Art Deco.

Public buildings built in the late 1930s and early 1940s are very interesting to me. I love the architecture. There’s a certain amount of comfort in these designs; the elementary school I attended was built in 1939 and had a distinct Art Deco flair in the design. There was an impressive staircase in the middle of the school. It linked the main entrance to the second floor, with ornate metal railings and a color scheme similar to that seen in the photo above. The stairway took folks to the second floor in a split design, arriving in front of the library. It felt so solid.

The library was filled with so much wood trim. The shelves and desks were sturdy. There was a room off one end of the library designated for the Board of Education meetings. The wood appointments were heavy and it always felt like important decisions were made there.

Public buildings built after World War II don’t really interest me. Design moved from impressive to functional. Cinder blocks were painted to look like a wall. There’s a lot of brick. No columns, no ornate railings, no heavy desks.

These pre-WWII buildings are bit more rare here in the desert southwest. If I find one I can’t photograph it; I might be mistaken for a terrorist or something. Things are weird in the 21st century.

13 February 2022 by Ponderings and Musings 0

Coincidence?

I just tried liking a tweet about the CIA on Twitter and this happened.

Coincidence? Big Brother is watching you. Always. Treat anything and everything you say on the Internet as if you just published it on the front page of the New York Times.

11 February 2022 by Let's All Rant. 0

Style.

I have two of these glasses. From the mid 20th century, they are Libbey “Nordic” glasses. I believe Grandma Country bought them at Woolworths. I remember her finding another set of glasses on a shelf sometime in the mid 1970s and happy that she could expand her set.

The glasses originally came in the tumbler seen here, as well as a shorter juice or cocktail glass. I may have found a set online and that set may be on its way to our home.

Most would find them simple. I find them delightful.

10 February 2022 by Fun and Games Dept 0

Point of No Return.

I first heard this song on the “93Q Clubbeat”, which played Saturday nights on WNTQ when I was teenager. I was thinking of this specific version of this song the other day and realized that when it was released in 1985, we were closer in time to an Elvis track than today in 2022 is to this song in 1985.

Someone around here is getting old.

From 1985, here’s “Point of No Return” by Exposé, when the group had its original lineup (before the ladies we know as Exposé today). There’s something about this version that sounds quite nostalgic to me.

9 February 2022 by DJ 0

Jump.

When I first saw this photo pass by on social media I thought it was part of an Onion article or something. Admittedly I don’t have much interest in the Olympics this time around; I haven’t really been interested in the Olympics since they started happening every other year, so I haven’t paid much attention to what’s been going on.

But I had no idea that the Men’s Freestyle Skiing was on a man made slope next to a bunch of cooling towers from a closed down manufacturing plant. For some reason I thought the Winter Olympics were always head in places with mountains and snow and the like. You know, like Lake Placid, New York or the Alps or something. But in the middle of a manufacturing district of a Communist country? Why?

8 February 2022 by Everyone's A Critic. 0

Monday.

There is never any silence in our house. Someone, somewhere is watching a TikTok video or there’s music thumping in one of the rooms or there’s the snippets of bad music blasting from an Instagram feed. It’s never quiet. There’s never silence.

Yesterday it was a little chilly when I sat in the gazebo playing around on my iPad. I was reading about various subjects and occasionally the silence was broken by an airplane flying over head as they departed the local Air Force Base or the coyotes would rustle in the wash. I didn’t find these sounds distracting.

As I get older I find that I can’t manage distractions as well as I used to when I was younger. I’ve never been good at managing distractions. My ability to tune out the rest of the world is slowly dissipating with age. Others in the family don’t seem to have this impediment. Perhaps I’m focused on different things.

7 February 2022 by Ponderings and Musings 1

Hobbies.

Zayre Electronics is the name of my home-based PC building and repair business from the late 1990s. I had a couple of contracts during that time and was able to make a little cash with the venture before deciding it was ultimately not profitable and winding it down. It was a little side hustle that offered me growth in my IT skills more than anything else. I’m happy to have that as part of my past.

I’ve enjoyed tinkering with computers since the mid 1980s. I was fascinated with the assortment of Apple ][+ and Apple //e computers in the “computer lab”, which was actually a converted class room in the math department. The math teachers taught computer education back then. Shortly after I graduated high school in 1986 the business department took over the responsibilities. I don’t know what year they finally ditched the IBM Selectrics, I was long gone.

I have a fully functional NCR RealPOS cash register setup here at the house. I don’t have a cash drawer hooked up to the system, as I don’t have that much cash to put in the drawer, but the rest of the system allows me to mess around with various point of sale software program suites and related software offerings. There’s a whole community of us point of sale geeks and we talk about they way things used to be and the way things will be in the point of sale systems space. Sorry to say, self checkouts are here to stay and that saddens us all.

I fire the register up from time to time and work on the software package I’m writing to keep these older machines running beyond their ill-timed shelf life. There are many things one can do with old technology, nothing is really obsolete unless it’s given up the ghost completely. I’ve turned old telephone system terminals into file servers with a few modifications to the operating system.

There’s always options.

6 February 2022 by Geek 0

Riding It Out.

My husband and I went for a ride yesterday. We’d been in the house since Tuesday and really needed some fresh air, so we moved our quarantine area to include the car. We both enjoyed drive thru food, wore masks while in the drive thru, and enjoyed being out in the desert sunshine in early February. It was good to see some landscape. Our home is beautiful but with the five of us in various stages of coughing and the like, the fresh air did us some good.

I’m on the mend and feeling better. Other than the lingering cough and a few instances of feeling winded when I don’t usually feel winded, I feel like I won the battle against COVID-19. The rest of the family feels the same way. We are continuing to maintain distance from the rest of the world per the CDC guidelines. This probably means I will not be flying again this week. I don’t want to risk getting my Flight Instructor sick in the close quarters of a Cessna 172.

I’m missing flying. Even skipping one week in my training has me gazing at the clear, blue sky whenever possible. I catch a glimpse of a Tucson Airport bound flight passing to the north of the house on approach and I really look forward to getting up there again as soon as possible.

Prior to testing positive for COVID-19 I did everything I thought I could to be as safe as possible, for my family, for those around me in public, and for me. In common areas like the supermarket I wore a mask, even when it was just suggested, I maintained social distancing, and I did my best to be in unconfined areas with plenty of airflow. And yet I still contracted (presumably) the Omicron variant. As I mentioned late last week, I am very thankful for the science that brought us vaccinations against this thing because I can imagine the experience being much, much worse than it was for me or for the family.

If you’re not vaccinated, I strongly urge you to follow suit and get vaccinated. It will probably save you a hospital visit in the future.

6 February 2022 by Ponderings and Musings 0

Caturday.

Truman has many moods. This week I have received the look of impatience and the look of “I’d rather be alone”.

Truman awaits indication that I will leave my office chair and find him some t-r-e-a-t-s.
Apparently I don’t have enough heat in the bedroom, even though we live in the desert.
5 February 2022 by He's A Feline. 0

About J.P.

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!

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