Ponderings and Musings

I went hiking up on Mount Lemmon yesterday, and per established tradition in 2024, I brought along my video equipment in hopes of making another piece of video art.

I was successful in this endeavor.

Earl always previews my videos before I declare the project complete, and he sat down and watched my final draft. He told me it was the best video I had produced thus far.

I tried my best to be my absolute authentic self in this video.

If anything, I want to be inspiring for other people by sharing that which inspires me. If anything, I hope someone, anyone smiled, for whatever reason motivated them to smile. And if you decide to watch the video, I dropped a couple of Easter eggs in the later half that amused me a little bit.

I am reminded of a speech I heard during an episode of “Madam Secretary”, a CBS series that aired too long ago.

What is an even greater threat than nuclear weapons? That which makes the use of them possible: hate. Specifically, the blind hatred one group or nation can have for another. …Nationalism is the existential threat of our time.

Nationalism is not the same as patriotism. It’s a perversion of patriotism. Nationalism promotes the idea that inclusion and diversity represent weakness, that the only way to succeed is to give blind allegiance to the supremacy of one race over all others. Nothing could be less American. Patriotism, on the other hand, is about building each other up and embracing our diversity as the source of our nation’s strength. “We the people” means all the people. America’s heroes didn’t die for race or region. They died for the ideals enshrined in our Constitution. Above all, freedom from tyranny, which requires our unwavering support of a free press; freedom of religion, all religions; the right to vote, and making sure nothing infringes on any of those rights, which belong to us all. Look where isolationism has gotten us in the past. Two world wars. Seventy million dead. Never again can we go back to those dark times when fear and hatred, like a contagion, infected the world.

…It is why we must never lose sight of our common humanity, our common values, and our common decency. I was reminded recently of our nation’s founding motto, E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. Thirteen disparate colonies became one country. One people. And today, we call on all Americans and people everywhere to reject the scourge of nationalism. Because governments can’t legislate tolerance or eradicate hate. That’s why each one of us has to find the beauty in our differences instead of the fear. Listen instead of reacting. Reach out instead of recoiling. It’s up to us. All of us.

Madam Secretary, “E Pluribus Unum”, Season 5 Episode 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0StuIUQmZGU

There’s thunder in the distance as I type this blog entry. This makes me very happy.

Earl and I just completed lunch and I’m taking a few moments in the gazebo to relax, write a blog entry, and ponder life. I have been shrinking my lunch hour for the past several months. Earl pointed this out to me while we were conversing during our road trip to Flagstaff last weekend. He indicated that I haven’t been taking enough time for myself and that was contributing to my feeling of burnout.

I felt really burned out going into last weekend. This week has been a complete 180 from my feelings last week. And that’s a wonderful feeling.

One of the things that I never considered when the five of us decided to move together to Tucson back in 2021 is the amount of bandwidth it would take my brain to process all the people around me on a continuous basis. When it was just Earl and me living together it was easy for me. Juggling the wants, needs, thoughts, feelings, impulses, and more of four other adults, two dogs, and a cat, well, that can drain my battery at times.

Growing up, if I started to feel overwhelmed by constant interaction I had an out. I could go down in the basement, I could go explore the woods behind my parents’ home, or I could listen to music off my Yorx Record Player. It was usually a Human League record.

With work getting intense lately, worry about the upcoming U.S. elections, juggling the family’s needs, and trying way too hard to be creative through my YouTube channel, my batteries were about depleted. Honestly, I had no juice left. Last week I was completely on low-power mode. Like my iPhone 13 Pro these days, I was running hot and sluggish.

Why do I share these things on this blog? No idea. Well, I guess it’s honesty. There are WAY too many people on the Internet that portray a character through the online activities. For me, life in general is a game ripe for many portrayals. Writing about my internal wiring once in a while keeps me honest.

What you see, right here, is what you get.

Please carve 30 minutes out of your week this week and watch this explanation of The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025”.

Your vote for Trump is a vote for my husband and me to not only not be married, but for us to basically not exist in society anymore. And that’s just one small part of a incredibly dystopian mess of a plan.

I’ll repeat: your vote for Trump is a vote for Project 2025. Your vote for Trump is a vote for this dystopian nightmare.

And as an added bonus, for any rural folks stopping by, Project 2025 also ends government funding for crop insurance and ends all subsidies for American farmers.

Remember, like driving, voting will get you somewhere.

D for forward

R for backward

N for not moving anywhere

I spotted this spelling mistake as soon as I saw this sign in Flagstaff. It’s not “Humphery St”, it’s “Humphreys St”, at least according to the U.S. Postal Service.

The sign that was there in 2011 (as seen in this Google Maps snapshot) is closer, at least displaying “Humphrey St”

As a sanity check, I checked further downstream on Google Maps and discovered that the street is indeed “Humphreys St”.

When we were in Flagstaff this weekend I spotted some religious-themed candles for some of the Gay Saints.

I also found a display where I had a hard time making a decision.

We also may have gone to a few places for some adult beverages and a bite to eat.

I’m sitting outside after having a nice lunch with my husband. The breezes are pleasant, and it’s mid August, so the temperature is currently around 100ºF with the humidity on the low side. I’m used to this desert weather now. Everything is fine as long as I’m not in the sun.

Several of the folks I follow via my “Resurgence” blog roll (see the sidebar) have paused their social media activity and are concentrating on just their blogs. I like this. At times my social media feeds are filled with way too many opinions and nearly not enough facts. It’s good to step away from the noise from time to time. It’s not like pandemic times when we didn’t have a choice for interaction with other people.

Earl and I are planning a little road trip this weekend that involves my most strenuous hike to date. If I reach the heights I hope to reach it’ll be me hiking at my highest elevation thus far. I’m looking forward to the challenge.

This guy bonked himself on Mike’s office window yesterday, but sorted himself out and got himself together while sitting in the palm tree adjacent to the window. He’s was only about seven inches tall.

Another reason for sitting outside is because I enjoy the fresh air, regardless of how warm or hot that air is. Air conditioning is a wonderful thing and a necessity in the desert, but sometimes I just want to feel Mother Nature’s natural breezes.

I find it refreshing.

Please view and heed. You don’t want to be talking to a pop tart in public.

I think I’ve written about this before but I’m too lazy to go through 23 years of blog entries to see if I have actually put these thoughts to paper, so to speak.

I recently had a birthday reminder pop up in Facebook and the face associated with the reminder was unfamiliar. I then realized it was a co-worker from a job I had 14 years ago. We haven’t spoken or interacted in any way, including on Facebook, since I left that company back in 2015.

I have no idea why we are maintaining a connection on Facebook. So I removed them from my friends list.

Social media, and in particular Facebook, allows us to make electronic connections easily, sometimes judiciously, and often frivolously. Here’s ago I was at a going away party of a friend in Chicago and I met one of their friends, who promptly friended me on Facebook. He seems nice enough. Our paths are most likely never going to cross again. I have no idea why we are friends on Facebook, as we don’t have common interests. He had some laughs, good conversation, and a couple of beers during this one event and then we moved on. In the pre-social media days, this would have been a fond memory and nothing more, but now there’s this electronic connection and I felt a couple of pangs of guilt as my mouse pointer hovered over the “unfriend” link. I don’t want to tarnish a happy memory that I can vividly remember, and admittedly, they may or may not remember, by severing a connection that wouldn’t have lingered had it not been for Facebook.

As we navigate our way through this chaos through life, there are folks that are meant to be in our lives for a long time and folks that are meant to be in our lives for just a moment. I truly believe this is how we are wired and this is how this whole existence thing is suppose to work. We have memories of folks that we have crossed paths with, albeit good or bad memories, and then we move on. Building a connection through Facebook, and to a lesser extent, other social media platforms, artificially extends a connection that was probably not meant to be. I believe our minds and/or genetic makeup in general is not designed to handle all these extra connections.

Hence, just more ammo for the constantly growing ball of chaos.

I’m on another quest of sorts to clean up some of the chaos in my life, and a good chunk of this extends around technology, and in particular, extraneous connections. “Unfriending” is such a harsh term that evokes an emotion it shouldn’t have the right to evoke. But social media is engineered to tug at the emotions a lot so that you forge a dependence on the dopamine, which in turn helps build a data profile for profit purposes. Selling data is first and foremost the purpose of social media.

Don’t let your happy memories linger beyond their intended expiration date just to become a profit opportunity for a corporate conglomerate.

“We had a nice time together, it’s time to move on, have a pleasant and happy life.”