Ponderings and Musings

Tomorrow we are scheduled for a tour of the house. I’m really looking forward to seeing the house in person for the first time; all interactions have been with the real estate agent via photos and video tours. I need to “feel” the house. I am confident that we’ll love it and we already have a contract on it, but tomorrow is inspection and tour day and after that is complete things will be full steam ahead.

Since we don’t have the code to the gate, we drove around the area best we could to get a sense of the lay of the land. We like it. We actually love it. We are minutes from Saguaro National Park East and Mt. Lemmon. The landscape is beautiful and just what I’ve always wanted for a desert home.

Three of the five of us are here; Chris flew into Tucson International Airport and we picked him up at lunch time. As an experienced pilot that can work iPhone applications, I was able to snap a photo of his arrival

We toured another home along the Rillito River. It was quite a nice home but not quite what we’re looking for. Interestingly, the house has an elevator that reminded me of something from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Augustus must stay away from the chocolates if he moves into this house.

I could never bring myself to get inside that tube. I’ll fly an airplane miles above the earth but I do not enjoy elevators.

We took a drive a bit up Mt. Lemmon today just to enjoy some desert fun in the nice weather.

Our stay here in Tucson is too short and with pandemic restrictions it’s not like we should be overly sociable at this time. However, when we move here in a month or two I’ll look forward to meeting up with folks that we’ve chatted with over the intertubes over the past decade or two.

I looked back on my blog entries here and realized that back in May 2006 I blogged about the fact that I’ve always wanted to live in the desert. It’s quite fun that we’re able to make that dream come true 15 years later.

I’ve been working through cleaning up my online presence and decided to tackle Tumblr today. Surprisingly, I had more than a dozen Tumblr accounts under various email addresses. I’ve spent the last hour cleaning all of that up. Do people still use Tumblr?

Following the Tumblr links back to my blog and then following comment links brought me to a couple of different LiveJournal blogs that are still active! This is exciting as I didn’t know LiveJournal was still around. I must catch up.

One of the things I found was a feed pulled from my original Instagram account, which contains photos that never made it to MobileMe back in the day. At the time I did not have an iPhone; between my original iPhone and my iPhone 3G I was working in a more rural part of Upstate New York. This area did not have AT&T 3G service at the time, so I had moved the family to Verizon. The iPhone 3G was not initially available on Verizon, so we all had the original Motorola Droid phones on Verizon. They worked well for what they were. Here’s a blog entry about the experience from back then. I’m happy we moved back to the iPhone.

It’s interesting to read about what I had to say about the original iPad and my state of mind 10 years ago. In some ways I may have grown older but am I wiser? Probably. I’ve accomplished a lot in these past 10 years and realizing this makes me feel better about my place in the world. I’m happy with the career choices I’ve made along the way and I enjoy my job much more than the position I had 10 years ago.

While I’m hesitant to say 2021 will be better than 2020 for the world in general, I am determined to make sure 2021 is better for my family than it was in 2020.

I’m slowly getting used to my new reading glasses. Spending 10 or more hours in front of a computer for work and then various recreational activities on my technological devices have taken its toll on my eyes; however, I was always destined to need glasses sooner or later. All of my relatives wear glasses; I’m lucky I made it this far with only needing occasional glasses.

The new frames are lightweight and quite comfortable to wear. I’m embracing my middle age. I probably need to drop a few more Dad jokes to complete the experience.

I grew up in a small town. I actually grew up outside of a small hamlet outside of a small town. To many in our school, we lived on the “other” side of the Interstate but on the right side of the tracks. Political maneuvering a small school district is interesting. Even though we live in a major city, I never forget where I came from an I am always interested in driving through small towns on our road trips.

Many of the towns and villages in Illinois are struggling. Those of a appreciable size have a Walmart and maybe a couple of chain convenience stores or supermarkets on the outskirts, but the “downtown” area or business districts are often seemingly forgotten. There might be a pizza place, a barbershop, and maybe a diner. Often there are a couple of bars and particularly in Illinois, gaming rooms where folks can try to win their millions at video lottery terminals.

All of these things have been closed during the pandemic.

Times were tough for these small towns before COVID-19 came to town; isolation and mandatory closing of businesses have just made it worse. These areas have been in a steady decline for decades and many of their citizens have been clamoring for something to change for a long while. I’m sure some feel forgotten. In that regard I get why rural communities leaned toward Trump; he talked about “draining the swamp” and “the American farmer” and the like and they bought into his shtick. They feel left behind by the D.C. establishment and they were promised something different. It’s unfortunate that Trump was just using them for votes to stroke his own ego.

Will Main Street in Anytown, U.S.A. return to its former glory? Gosh, that would be nice. There’s something to be said for a smaller, closer-knit community that takes care of one another. I’m probably a bit pollyanna in my thinking, but I hope that big box stores and the like will eventually dissipate in favor of local and smaller establishments again. I would love to see mom and pop shops augment the growing Internet experience, instead of being wiped out by some large conglomerate that couldn’t care less about the small town bypassed by the Interstate.

In 2021 we should all strive to listen better. The folks in the city should listen to the folks in the country and vice versa. I bet there’s a lot we can learn along the way.

I’m not a fan of hypey headlines. Social media is notorious for this tactic, with idiotic blasts such “You won’t believe who did this!!!” or “The Sad and Empty Life of Adolf Hitler!!!”. It’s not a social media appropriate headline unless someone’s mouth is agape and there’s an unreasonable number of exclamation points or question marks.

I’ve been on a crusade to clean up my various news reader and video watching subscription lists, and am deleting any YouTube content creator that uses this banal approach to getting attention to their featured videos. If a “tech expert” needs to resort to “Ugh!” in huge letters or has to assemble an image with hair flying around, expressions of disbelief, and floating laptops placed at jaunty angles, I’ve got better things to do than watch whatever they’re shilling to make YouTube cash.

They can stay off my lawn.

I’m all for content creators sharing their creations, or presenting information, or relaying their point of view on a subject. I’m also a proponent of money being made with these endeavors. What I don’t enjoy are these schoolyard tactics to grab my attention and bribe me to click. I’m not falling for it. I didn’t call the Psychic Friends Network when Dionne Warwick started flashing her toothy smile for the service in the late 1980s and I’m not falling for these goofy belches of exclamation points, garish fonts, loud colors, or UNBELIEVABLE images. It’s not my jam.

So stay off my lawn.

When did we decide as a society to start putting television *everywhere*. I mean, I grew up with a television in the family room and the living room. The family room television was always on. Grandma and Grandpa City had a small black and white in the kitchen to supplement the color set in the living room. The black and white television was used for the news during the supper hour. Farmers Sam and Irma had a television in their kitchen mounted in a special cabinet above the refrigerator. Grandma and Grandpa Country had a Zenith in the living room and a smaller Zenith in the bedroom. Both had antennas with a rotor on it. Face it northwest to pull in Canada.

But when did we decide that we needed a television in every convenience store, on every fuel pump, in cash register displays, and in every inch of an airport terminal?

My husband and I stopped at a convenience store for varying needs during a ride over the weekend. I was instantly thrown into a foul mood because the television was blaring weird conspiracy theories about the recent Domestic Terrorist attacks on the Capitol Building. I looked around and no one was watching but wow, was that television loud. I then filled the tank in our Jeep Cherokee as the gas pump screamed entertainment news from a service called Cheddar. The fact that we now have 7-inch full color display screens on a gas pump to scream television at someone with access to highly flammable liquid just seems weird to me.

I think this moved happened right after 9/11. Before then, one of our favorite haunts was a decent restaurant with good food. After 9/11 it still was a decent restaurant with good food, but televisions were installed all over the place and they were tuned to CNN. Ever since then I’ve noticed diners now have TVs installed in the corners of the dining rooms, supermarkets have televisions talking at your while you’re at the checkouts, and the aforementioned gas pumps no longer let you put a tiger in your tank in peace.

It’s annoying.

A while back I included in a Yelp review of a Chicagoland diner the fact that their televisions were tuned to Fox News and I found it annoying. When Sean Hannity is interrupting my dinerlicious French Onion Soup, we have a problem. I wouldn’t even put up with Rachel Maddow interrupting a culinary experience. It’s completely unnecessary.

Televisions all over the place may have made sense in the days after 9/11 but before the proliferation of smartphones. They were probably put up there to keep people informed in the event of something happening after but in the spirit of 9/11. But with everyone having a smartphone in their pocket, we are instantly notified of way too much information today. Tweets, EAS notifications, Facebook, and all the news service apps that blast out “breaking news” every 10 minutes notify everyone all the time. If something big happens again, and believe me, there’s a shoe waiting to drop on that, we’ll all know about it when everyone’s phone starts reacting at once and we all notice the commotion. The thing is, we’ll get that information but the avenue we have chosen, instead of the news channel that’s being force fed to us through installed televisions in every nook and cranny of our existence.

What’s next? News updates over the new electronic road signs popping up on our expressways? Wow I hope not.

And it’s 5:20 AM and I’m sitting in the living room, unable to sleep for the past 45 minutes or so. After watching the events of yesterday (wow, that was quite a week!), I’m still shaking my head wondering what the hell has happened to this country. I openly wept in bed the day after Election Day in 2016 because I knew Trump’s election as president was one of the most dangerous, reckless, and stupid acts the citizens of this country had ever committed. There is no good in that man. And yet, a little less than half of the population thought he did just fine with hundreds of Americans dead from a preventable pandemic, and the crushing of any sense of law and order or decorum or anything remotely resembling intelligence in Washington, D.C.

I have no idea if that last sentence made sense as I can barely see what I’m typing in the dark, but you get my drift.

My dreams have been populated with jumbled scenes mixed with historical context and augmented by memories from my childhood. My brain is yelling at me to “turn it off” but I can’t. At 52 years old I guess I still care too much about my fellow man. Just as I used to have nightmares about nuclear annihilation when I was a teenager in the 80s, my conscience is populated with the concern of what this nation has become.

For a long time I have refrained from going on about politics and talked about anything else. Silence is not the answer. Too many people are being silent on topics and subjects that need to be discussed. The problem is the last four years have been so utterly draining for anyone with any sense of decency for their fellow citizens, or anyone with an IQ higher than the speed limit, that I’ve completely run out of steam for debate.

Watching the attack on the Capitol Building yesterday ignited a fire in me again. As I watched the Senate proceedings after control of the building was regained, my eyes misted up as I saw American Democracy in action.

Our Democracy is not a reality game show, to be won by the strongest “team” nor is it scored like a football or basketball game. I know the cable news channels like to announce scores like Joe Biden just made a lay up or Trump just made fumbled the ball, but despite the hysterics of pundits and commentators and “Magic board” operators, poll results are just the results of math equations that have already been completed.

So what does this have to do with sleep? Say what you will about 2020, but at least I was able to get sleep then. In 2021 sleep seems to be a luxury that I currently can not afford. Even as lethargic as I feel right now from a lack of sleep, I still care about this success of this country, this “Greatest Experiment”.

Hopefully I’ll be awake long enough to see the latest outcome.

Ah, sleep. The older we get, the more we want it but the less we get it. It’s 5:45 a.m. and I’ve been awake for about an hour. My husband has roamed the bedroom and rest of the condo on and off since I went to bed around 10:00 p.m. It’s what he does. I honestly don’t know how much sleep I got last night. I’d guess around six-ish hours but it wasn’t the quality sleep I’d normally enjoy. I feel rested but I’m going to need a nap during the day. Lunch hour naps are always fun. When I worked in an office I used to find a parking lot near a mall or shopping center and nap in my Jeep. Nowadays I nap on the couch after a quick bite to eat.

There’s an art to napping: too little and it’s a wasted effort, too long and you’re groggy for the rest of the day. Twenty minutes is my sweet spot. If I can get 20 minutes of nap time in around noon I’m golden for the latter half of the work day.

Part of the fun of living in a major city is the sounds of the city at night. Normally if one were to step out on the balcony they’d just hear the whine of civilization: heating units cycling on and off, an emergency siren off in the distance, a helicopter looking for news. But life starts early in the big city. The ‘L’ starts its morning runs around 4:40 a.m. Props to whoever thought running metal wheels on a metal track was a grand idea. The garbage trucks start banging the dumpsters around 5:30 a.m. The neighbors get restless around 4:00 a.m.

I’m going to go for a walk in a few minutes to officially get my day going. At least, I think I’m going to go for a walk. My eyes are starting to feel droopy as I type this blog entry. Perhaps I’ll take that midday nap early and then rearrange my walking and other exercise schedule to accommodate my mood and energy level.

It’s a new year and perhaps a good time to stop being so rigid with my schedule and start going with the flow.