Ponderings and Musings

Having documented nearly half of my life in the blog thing (which is no longer in a trendy thing to do) can be an interesting experience. Every once in a while I’ll talk about something that has happened to us in the past and there will be a disagreement on the specificity of the events. Occasionally I’ll turn to the blog and see if I wrote something about said event. It’s a 50/50 chance as to whether I wrote anything about what we’re talking about, but as I start strolling through blog entries nearing two decades old, I realize that I’m basically the same person I was 20 years ago, albeit with remarks around different stages of technology.

For example, this blog entry from 2005 illustrates how I felt about the increasing use of cell phones in public at the time. Older and wiser(?) me looks back at this entry and notices a level of hysterics that I don’t feel nearly as much these days. Jaded? No, I don’t think so.

I want to know when everyone became so damn important that they had to yak on their cell phone whereever they may be. Are people so full of themselves and so self righteous that they think that they need to be available to their public every single, solitary second of the day? What happened to a little “down time”? The morning commute was your chance to organize yourself for the day, maybe win a contest on the radio and breathe in the sunshine and exhaust fumes. Now everyone is busy making appointments with their metrosexual stylist, yelling at the kids for making toast with the clothes iron and calling ahead for Dunkin Donuts buckets of coffee all via their cell phone.

I think the comparison is similar to what Bea Arthur discussed in one of her last interviews, comparing Maude Findlay from “Maude” to Dorothy Zbornak from “The Golden Girls”.

“They were the same height, but Dorothy would probably tell Maude to calm down a little bit”.

I love that Zenni Optical makes it so easy to order glasses at such an affordable price. I ordered a second pair of my regular glasses but with a slightly larger frame to accommodate my big head.

I’m digging the mid century look these days.

Pilfered from social media.

I often wear my AirPods Pros when I’m out for a walk. I don’t wear them when hiking, but if I’m walking the neighborhood or on a nearby trail I’ll listen to a podcast or some music. I’m also a fan of Apple’s “It’s Time For A Walk” series with their Apple Fitness+ service.

For the past several weeks I’ve been hearing intermittent static and white noise-like sound when I’m firing up these first gen AirPods Pros; Mike suggested it sounded like a manufacturing defect he had read about a while back and suggested I take them to the Apple Store.

I did that today.

After a few minutes with the kind man behind the Genius Bar, he took my pods into the secret room for some tests. A few minutes more and he came out, informing me I now had two new AirPods Pros in my existing case and he gave me instructions on how to charge them and get them paired to my iPhone.

My walk this later this afternoon was a delight and there was absolutely no issues with my AirPods Pros. They were covered under a quality program of Apple’s and they replaced them without request and without hesitation.

This is why I pay the so-called Apple Tax.

The mood at tonight’s hockey game was quite festive. We went a little earlier than usual to enjoy the drinks and food in the area in front of the arena before the game. Being St. Patrick’s Day I thought the area would be a little more populated, but it was comfortable. They didn’t have Guinness, though. They were serving corned beef and cabbage for $15 a bowl, but we didn’t buy it. The line was too long.

There were quite a few folks dressed for the St. Paddy’s holiday. They were also dyeing beer green. I had a Dos Equis Amber which didn’t look very green, though they tried. There was a lot of green in the stands though.

The folks in front of us were fun and dressed festively.

A bit over the top for these days, but still quite funny. Nothing beats “The Golden Girls”.

Lucky and Jinx enjoy playing hide and seek in the great room. When they’re not playing hide and seek they’re running around at full speed with occasional stops to sniff the rear of the little ginger animal (Truman) that occasionally makes an appearance.

The dogs recently celebrated one year of living with us and it has been a year of delight. I enjoy their energy.

I’ve mentioned before that my favorite food is popcorn. I can’t get enough of the stuff and honestly, it’s probably my favorite element of the cinematic experience.

Earl and I went out to dinner the other night. I noticed they had a popcorn dish as an appetizer. Popped in bacon grease, the popped corn was topped with bacon, some other seasonings, and the sprig of green that I fail to identify at this time. I enjoyed the popcorn so much that at the end of the meal, when we decided to splurge for dessert, I stepped away from the traditional dessert menu and ordered another of the popcorn appetizer.

It was delicious.

Maintaining my popcorn mood, I popped myself a bowl of corn for supper last night. Every once in a while we have a “every man for himself” dinner experience and while the others made sandwiches and the like, I opted to eat a bowl of popcorn.

I didn’t include bacon this time around.

My husband and I went for a mini road-trip yesterday. As we were setting out from Tucson around 10:00 a.m., I commented, “it sure looks like it wants to thunderstorm, but it’s the wrong season for that”.

A few hours later, as we roamed around parts north of Phoenix, the sky turned very dark. And before we knew it, we were storm chasing in the Sonoran desert in March. Because when it comes to weather these days, anything goes.

There was some impressive lightning but I was unable to get any shots because I was not planning on chasing storms in the Sonoran Desert in March.

The U.S. Senate has passed the “Sunshine Protection Act”, or something close to that idiotic name, for the second year in a row. Last year the legislation failed to pass the House. I don’t know if that’s the plan this year or not.

The “Sunshine Protection Act” will put the parts of the United States that engage in the idiocy known as “Daylight Saving Time” into permanent status, just like they tried back in the mid 1970s during the Energy Crisis and discovered that kids going to school and adults going to work at 8:30 a.m. when it’s still dark outside is depressing. And dangerous. As I recall, a few kids were mowed over by school buses while waiting on darkened rural roads. But oh, the savings of daylight! It’s remarkable to me that it seems no one remembers that.

We live in Arizona where we don’t mess with the clocks. It’s one of the perks of living in Arizona. I’ve ranted on this blog for decades about how much I despise the practice of Daylight Saving Time, and now that the U.S. Government is going to do something about it (HA) just makes me despise it even more. The government is getting way too involved in way too many things. Clocks are built to indicate a man made construct. Your body is tuned to wake up when it wakes up and go to sleep when it goes to sleep. That’s it.

Stop making life so damn complicated.