I’ve been watching a storm on radar march across the prairie since I woke up 1 1/2 hours ago. I snuck in a 2 1/2 mile walk before my iDevices started warning about lightning strikes nearby. As I arrived home I felt a few rain drops before getting inside.
As I type this the sky is forming interesting patterns and I see flashes of lightning in my peripheral vision. The wind is pick up in intensity. I’m starting to hear the faint rumbles of approaching thunder.
It’s gong to be a great day.
I know when some folks think of us that work from home, there are visions of people lying around in their sweat pants, laptop slung across their lap, while they are snuggled up in bed. Comfy, comfy, comfy.
In actuality, I have a separate office, with an office computer, phone, and desk. Being in my office brings me to a mindset of “it’s time to work!” and I get down to business. However, there are some things that make me more productive:
Getting into a work mindset, and dressing for a successful day, has been key for my working in a “virtual office” for the past five years. I wouldn’t change the experience for the world, because I am honestly much more productive doing my thing remotely.
I just have to make sure that I’ve dressed for the part.
I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘perspective’ this weekend. The motivation for this line of thought is not important at this time; let’s just say that sometimes life gives you a reason to think about the bigger picture.
And what have I been thinking about? What’s really important, I guess. We’ve had 18 months of unprecedented chaos from the highest office in the land. Despite this, we live in a city we love, have a nice roof over our heads, and we do things that fulfill us. Not everyone in the world has this luxury and that is something to remember.
Do screaming women in a restaurant bother me? Yes. Is it worth getting upset about? No. I might rage tweet once or twice about it, and I should probably stop doing things like that, but the truth is I will not change their behavior by throwing some sort of fit in public. And honestly, a nearly 50-year old man having a hissy fit in the middle of a restaurant is just as bad as the Screaming Trixies to begin with, so why add to the chaos? Roll with it and save the high blood pressure for something that is deserving of hysterics. Screaming women in a restaurant are not worth the energy.
With the bit of soul searching and priority seeking I’ve been doing in my head this weekend, I feel like I’m jumping into the work week more prepared than I have been in months.
The key to a successful life is this: do your best, do good things, and share your love. Love life. Find the reason to love life. That’s all you have to do.
Keep it all in perspective.
I don’t like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House Press Secretary of the Trump Administration. I don’t know her either outside of what we see of her in the media, but I find her condescending, smug, and untrustworthy. To be fair, I compare her to fictional Press Secretary C.J. Cregg from “The West Wing”, and honestly, who can really compare to a character portrayed by Allison Janney? No one.
Twitter and its online brethren have been wild with commentary about Saturday’s National Correspondents’ Dinner, more specifically, comedian Michelle Wolf’s roast and monologue. I had never heard of Michelle Wolf until the brouhaha. She left no rock unturned. She took humor to the places we would have never dreamed of before the Trump Administration. She dug deep and she dug hard. I found most of it funny, but honestly, only when I wasn’t watching the video. When I watched Michelle do her thing I had a hard time seeing the reaction of the audience, including the various targets of Michelle’s monologue. This wasn’t a Dean Martin roast. Phyllis Diller wasn’t talking about Fang. This was someone taking roasted meat and using a well aimed slingshot, flinging this meat and squarely hitting their target. Hitting their target hard.
I have tweeted about Sarah Sanders too much. How does she sleep at night with all her lies? Her poor children. Why doesn’t the press corps just sit there and not challenge her on her lies. How can she stand there and state proven lies as fact while getting paid by the taxpayers. I have gone on and on and on.
But then I saw Sarah’s expression during one of Michelle’s jokes. And it made me sad. Is this really where we are in our country today? Have we abandoned all manner of intelligent discourse in our country? Are we reduced to vulgarity, screaming, yelling, and throwing out vile comments and remarks to get someone’s attention? Is this where we want to be?
I’m not disputing the content of Michelle’s message of her comedy routine, but I thought her delivery might have been a little harsh. I guess I come from a world where you don’t drop f-bombs at a black tie affair. But then again, I come from a world where government was something you could reasonably trust, and that’s all completely gone out the window.
Now, some are saying that Michelle attacked Sarah’s looks and that she went too far.
I like Sarah, I think she’s really resourceful. She burns facts and uses the ash to create a perfect smokey eye. ‘Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.
Honestly, I found the monologue uncomfortable to watch and I can’t help but reflect that it’s the product of where we are in American politics today. Michelle’s humor was a result of what Tweeting would sound like In Real Life. People say these things, and much worse, on social media all the time. Hiding behind anonymity and not having to physically face their target. I’m very guilty of this.
But seeing the reaction of the person you’re lambasting while you’re saying it? Well, it makes me pause and become very aware of what my Tweets in the past would sound like if said In Real Life. At the very least, watching Michelle Wolf’s monologue at the National Correspondents’ Dinner has made me realize that I need to practice what I preach, and be a better Internet citizen.
I don’t dispute the content, but someone has to be the grown up in the room and start nudging the pendulum back to civil discourse and a celebration of sanity.
I had a glass of red wine with dinner last night. While waiting for Earl to return from the wash room, I tweeted a musing as to whether Americans are drinking more since the election of Trump to the White House. I know I’ve been drinking more alcohol since Trump took office. It helps take the edge off reality.
Honestly, I’m very curious is to whether this is an actual ‘thing’ or just my own perception. We hear about increases in Opioid addiction, alcoholism, dependency on other substances. I know I smell a lot of pot on the street. Is this related to a societal shift that was bound to happen regardless of who occupied slot 45? Is life just getting more and more stressful as we realize that life isn’t as we depict it to be on social media?
I’ll have to find some studies on this. I find it quite interesting.
Cheers!
April Fools’ Day is my least favorite holiday, and I use that term loosely, of the year. I’m happy Easter also fell on April 1 because that helped quell some of the idiocy that typically lets loose on the Internet for April Fools’ Day.
People use to engage in clever April Fools’ Day jokes and pranks. A few decades ago there was a radio station, WKGW, that called themselves KG-104. The morning show announced the United States had switched to “Metric Time” and while my clock said 8:45, they announced the time as something idiotic like “it’s 2:75” as they went into a commercial break. The commercials then revolved around this prank, for example, an electronics store announcing you could bring your VCR in for reprogramming to accommodate the new Metric Time standard. It was a clever gag and probably the only time I’ve ever enjoyed an April fools’ Day prank.
In April 1999 Earl and I were working on opening a fast food restaurant in a local mini-mall. I had left my radio career to pursue this venture. We had sunk all of our savings and our blood sweat and tears into this business. I can still vividly remember Earl’s voice as he called me up to tell me, “it’s all burned down. All of it. We lost everything. They think it was faulty wiring.” A few beats later he said, “April Fools’!”.
Hardy har har har.
I don’t know if my resistance to April Fools’ frivolity was amplified by Earl’s joke of 1999 or from the license some took with pranks back when I was in high school: lighting a classmate’s jeans on fire, flushing a nerdy kid’s head in the toilet or pouring water into an Apple IIe to “make it spark”. Maybe I’m just overly sensitive, but in a world where people take great glee in playing stupid pranks to get YouTube revenue I guess I just don’t see the fun in pranking folks and then screaming “April Fools!”.
That being said, I did tweet a geek prank of my own tonight:
I’m excited about Kmart buying Walmart.
No one bought it. I guess I’m not very good at this sort of thing.
So the family got together tonight and watched “Downsizing” on iTunes. It became available for home rental last week.
I’d seen the trailers for this movie last autumn and I thought the premise looked quite interesting. It’s billed as a comedy. The world is in ecological turmoil and Norwegian scientists have come up with a solution: an irreversible cellular miniaturization process that shrinks folks down to about 5-inches tall. The small people have less of an impact on the environment, hence the world will last longer.
The movie starts out as the trailer depicts and is quite interesting. Seeing how the small people live, the miniaturization process, how much further money goes when you’re buying small versions of everything, stuff like that. It took me a few moments to figure out why everyone had big antennas stuck to their miniaturized iPhones and then I appreciated the, pardon the pun, little details that brought authenticity to this alternative universe. A quick aside, some of the special effects were not as good as I expected them to be in a 2017/2018 movie.
The problem was about a third of the way into the movie I started wondering what the point and/or the plot was. Where was this movie headed?
Apparently the director or producer realized the same thing and the entire movie takes a sharp left turn into whack-a-doo world where being tall or small doesn’t really matter anymore. In fact, near the end when we see the “smalls” flying in their special section of an airplane to return from where they had all this weird twist to the plot, I was like, “Oh yeah, they’re smaller than everyone else, totally forgot about that.”
The problem is, the plot was so weak, we took a break to make snacks and ask ourselves, what is the point of this movie? Characters just disappeared. Scenes that appeared in the trailer are nowhere to be found in the actual movie and the whole whimsy small people on a ferris-wheel vibe is mindlessly absent from the finished project.
I’m happy we chose to watch this movie via iTunes because we were only out $5.99. We probably should have checked Netflix and watched it as part of a monthly rental package.
Had we experienced “Downsizing” in the theatre we would have definitely been out too much money.
This was more than a small disappointment.
I making some changes to this ancient blog to deal with any potential privacy concerns when you visit to read my latest witty missive.
I have removed the “Share This” buttons from my blog posts. I don’t know what Twitter and Facebook were doing behind these buttons to track their usage (honestly I don’t have time to dig into that code right now), so I just removed the buttons altogether. I don’t know if folks were sharing my posts in this manner but now they will just have to copy and paste the link to a post in their own tweet.
None of my personal sites have advertising on them. I am not a fan of the ad supported model that runs rampant over the Internet. I don’t even like ads on my television shows. The ironic thing about that is I used to make a living writing ad copy for a group of radio stations. The more you know, I guess. Anyway, there’s nothing on this blog or any of my sites that generates revenue and I will continue to have it that way. To the best of my knowledge there’s nothing on my sites that tracks user data either. I need to look into the JetPack services from WordPress. If they’re tapping into user data, I will vanquish them from my site immediately.
From this point forward I will no longer embed YouTube videos into my posts. Google was tracking the who, what, and where when people watched these videos and I don’t like that, so when I post a video in the future it will be grabbed, stripped of its metadata and hosted on my own server. You should be able to watch a video without fear of being tracked.
I know this blog is goldfish swimming in this huge digital ocean, but I believe in practicing what you preach and I am not going to contribute to the degradation of user privacy on the Internet. It’s something that I strongly believe in and I will continue to advocate for user’s digital rights in any way that I can.
While touring the Magic Kingdom today, I spotted two young people kissing in the crowd. The crowd was at a standstill and the two people in question were holding hands and giggly. It looked like young love.
I was reminded of a video I stumbled across years ago. It was a video of strangers kissing for the first time. I remember finding such a beauty in the black and white video. I watched it again this evening.
It’s still an incredibly beautiful video to me. And even though I’ve been married for over 21 years, I can still vividly remember the first time I kissed my husband and how I still see fireworks every time I kiss him.
Every kiss is a first kiss.
“Alexa, turn on the counter lights!”
Nothing happens. I look up at the lights, just a moment away from wiggling my nose in an attempt to try to turn on the lights. “Alexa, turn on the kitchen counter lights!”
Not even a glimmer, nor a blink, nor a bit of smoke.
I then remember that these lights require the manual use of a light switch. How barbaric.
We have a lot of automation throughout the house. The majority of lights are controlled through if…then statements, Internet voodoo, and screaming repetitive commands at our Amazon Echos strategically placed throughout the condo. Fans turn on and off on their own. Lights blink when the Cubs win. Lamps change color when rain or lightning is detected within a certain radius of our neighborhood. Our fire alarm talks to us, our thermostat responds to our whims.
But flipping a switch to turn on the lamps hanging over the breakfast bar? Barbaric.
Ecobee is getting ready to release a wall switch that has Alexa (Amazon Echo) built into it. It has a motion sensor, a speaker and it also functions at a regular light switch. I think it would look über cool in the entryway to our kitchen.
It’s also a bit pricey at the moment.
Honestly, I’m debating as to whether to beg the budgeting department (my husband) for the money to buy the switch. The existing wall switch works just fine. It just requires manual effort.
When did I get so spoiled?
Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
Weird? Eccentric!