I’m writing this 2.2 miles and 900 feet up into my hike today. The weather is perfect at around 65°F and I’m feeling good. This is the final day of my mini vacation and I wanted to try a longer, more challenge hike.
I’m sweaty, my legs are already sore and I still have 2 1/2 hours to go on my plan. I’m challenging myself and I’m loving every minute of it.
Make your life great.
When I was a kid the Sears Wish Book was a big deal at this time of year. For those unfamiliar, the big department stores (Sears, JC Penney, and Montgomery Ward come to mind) would release these big catalogs of all their entire inventory to convince the consumer to buy their holidays gifts from the family from these catalogs. Think of it as Amazon of the mid 20th century.
I always enjoyed flipping through the Wish Book from Sears in particular, because out of these department stores we went to Sears the most and they had the niftiest cash registers at the time.
There’s a collection of these catalogs available online at WishbookWeb. I was flipping through the 1970 Sears Wish Book and noticed they were selling Micro-Waves (as they displayed in their ad). The technology was new for the consumer at the time; I believe my grandmother got her first Amana Radarange in 1971.
Apparently the Micro-Wave oven was so new that the Sears advertising department didn’t quite have all the mechanics down yet. In the page below, look how many places they display food wrapped or trayed in foil! To be fair, there’s tiny print that tells us to wrap the baked potato in foil after baking, but that TV dinner is going to create quite the light show if put in a microwave oven.
I’ve been wanting to go for a hike in the desert since we moved here earlier this year. Today I hiked 4 1/2 miles in Saguaro National Park East, which is a few miles from our home. The Douglas Spring Trail took me on an enjoyable journey through the Rincon Mountains. I climbed 795 feet along my hike and had a wonderful time exploring all this area has to offer.
Truman takes a moment to see what’s going on while we watched the season premiere of “The Expanse” last night.
The Expanse returns for season six, its final season. This season is abbreviated at six episodes and Amazon Prime is releasing the episodes one week at a time. I like to binge. I don’t know why we have to do things this way.
I’ve really enjoyed the series, especially the earlier seasons on SyFy and the first season on Amazon Prime. Season five was a little uneven and pulled too far away from sci-fi and to much into Dynasty in Space for my taste, but the trailer for season six shows promise.
I’m looking forward to the experience. I *love* Shohreh Aghdashloo as U.N. General Secretary Chrisjen Avasarala. Her voice commands respect and she’s one of the few characters I know that can give a world of class to the utterance of an F-bomb.
Steve Bronski of Bronski Beat passed away this week. He was 61 years old.
I wasn’t aware of Bronski Beat when their debut single, “Smalltown Boy”, was released in 1984. It wasn’t until I was in college in later 1986 that I discovered the band and started enjoying their albums and single releases. I instantly fell in love with their synths, and Hi-NRG music, and then started listening to their lyrics and realized this group was something special for the gay community.
A few elements of “Smalltown Boy” has always held some truth for me. As a Gen-X gay man I consider myself quite lucky; my parents were mostly fine with my homosexuality and I’ve always felt love and acceptance at home. Both of my parents were awesome in many ways, including dealing with their only son being gay. I’ve been blessed, many of my age and to this day are not nearly as lucky.
The video for “Smalltown Boy” has a couple of scenes that I can relate to, mostly around where Jimmy Somerville is encouraged by his gay friends to approach another young man and profess his interest in him and the results of the interaction turning less than positive. Even though it’s been over 35 years I still have a hard time with that similar moment in my past. A couple of gay friends encouraged me to approach someone that I knew was gay and muster up the courage to show an interest in him and it didn’t turn out well. I wasn’t hurt physically too much and there was thankfully no gang or police or anything involved as shown in the music video situation, but it was still a lot for me to handle that I handled alone and got through it. The biggest hurt I felt was the betrayal from what I believed to be friends that understood me because they were like me. They really weren’t like me, they just shared the attraction to the same sex. It was good to leave them behind.
The messages in the music by Bronski Beat was important during the 1980s, in addition to just being good music. RIP Steve Bronski. Thank you for doing your part to help life for LGBTQ+ folks a little bit easier and more importantly, thank you for your music.
Chris is an amazing crafty type. He’s always doing wood working things in the shop off the garage and designing nice things for the house. Mike helps with bringing these ideas to fruition and it’s wonderful for all of us.
Our fireplace doesn’t have a mantle, so we needed something to hang our stocking with care. Chris designed a desert themed stocking hanging rack and it was installed while we were in Palm Springs this past weekend.
We love the way it turned out!
Christmas Cat has been on our Christmas Tree every year that we’ve been together. Before I met the love of my life Christmas Cat was still on a Christmas tree every year. I figure he’s just a couple years younger than me. I don’t remember where the ornament came from. His blanket is looking a little rough around the edges but he makes me smile.
We decorated the main Christmas tree this evening. The 12-foot tree in our Great Room looks wonderful and brings all five of us much joy.
Last night was the Palm Springs Festival of Lights Christmas Parade. We didn’t know this event was happening before we arrived on Thursday, but we were anxious for a bit of holiday cheer of this nature.
I made a reservation at one of the restaurants along the route and asked yesterday morning if we could be seated outside. They couldn’t guarantee an outside seat but they promised us a window seat.
We ended up eating right on the sidewalk last night. The meal was delicious and the surrounding festivities were, well, festive. It was a very nice time.
All of the floats and bands and others in the parades were decorated with flashing lights, garland, tinsel, and the like. There were many marching bands and they all played their takes on holiday music. The bands all sounded good. I mentioned to Earl that I was happy to see marching bands still doing their things decades after I was big on being in marching band in junior and senior high school. Some of the tuba players were playing with marching tubas (I’ve never played one of those) and others were playing sousaphones, which is the “tuba that wraps around you”. I played plenty of those, both in brass and fiberglass. I could probably squeak out a B-flat scale today if I was given the opportunity.
The parade was fun, the crowd was pleasant, and there was a great energy in the air. I was a little concerned about COVID, the density of the crowd, and folks not wearing masks, but that’s why we have our vaccinations complete with booster shots.
A quick aside, to enter a restaurant here in Palm Springs you must prove that you’re vaccinated or that you’ve had a negative COVID-19 test in the past 48 hours and you still have to wear a mask whenever you’re not eating. I have no issue with this. The only bump in this requirement is the Walgreens app is awful for consistently showing one’s vaccination status but luckily we brought along our real vaccination cards. On the crowd front, about 40% of folks were wearing masks while moving about on the street.
Overall we had a great time and the experience helped put me in a holiday mood.
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!