Ponderings and Musings

As I get older I realize that I have less bandwidth when it comes to patience with dealing with people. I don’t know if the average IQ is really plummeting (I suppose it is) or if people goes as brain dead on the Internet as they do when they step foot in an airport, but sometimes I really want to shake people by the shoulders and say to them, “Are you in there?”

I have the note shown above sitting under my work monitor as a constant reminder that I shouldn’t go into “meltdown mode” whenever possible. I despise the word “trigger” when it comes to human behavior, mostly because it’s a thoroughly overused word, but I do know that blatant willful ignorance is a “trigger” for me. It’s probably a trigger for most people, other folks just handle it better than me. I blame this on the American tendency to giving standing ovations to even the most mediocre of performances just so everyone involved feels good.

Maybe I’m just becoming a cranky old man. I’m actually OK with that.

This week has turned out to be a bit of a downer across the board for me, as it seems like one of those weeks where everything involves swimming against the current. The key is to stay away from the fishing lines. My mood has not been good and I’m hoping to regain my center by the end of the week, so I can enjoy the weekend with the family.

Maybe I just need a good dose of sunshine and fresh air, and step away from my Internet connected devices for a while.

As an American that went through elementary school in the 1970s, I learned that when one assumes the role of pedestrian on an American roadway, you walk facing traffic. So, in our U.S. ways, that’s the left side of the road.

It no longer seems to be a common theme amongst some folks here in our little development.

Early morning walks are a popular pastime here at Rancho Cancion and quite often I’ll see several of our neighbors out for a walk when I’m out for a stroll. The timing gets earlier as the sun gets hotter here in the Sonoran Desert, so right now folks are generally walking before 10:00 AM.

Most people walk as I described, facing traffic, along the left side of the road. I’ve noticed some of the younger folks (that have properly stayed off my lawn) walk on the right, or wrong, side of the road. Because I generally avoid people whenever possible, I cross the road so we don’t end up meeting face to face. That’s just not my jam.

Then we have the older neighbor who uses walking sticks. She generally walks on the right, or wrong, side of the road but today she decided to really keep me guessing and walked down the middle of the street.

I had to double my cadence so I could get around that chaos quickly. It boosted up my calorie burn for the stroll.

After spending several months on my own Mastodon instance, I’ve decided to move to one of the larger servers. This particular Mastodon instance has 17K users and is focused on tech. I like the community, know several of the folks over there and am looking forward to more robust interactions on this newish platform.

I’m am now on hachyderm.io. Please feel free to follow me there.

As I do research for my storm chasing trip coming up next month, I’m getting enthralled with videos like this one about The Great Plains. It’s such a fascinating area to me.

I have no idea why this clip crossed my mind today, but here we go. Let’s watch Charo perform “The Love Boat”. I don’t know why they’re in the lobby of a Holiday Inn.

When I was younger I noticed when folks said “life gets better as you get older”. They were absolutely correct. I’m comfortable with who I am and the way I look and the way I feel. Sure, the body doesn’t do everything it used to do (a bike ride would probably kill my knees right now) but I’m in a great place and right where I should be.

I always enjoy the small splashes of color around us here in our desert home. These are little reminders of all the good things that happen around us.

It’s kind of weird to think I have favorite photos that accurately represent who I feel I am on the inside. However, this selfie from 2009 captures my essence of the timeframe, and seeing this photo today makes me smile.

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”.