Ponderings and Musings

What in the fresh hell is this idiocy in ad algorithms from YouTube? I used to pay for premium service on YouTube so that I could avoid ads, but with most of the channels I subscribe to now showing shorts (less than 60 second videos) instead of real content, I’m rapidly losing interest in the platform.

But this ad? I sure fire way to push me off all the way.

Yeah, it was edgy back in 1989 when Kiss 108 in Boston ran an on Saturday nights that started with, “Are you gay? Does gay life intrigue you?” and proceeded to give you a 900 number to chat with someone about being gay. But in 2023, this is incredibly offensive.

This photo popped up in my history today. I love it.

This is one of my favorite scenes from the entire series of “I Dream of Jeannie”. From season 4, this scene is in “Jeannie and the Top Secret Secret”. Kudos to Sabrina Scharf playing Valerie Thomas, the terrorized passenger sitting next to Major Nelson.

I am on United flight 1417 from Denver to Raleigh-Durham. I’m visiting our friends Jeff and Mark for a few days; working from their home and then hanging out this weekend. Flights were more affordable if I did it this way. My husband said, “go and have a good time”.

This flight is at about 60% capacity. i’m comfortable if just slightly cramped in seat 14A. It’s an economy seat but not a basic economy seat because I don’t do that.

The flight from Tucson to denver was interesting; the mother and young child in my row didn’t speak English and didn’t understand how the seat numbering system works, so I ended up sitting in the aisle, which made me a little cranky. These things happen and I shouldn’t let them bother me but they do. Luckily, the flight was only 90 minutes so it wasn’t awful. I just like being next to the window and things going the way they planned.

This flight to RDU is quiet. I’ll probably take a nap.

My husband picked out some new slip covers for our upstairs couch. They’re quite nice and not plastic.

It started with daydreaming. I was working along this morning, minding my own business and trying to concentrate on the task of the moment when I started thinking about chasing storms. This quickly connected to me wondering how many homes in tornado alley actually have storm cellars like we see in “Twister” or “The Wizard Of Oz”. I did a quick search, intending to find a statistic. Instead, I landed on real estate listings in West Texas for homes with a storm cellar. I started looking at these listings. I then noticed a common decorating theme in all these homes.

They have “messages” everywhere. Inspirational messages. Religious messages. Stencils. Framed nuggets of wisdom. Food cabinets labeled “PANTRY”. I can only assume I have missed out on some sort of Live, Laugh, Love opportunity in our attempts at decorating over the years.

My husband and I picked up a few mid week groceries at the Safeway this evening. While browsing the snack aisle I noticed a classic looking bag of Doritos on the bottom shelf. The taco flavor is my favorite. It took a lot of willpower not to eat the entire bag when we got back home.

It’s been a cloudy, hazy weekend here in the Soronan Desert. We have winter like weather coming up this week, with the snow levels coming down to Tucson city proper by this weekend. There’s also a hard freeze in the forecast. Exciting times.

The predicted snow at this point isn’t a huge deal as it’ll be just a dusting that will probably melt quickly, but I’m sure it’ll still make an impact on the area. If it happens.

It’s been raining a lot for the past 48 hours. I still find the lights of the city to be quite beautiful, even under the clouds.

I enjoy reading. My mom used to joke that once in a while she’d come down to the kitchen while I was eating breakfast and find me reading the phone book because I couldn’t find anything else to read. At 16 years old that was absolutely true. At 54 years old that doesn’t happen because we don’t have a phone book in the house.

Computers and the Internet have kind of thrown my reading habits sideways. I still enjoy reading, and I read a bit before falling asleep every night, though I use the Kindle App on my iPad Mini and I don’t find that experience to be particularly fulfilling. I need to get a Kindle so that I don’t have something with harsh backlighting. I’m convince that mobile devices are straining our eyes far more than books ever did.

With the tendency for Internet experiences to be short spurts of reading material, I’ve found that my already scatter focused mind drifts a bit while I’m reading, much more than it did when I was younger. I found a new approach to placing type on the screen and it’s called “Bionic Reading”. Bionic Reading places emphasis on the leading letters of words, creating a somewhat unnatural pattern in a line of text, which trains your eyes to move across the entire line of text instead of skipping around a little bit. While designed to help the reader comprehend text better, it also helps those with wandering focus to stick to the text instead of looking at the squirrel jumping around outside the window.

Because I’m an elder-Internet user with an old-school blog, I still use RSS feeds to aggregate my reading material of the day. My application of choice to consume this information is Reeder 5, available on iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS. While I don’t pay for an RSS aggregation service (I have my own server doing that job for me), Reeder 5 has built in functionality for your own aggregation lists and more importantly, it has Bionic Reading built in as an option.

As I’m tying this blog entry I’m realizing WordPress may have a Bionic Reading plugin that I can make available here for this blog. That’d be rather nifty.

I often write down bits and pieces of a blog entry throughout the day and then try to formulate the mess into something a little more coherent before winding down and heading to bed. Occasionally the winding up and posting the entry for the day happens in a batch effort on the weekend. Sitting down and making my thoughts a bit more tidy before releasing to the masses for consumption is a bit of a cathartic activity, and it gives me a chance to see where my head was at various points throughout the day.

The pressures at work, which are not really that unusual for a person in my position and management level in a corporation, can sometimes get to me. Balancing the needs of my retired husband, my family back East, my family here in Tucson, and my personal needs can sometimes be overwhelming. As a loner and introvert (even though I can fake extrovert quite well for short amounts of time), I can easily become overwhelmed with too much sensory input. Driving a car in a rural locale, flying an airplane, or sitting at my desk, gathering my thoughts and writing them down through various medium, keeps me sane. As the Internet has opened up the world to the individual user, reading the experiences of others with similar thought processes and challenges is somewhat comforting to me. Even though there are times when I want to be alone, it’s good to know that my hyper focus on one thing and lack of focus on a lot of things is not a unique situation. And this is where technology has been an asset to my life.

In addition to this blog, I have a personal journal that I maintain on a daily basis. I’ve been doing this for a little under a decade and it’s a bit of a hoot to go back and see where my head was at on the same date several years ago. I notice many patterns, and where we’re living or what I”m doing doesn’t seem to make a difference, I still have definite patterns in my thoughts and dreams and struggles and successes.

The key is to keep the patterns moving in a positive direction.