Ponderings and Musings

I try to walk every day (when the weather cooperates). I’m not walking nearly as much as I did when we lived in Chicago, and during the desert summer it’s best to walk late in the evening around sunset, but I still try to get at least three miles in a day. As the weather cools down I’ll start riding my bike again.

I’m not pleased with my weight at the moment and walking does not seem to be helping the situation. I think I live with too many good cooks. I need to start eating in “Leave It To Beaver” portions. I also need to know when to ask to be excused from the table.

I was looking at myself in the mirror, getting ready for the day. The sun was coming in the large bathroom window and causing the gray hair in its typical male pattern baldness to glisten just a bit. After shaving my head for over two decades I’ve started just keeping it close cropped to a very, very short buzz. No comb over for me, but I’ve earned the gray and I should just let it do it’s thing. Subtly.

We cancelled our Sirius/XM radio subscription a couple of weeks ago and I’ve started listening to the local radio stations here in Tucson. They’re not bad, but they’re pretty cookie cutter, like most contemporary radio stations across the United States. The programming is bland, boring, and predictable. As a guy that used to work in radio I know there’s a lot more to the history of pop music in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s than what’s played on commercial radio stations today. And since we don’t have Yacht Rock Radio from Sirius/XM anymore, I was happy to find I Heart Radio’s equivalent available in Apple Music.

So to go with the gray buzzed hair on the sides and back of my head, I’m listening to Yacht Rock Radio again. To complete the look I’ve been wearing my dock siders in casual situations.

Middle age rocks.

Back in the mid 1990s I was working for a small company. The younger son of the owner of the company had just joined the workforce and during a lunch break mentioned that he was happy our Kmart was open, since it was the only Kmart left in the nation.

Never mind there was a Kmart having a grand re-opening about 15 miles away because it had been dubbed a “Big K” during that phase of idiocy the Kmart Corporation engaged in during that era.

Since the son didn’t really travel outside of the small city, he was operating on limited information, but because of his overwhelming confidence, we spoke with such authority that he’d probably try to sell a surf board to an Eskimo.

It comes as little surprise that I recently ran across one of his comments to a post from a mutual acquaintance on Facebook back in the early days of the pandemic and he was using that confidence to push the whole “this is a plot from China” dialog. I made sure to sever ties with anyone that was part of that conversation.

I got to thinking about this today because there’s so. many. experts. now on the internet that are experts about everything. Twitter is especially notorious for this; tech guru Xeni Jardin often tweets things like, “hello to our newly minted experts on FBI masters” or “hello to our newly minted experts on solar panels in the dark” and she’s absolutely right. Everyone gets a little Google going and they think they know it all.

By the way, there’s a handful of Kmart stores still open across the country, and it’s been well over 20 years since this conversation about our local store back in the mid 1990s.

There seems to be a trend of taboo vulnerability if you begin an Internet conversation with “I think…” or “Maybe,…”. Everyone speaks with such authority when they don’t really know what they think they know. Look, when I was young, I might have done this on hundreds of situations, but by my early 20s I had figured out I was not an authority on everything and quite frankly I was humbled by the experience. It’s helped me keep my perspective on the chaos that we call the 21st century.

I have a few Twitter accounts over there in the land of chaotic dialog. I’ve pretty much abandoned the account I consider my “generic account” where I’ll talk about anything and everything, because I don’t really have much to contribute and all the screaming and shouting and use of the caps lock key and the exclamation points and the pearl clutching quite frankly gives me gas and a migraine. I am venturing into my “professional account” again, which focuses on my aviation and day job topics. If I want to shout into the ether about the idiocy of politics or whatever, BevMo! is just down the street and I can drink a beer or something to calm down.

No one is an expert in everything. Not everyone is an expert in something. As I mention in my active Twitter profile, “tweet gently”.

Speak gently. Be humble. Listen. You might live to be an old guy like me.

One of my favorite scenes in the later seasons of “Bewitched” takes place at the beginning of season seven.

During the hiatus between seasons six and seven, much of the “Bewitched” had burned down in a fire. Most everything had to be rebuilt, and to keep production moving, six or so shows were filmed on location in Salem, Mass. When the sets were rebuilt, a couple of teaser episodes were filmed on the new set, and these episodes centered around whether Darrin should accompany Samantha to Salem for the Witches’ Convention. Samantha?s decision enrages High Priestess Hepzibah, who pops in to create chaos for the Stephens.

Hepzibah was played by Jane Connell, a Broadway actress who had played a few other parts on the series over the years and also appeared here and there in television shows of the time. She also played Gooch in the 1974 film version of “Mame” starring Lucille Ball. I’ve always enjoyed the intensity Mrs. Connell uses to portray Hepzibah, and I was surprised to learn that she was only in her mid 40s when she played the role.

I found an interview with Jane Connell from 1985 on YouTube, and she’s definitely a character actress, looking and sounding like none of the roles she played on “Bewitched”. I enjoy these old interviews, and I enjoyed her look into Broadway and her role at the time in the mid 1980s.

Apparently someone made off with the FedEx truck between Carson, Cal. and Phoenix, Ariz. It’s been making that drive since Friday. It’s a six hour drive. All I can imagine is the driver running amok and speeding across the desert, eager to get away from his mundane employment, in an absconded FedEx truck.

I’m old enough to remember when color televisions were considered “special”. At least they were considered special to me because we didn’t have a color television until 1976. I remember the event; the black and white television situated in living room atop of cabinet of some sort stopped working on a Thursday night. I remember being in a panic that I would not be able to see our cartoons on Saturday morning, but Dad went to the Zenith dealer in town and bought a 19-inch color TV and brought it home and we were able to watch ElectraWoman and DynaGirl in glorious color. We watched it on Channel 9, the local ABC affiliate, which at the time was WNYS-TV. The television looked pretty close to this:

Both sets of grandparents had color televisions in the early 1970s. Grandma and Grandpa Country had a Zenith console that sat on the floor that took a minute or so to warm up after turning it on. It looked like this:

I don’t remember Grandma and Grandpa Country getting this television, but I do remember Grandma and Grandpa City getting theirs in 1972 or so. I rode onto the west side of town with Grandpa City and he picked out a television to be delivered to the house. It was an RCA and it had a new feature of the time, turning on immediately when you flipped the switch. It would make a loud electric “hum” sound for a brief moment as the picture snapped into place. The controls were tucked behind a door that pivoted out the entire control panel. It was quite heavy.

A couple of years later Grandma and Grandpa City had cable television installed and I was excited to see shows on WPIX (11 Alive!) and WTBS from Atlanta. That was kind of a badge of honor amongst the geeks in elementary school, having grandparents in the city that had cable. To this day I can remember my grandmother mentioning my uncle had stayed up late “watching a movie on Home Box” (instead of today’s “HBO” we use today).

I sit here watching television with my husband on our new 55-inch Samsung flat panel television that was a third of the price of our previous television purchased 10 years ago. I wonder how the younger folks today would enjoy ElectraWoman and DynaGirl on a 19-inch Zenith.

I was in fifth grade when Olivia Newton-John released “A Little More Love”. I was fascinated by the track, mostly because of the musicality of the tune. The backing vocals are very entrancing to my ears, especially the variations of the title lyric. I used to blast this tune during recess on an ancient record player amidst the chaos of Miss O’Rourke’s fifth grade class in room 209. I’d listen with my friends Joyce and Renae, two of a minority of students in that class that actually had any chance of finishing our primary education.

I was sad to hear of Olivia Newton-John’s passing yesterday. I’ve always enjoyed her music and I liked her performance in that wacky movie “Xanadu”. I have another story about that title song that involves baton twirlers; I’ll save that for another day.

One of my best friends in high school was obsessed with ONJ like a good young gay boy and yesterday his husband shared that he had the opportunity meet her shortly before his passing from cancer. That made me smile; I hope Scott and Olivia get a chance to reminisce about his visit with her now that they’re both on the other side.

Rest In Peace, Olivia Newton-John. May your soaring melodies continue to soar.

Hat tip to keyboard guy with the mustache. I remember him from the ONJ performances on TV in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

I haven’t been out of the house since our return from Anaheim on Monday. I’m still feeling the effects of COVID; I’m doing my best to remain distant from everyone else in the family. I would feel awful if they got sick and so far everyone seems to be maintaining their health.

I’m feeling better than I did yesterday but nowhere near 100%. I haven’t had a fever, I’ve just felt run down and very winded climbing the stairs and basically ambulating around the house. I cough and sneeze a lot.

I would say my recovery is headed in the right direction. And that’s all I can hope for right now.

I like watching old sitcoms. I haven’t watched a lot of “Hazel” in my day. “Hazel” ran for five seasons in the early half of the 1960s, was based on a comic strip of the same name, and starred Shirley Booth in title character. I’ve seen episodes here and there and I watched one on YouTube earlier today. Hazel purposely lost a baking contest so the other woman, a widow, could take her son to the World’s Fair (the grand prize of the baking contest). It had all the charm of early 1960s sitcoms and it made me smile.

I got to poking around to see if I could find out a little bit more about Shirley Booth and I came across this interview with Dick Cavett. It took place in 1971, so Shirley was around 73 years old at the time. I found her to be a delight, so pleasant.

As I get older I tend to appreciate these interviews from days gone by more and more.

Yesterday morning, waking up at Disney’s Paradise Pier Hotel and readying ourselves for the ride home across the desert, I felt sniffly. I had a little post nasal drip and a bit of a headache. I took a couple Tylenol and we made our way home for the 450+ miles from Anaheim to Tucson. I went to bed rather early last night.

I didn’t get much sleep.

I woke up this morning feeling more of the same except a little more intense. Having just been away from work for four days, and since I work from home anyways, I dragged myself downstairs to my office and got to work. I took a couple more Tylenol. I checked my temperature as well, and it was within normal range (admittedly, slightly high for me at 98.1 DEG F, I usually clock in around 97 DEG F).

The sniffles have continued and I feel dragged out. On a whim I tested myself for COVID.

Yep, I have COVID again. No one else in the family is sick and Earl tested negative for COVID, so I’m staying away from everyone else. Apparently I didn’t mask up enough or the elevators were too crowded or someone breathed the wrong way on the Pirates of the Caribbean or something.

I don’t feel awful. I don’t feel as bad as the last time I had COVID. But I’m kind of bummed that’s I’m going through this again. I’m thankful for my original vaccine shots and two boosters since. It’s probably helping keep things under control.

The pandemic is not over. I know we like to believe it’s over, but it’s not. Be careful out there, act responsibly, and most importantly, get vaccinated. I’m probably not in the hospital tonight because of my vaccinations. I hope I get better soon.