is all perfectly fine, however, because I have varying degrees of attention span, I may gloss over a really blog feed because something in the tickler prose didn’t grab my attention.

This got me thinking about titles on blog posts. I have used titles on my blog posts for well over two decades. Around 10 or 11 years ago I started using one or two word titles in some sort of edgy (at least in my mind) way, and honestly, I think I got the idea from Jennifer Saunders’ titles used in certain seasons of “Absolutely Fabulous”.

Using one or two word titles has resulted in WordPress incrementing file names on the direct links back to these posts; I wouldn’t be surprised that if I hit publish it’s actually going to show as “titles-3” or something similar in the address bar of your browser when you read it. Nothing wrong with this and in a way it’s kind of nifty to see how many times I’ve used the word “titles” to title a blog entry.

As an aside, in early 2023 my husband and I binged “The Good Wife” from beginning to end, watching one or two episodes every night. It didn’t take me very long to figure out what the writers were doing there with episode titles.

• Season 1 = one word title
• Season 2 = two word title
• Season 3 = three word title
• Season 4 = four word title
• Season 5 = three word title
• Season 6 = two word title
• Season 7 = one word title

I think it was apparent from the very beginning of “The Good Wife” that they intended either a four or seven season run of the series. We never got into “The Good Fight” to see what they did with the titles there. If we want to see Christine Baranski below one-liners we have “The Gilded Age” where she can do a good Maggie Smith impersonation.

OK, I think I’ve gone off in a distracted direction.

Even though we are 13 days into 2024, I think I’m going to try being a little more verbose in titling my blog entries. Aside from the use of “Caturday”, because there’s really only one way to celebrate Caturday and that’s with a properly titled blog entry and some purr-fect photos highlighting the wonders of the local feline.

I hope my title titillated you enough to get to the bottom of this blog entry. I just had to use the word titillated.

I think out loud a lot. I often ask “why”. I think it drives my husband crazy at times, but sometimes I need to know the “why” so I can process it and understand it. I’d suck at just being told to do something without knowing the logic behind it. A weakness? I think not.

One of the things that definitely drives my husband crazy is I’ll process all the “why”s and the outcomes of a discussion out loud when he’s just asking for me to answer a question. For example, he’ll simply ask something like, “do you want to go to DiCastro’s for dinner”? Before I respond I may say something like, “well, I really like the pasta at DiCastro’s and they have a great selection of beer. They’re also really good at Chicken Marsala, but the Trackside has those great bread knots and it’s not too far away. We haven’t seen Lisa in a while”.

“Who is Lisa?”, he asks, with a slight hint of annoyance in his voice.

I look at him in disbelief, “The owner of DiCastro’s, of course”.

You’d think that after almost 28 years he’d be able to keep up with my multi-threaded approach to thinking a problem, but as we get older my multi-threadedness is a bit more scattered and he isn’t the fountain of patience he used to be.

We still make it work.

I try to rail in my ever charging trains of thought but as I get older I simply do not have the bandwidth to keep the herd of cats in my head in the same litter box. I just go with it now, knowing very well that I will come to a sane outcome that probably only I can understand and hope to relay coherently to the rest of the family.

And this is why I’m looking into Focus and Productivity webinar type things on the Internet in this here New Year.

Wish us all luck.

Today in the Sonoran Desert the wind is whipping at 20+ knots with gusts as high as 30 knots. I can hear rain hitting the side of the house with regular reliability and there is a hard freeze warning in effect for tonight and tomorrow night. The National Weather Service is declaring we may hit the record low of 24F.

I guess we needed to get a reminder of a North American winter or something.

I’ve been busying myself in the house with geek projects. I’m playing around with my old ThinkPad T460s, tweaking Pop!_OS on my desktop, and communicating with friends and family via iMessage on my MacBook Air.

Why have one computer when you can swivel between a few of them.

I’m a little short on patience today. I’m finding that as I get older I’m getting a little short of patience on a regular basis. I need to keep that in mind as I work on my personal goals for 2024.

I probably want a nap because of the rain. I think I’ll drink a cup of coffee and go read a book or something.

I didn’t get to see the sunset last night, but the after glow that hung around for a long while was impressive. My iPhone camera didn’t capture the colors the way I wanted it to. It was a good moment.