Ponderings and Musings

I have a love-hate relationship with WordPress, the engine that is running this blog. Love-hate is actually a strong term, it’s more of a like-dislike relationship. I’ve never been in love with the WordPress software, but it does what it needs to do for the most part and I’m fine with that. I like the “plug and play” aspect of the experience, versus building something from scratch that would need constant fiddling. There’s a lot of drama going on in the WordPress community and I’m trying to avoid that as much as I can. I don’t have the bandwidth to follow another train of outrage.

Tuesday is my least favorite day of the week. I seem to be the most out of sorts on Tuesday. On Monday I stumble (usually after a most excellent weekend), on Tuesdays I’m out of sorts, but by Wednesday I’m starting to get on my game for the week.

That doesn’t sound terribly productive.

Even when Tuesday is more like a Monday because we were traveling on the actual Monday, it’s still Tuesday and my brain apparently knows it’s Tuesday.

Catching up with work after being off for six workdays is always a hoot and a half.

I’m looking forward to our next vacation. That frivolity is yet to be determined.

I watched a British Airways A380 land in San Francisco from a cramped seat on a United Boeing 737 today.

Flying an A380 as a passenger is on the bucket list. Tell my husband.

I snapped this photo during my morning walk. I’ve been trying to get out and go for a morning walk each day of this portion of our trip and thus far I have been successful. It’s a good feeling and a great way to get the day started.

My husband and I have been walking an average of 25-27K steps while here in San Francisco. I’m hoping it’ll help balance the wonderful meals we’ve been enjoying when I jump on the scale when I get back home.

On this Coming Out Day, this is my Coming Out story. At least the beginning of it. I shared this on Facebook earlier, and it took 10 years of courage to get to the point to share this story as detailed below.

I’ve shared bits and such of this story on the blog before. Here’s the whole thing.

There wasn’t a National Coming Out Day back when I was a teenager. After years of knowing I was different, I realized in the Spring 1985, specifically during a 4th period Ethics class in Room 113 during my junior year to be exact, that I was fooling no one, including myself.

The desks were arranged in a circle. Somehow the class discussion has circled around to homosexuality. A classmate said, “Well let’s face it, John will have a hard time being gainfully employed…His mannerisms and way of speaking are going to prevent serious employers from hiring him”. As others agreed, friends and other classmates joined the discussion. I sat there as stoic as possible. I realized it was time to admit to myself that the gay was very much fact. The class conversation continued around how hard my life would be, AIDS, and whatever other fear based dialog was being bandied about during the Reagan era. The air around me was suffocating.

After a timespan that lasted forever, the PA speaker in the ceiling chimed an A-flat after the square clock clicked to 11:04, signaling the end of fourth period. Everyone went to lunch. I didn’t move. “Do you want to go into my office for a few minutes?”, asked the teacher, a man I admired. I did and I wasn’t in his office before the tears flowed. My mind was moving at an outrageous RPM, I didn’t know what to do, and all of a sudden another teacher was in the office with me. My head was down; she looked me in the eyes, grabbed my hand and at that moment she talked me off the edge. All the conversation around disease and being destined to a life on the streets had completely derailed me. I don’t know if my thoughts in those moments ravaging my head would have come to fruition, but if they had, I would not be typing this today. That teacher, Karen O’Brien, saved my life that day. I will never forget her words. “You are an asset to this world”, “You are important”, “You need to be you” were among many things she said in those moments. She had compassion.

It would be a year before I told anyone else that I knew I was gay. But someone had just said the right things at the right time when I needed to hear it most and I started to feel the beginnings of accepting myself for me.

When it seems the world is upside down and inside out with so much hate directed at people for just being themselves, someone today is going to allow themselves to “know they’re gay” for the first time in their life. This is why we have National Coming Out day.

Be who you are, because you’re beautiful. And to quote a wise woman, “People – I find them fascinating. I haven’t found one yet that didn’t impress me.”

We went on a wine tour in Napa and Sonoma today. The tour started at Fisherman’s Wharf here in San Francisco, stopped at the Golden Gate Bridge, and then took us up into wine country.

It was a lovely day and we met some lovely people during this excursion. We went with “Dylan’s Famous Wine Country Tour” from Dylan’s Tours. Our driver was Jeffrey. He was very knowledgeable about the Bay Area and of wine in general.

Here’s a bunch of photos from our excursion.

My random thoughts of the day:

• No one asked for my random thoughts
• If you’re in the path of Hurricane Milton and chose to evacuate, I hope you were able to do so safely. If you chose to stay behind (which I also think is a valid choice), I hope you’re ready for the adventure of a lifetime.
• No one is going to make your life awesome except for you. Relying on other people, whether it’s financially, politically, socially, isn’t going to work. Only you can find your awesome self.
• The way to make the world a better place is to be authentic in who you are.
• Screaming into an echo chamber on social media accomplishes nothing. Blogging into the world where anyone can read what you’re writing barely makes a dent, and that’s if you’re lucky. Go out and live to your convictions.

This meme is from Mel Robbins. I have followed Mel for many years, having discovered her through a TED talk I watched more than a decade ago.

I find her quite fascinating.

Following her page on Facebook is one of the main reasons I still keep my account alive on that wretched platform.

I find Mel to be quite pragmatic. Her observations on life, and especially what we can do with our lives with just a bit of common sense, is inspiring.

I like to be inspired. Stop being fine. Start being awesome.

Yesterday we drove from Westminster, Colo. to Cheyenne, Wyo. to visit our friends Tim and Gordon. It’s been too long since we last saw them; our last visit was back in 2016. We’ve been friends since 2001 or so, keeping up correspondence over email and chatting from time to time. Tim is an avid clock collector and we met through having collected the same type of clock systems from The Standard Electric Time Company.

In my typical ways, I couldn’t simply drive up Interstate 25, so we took US 287 through Longmont to Fort Collins, and then over county routes to US 85 to make the rest of the trip north.

North of Fort Collins the landscape is very comfortable to me. It’s wide open, with ranches dotting the landscape here and there, and just a whole lot of nothing. I love it in these parts; it’s one of the reasons I enjoy storm chasing so much. I feel like I can just wrap my arms around the big, wide open spaces.

I remarked to my husband my affinity for the area and asked him if he’d ever live in these parts and his answer was a quick, solid “no”. I grew up a little closer to farms than he did, and he likes to be relatively close to urban development, so the answer was not unexpected. Me? I could easily live in the middle of nowhere and not complain about it.

In fact, I’d be immensely happy.