Ponderings and Musings

We recently signed up for Sirius/XM Radio again in the car. We swore we weren’t going to do this ever again, but Sirius/XM gave it to us for free for 90 days and then offered us a 75% discount on the first year after that.

I really like my “Yacht Rock” radio.

Local radio isn’t really that compelling here in Southern Arizona. The stations are alright but there is nothing particularly outstanding or local about them. It’s really a shame; back in my radio days each station had its own personality that reflected the vibe of the area it served. Like so many things in the United States, radio gave way to corporate greed and everything is a cookie cutter presentation from a corporate office somewhere outside of the listening area. Only the major markets have local radio stations; medium and smaller markets are an afterthought.

At least the music stations on Sirius/XM don’t have commercials.

With the subscription we can listen on our devices, so I’ve been enjoying Yacht Rock during my relatively meeting-free Friday.

I mentioned the other day that I had was going through old blog entries and noticed a bunch of photos missing. The photos weren’t really missing, it was just that the JetPack plugin (a service I paid for, mind you) was doing something to the images and keeping them from showing. It was also slowing down the performance of the blog. A lot. I’m much happier without the JetPack service activated. Plus, I’ll save a little bit of money.

One of the harder things about reading old blog entries is seeing a difference in exuberance levels between then (usually before 2016 or so) and today. Yes, I purposely picked 2016 because, as well know, the United States changed a lot when Trump won the Presidential election in November of that year. In my opinion, the country has been in a steady tail spin since that day and things only got marginally better once Trump was out of office. The seeds of destruction were well planted during the Trump years, throughout government, and through the populace.

It’s rather depressing.

I don’t like writing about depressing things. I try to find the happy where I gaze and generally I can find it, but since the Trump years it feels like there’s been less happy to be found. Now, I don’t completely blame the Trump years for all of this, because it coincides with a lot of other things, including the explosion of social media, the general attitude shift to one of “less trust” throughout society, and the general tendency for folks to fear science and reason in favor of opinion and superstition.

Ironically, a blog post I wrote in October 2013 talks about me finding little joy in Facebook. Twitter wasn’t completely off the rails back then, but Facebook was being Facebook and I found that depressing. Here it is a decade later and I could write a blog entry today that would probably go word for word with what I wrote 10 years ago on the subject. That’s a long rut.

I will continue to try to find the happy as I look over this world. I will focus on the pleasant. But I will also be a realist. It’s important to keep it real.

But oh, to have that pre-2016 feeling of optimism again.

I noticed a lot of broken images in posts from days gone by and found the issue was with an add-on to WordPress called JetPack. I’ve never really been a fan of this add-on, so I removed it. Things should still run as intended. If you see something broken, please let me know.

And here’s what I look like right now.

“Temptation Eyes” by The Grass Roots is one of my favorite songs from the early ’70s. Here’s a live(-ish) version from The Ed Sullivan Show.

There’s a reason I still find mustaches and sideburns hot.

As we were traveling over the weekend I noticed a continued trend with folks working in the service industry: the younger people working jobs as cashiers, etc. really like wearing AirPods (or something similar) all the time.

Back when Walkmans were all the rage in the late ‘80s and we had a corded pair of headphones attached to a portable cassette deck on our hip it was kind of fun to listen to music while out for a walk or something. I once tried to wear my Walkman at work while writing code, but I missed one phone call from a colleague (because I couldn’t hear the phone ringing) and I was scolded for my inattentiveness.

I didn’t wear the Walkman at work again.

There are times when I need to wear headphones at work these days to drown out the noise of the landscapers working in the yard or something that’s distracting me from doing my best work, but for the most part I feel to disconnected from the world around me when I tune out my surroundings. One of my strongest beliefs is everyone and anyone should always be aware of their surroundings; it makes the world much better when everyone knows what’s going on in their immediate vicinity, but too many people bumble and stumble through life, blissfully unaware of the safe that’s about to crush them on a sidewalk or something.

When I’m at Target and the person directing folks to the self-serve checkout lanes and their wearing AirPods I wonder why they’re even employed. I have enough IQ digits to figure out the green light means the register is available and the red light means it’s occupied. I don’t need a tuned out teenager telling me to go when the light is green. I’m aware of my surroundings. If the director is Target’s way of keeping a human presence at the self serve registers so they don’t feel bad about eliminating jobs, I’m not buying it. I don’t even know if the person doing the directing can hear what I’m saying so I purposely mumble and smile.

Don’t get me started on someone wanting to check my receipt; I always refuse, opting to just wave the receipt in the air.

I’m starting to go on a tangent and I feel my blood pressure rising a bit so I’ll stop the tangent right here. Suffice it say, there’s a lot of world around us to take in. I don’t get the appeal of replacing the world for music or podcasts or whatever while you’re working with the public. It just doesn’t make sense to me.

And it probably never will.

Maybe I should change the title of this blog to “Get off my lawn”.

I stumbled across this interview with Agnes Moorehead during the fourth season of “Bewitched”. I’ve heard she was an interesting woman; here she’s very frank on various Hollywood subjects of conversation.

I would have enjoyed meeting her in person. I really admire her work ethic.

Earl was enjoying the large wall of screens in the Sportsbook area of Circa Casino here in Las Vegas. He’s always wanted to multiple TVs stacked upon one another so he can watch several football games at once. This 75 foot by 15 foot display takes all of this to the next level.

Twelve years ago today was our legal wedding ceremony. 27 years ago today I got down on my knee in the Adirondacks and proposed to Earl, telling him I wanted to live with him the rest of my life. I’ve been with the man nearly half of my life and it is still perfection.

I’ve had a few people ask me over the years about the “secret of our marriage”. The secret is that it’s our marriage. Every marriage is different; I couldn’t prescribe a path for someone else’s marriage anymore than they could prescribe a path for ours. If there is a secret in there, it’s that 27 years ago, when I proposed, we both promised that divorce (or breaking up before the legal days) was never an option. Never. We wanted to be with each other for the rest of our lives and no matter what, we’d figure it out.

27 years later, it just is. If a rough patch comes along, we figure it out. That’s what we do.

To this day I still fall in love with my husband on a daily basis.

Looking at this building near the Las Vegas Strip, I can’t help but notice that this building looks a hell of a lot better than the Trump building in Chicago. If the design of a building ever screamed the personality of a person, it’s the Trump buildings spread around the country. I’m surprised Trump favors an orange spray for his tan instead of something leaning a little more golden.

I posted this photo on Instagram without comment. One person liked it and a few others added some pukey emojis. I decided to delete the photograph. I’m not in the mood for controversy.

Before Trump won the election in 2016 I would have considered walking into the Trump building here in Las Vegas just to see what it’s about. Earl and I toured the ground floor of his building in Manhattan years ago; it was very golden. I know Trump Hotels cater to the rich, rich crowd; I’m always curious as to what that experience is like. I doubt I’ll visit this building during our weekend here in Las Vegas, though. I’m not that curious.

We are in Las Vegas for a long weekend. The drive across the desert was pleasant today, though there was some slow going around Wickenburg, Arizona due to construction. I mentioned to Earl that it’s still weird to me that there was never a direct Interstate connection between Phoenix and Las Vegas built into the system back in the ’50s when they were planning this sort of thing. He reminded me the desert cities were much smaller back then. Signs along US Route 93 remind us it’s part of the “Future Interstate 11 Corridor”, but I doubt that’ll be finished my lifetime. There’s not much between Wickenburg and Kingman; but the drive is pleasant.

We are settled in at the Downtown Grand for a long weekend. We don’t have a lot in the way of plans. I can amuse myself just by people watching. I love doing this. We’ll probably gamble a little.

Maybe we’ll win a lot.