I just took this photo while running out to the mailbox. I love the color of these flowers. Unlike much of our landscaping, our landscapers have not put a label as to the type of flower seen here, but I believe it’s bougainvillea.
Even though we’ve lived in the desert for nearly four years, it’s hard for me to believe that I am sitting outside in the gazebo, watching a beautiful sunset, and Christmas descends upon us in less than two days.
For this (former) northerner, it doesn’t feel like Christmas, despite the mall speakers screaming about “let it snow, let it snow, let it snow”. The family has done a fantastic job of decorating the house for the holidays, so that’s a wonderful thing.
I’m ready to wind down 2024. I feel prepared for 2025, whatever that may bring.
In the meanwhile, I’ll just keep enjoying the beauty around me.
Pecos Hank on YouTube has an excellent year end video showing many highlights of storm chasing season in 2024. His videography is an inspiration for me.
If you take a look at 14:16, you’ll see me parked and capturing the Eldorado and Duke, Oklahoma tornado back on the 23rd of May. Seeing me in someone else’s storm chasing video just made my day.
We washed Truman’s cat bed this week because it was way overdue for such attention. Apparently he is not pleased by this action because up until yesterday afternoon, he chose to ignore his cat bed and sleep on top of his little cat-hideaway, which he almost never does.
At least he’s keeping an eye on the Network Attached Storage (NAS) server.
This photo was taken Friday afternoon. All is back to being correct in the cat world.
I took a look at the news today and saw what’s going on with the U.S. budget and how the government will probably shut down tonight. I feel bad for all of the working Americans that will be affected by this action. Apparently there was a bipartisan bill to keep things moving but at the last minute Sissy Space X got the House Republicans to kill the thing, so now there’s a scramble.
There’s always a scramble.
I’ve been seeing inklings of how Musk appears to be calling all the Presidential-elect shots and basically telling Trump to do. I guess since Musk isn’t eligible to be President of the United States, he just bought his way to the top instead and is telling the old guy what to do.
That’s not how any of this works, but I gave up that dream at the beginning of November when voters decided one term of chaos wasn’t enough. I blathered on about it on Facebook just because I could. I really didn’t think the Co-Presidency would be so blatant this time around. I guess I’m not as smart as I thought I was. Or, I guess I had more faith in the system that it deserves.
For now I shall go back to keeping my head down like I’m sitting in Room 108 in the elementary school, waiting for the buzzer to ring so I know it’s time go do something.
In the meanwhile, I am focused on things that give me joy, such as my video production, geeky things like cash registers, visiting with family and friends, and trying to embrace the holiday spirit.
It’s time to shut the news back off and find some joy out there, anywhere.
OK, I’ve kind of lost interest in the litany of superhero movies we’ve been assaulted with over the past few years. However, the trailer for Superman, coming out in July ’25, looks really interesting and has a beautifully familiar feel to it.
As a young lad I was always fascinated with the business calculators in use at the family owned lumber yard and contracting business. I suspect Grandpa Country was a bit of a geek at heart, as he invested wisely in these sorts of pieces of technology. For example, the Accounts Receivables at the store were maintained in house, originally using a Burroughs Bookkeeping machine purchased in the 1950s. I never saw this machine, but being the dork I was and continue to be, I could tell which entries on old ledger cards were made with this machine, just by the way the printing appeared on the cards.
In 1972 (I tracked down the exact date by the change in dated entries on the older ledger cards), the Burroughs machine was replaced by an NCR Class 160 Bookkeeping Machine.
Photo from ncr.co.uk
I can easily remember this bookkeeping machine, as it’s what was in use when I did the accounts receivable for the family after Grandma Country retired but before my aunt took over the duties for the family business. I learned how this machine worked by watching Grandma Country do the invoice posting every morning during summer vacation. I found the machine fascinating. It was replaced by a computer in 1990 or so, running software I wrote that basically replicated the functions of this wonderful piece of technology.
Grandpa invested in the right tools and that’s something I learned from him.
The store didn’t have a proper cash register of the time, much to the chagrin of my technological ways. Instead, there was a very large “black box” built into the sales counter. The box had a tractor-fed stream of blank invoices that were there for handwritten detail, and a journal tape where we wrote the sub total of the sale, followed by a dash, and then the amount of tax charged on the sale. When the lever was pulled to advance this journal tape, the cash register drawer popped open. At least, until that functionality was disabled because of the amount of paper wasted just to pop open the drawer in a “No Sale” situation.
All of the calculations were performed on adding machines/calculators made by Monroe Systems for Business. We had a few of these machines scattered around the business, one in the back office, one on the sales counter etc. Because they were so robust and had some nifty features for their day, they lasted for literally decades. In fact, the Monroe 525 calculator, purchased in the mid 1970s, lasted until the store was sold to a new buyer in 2010.
Photo from picclick
For the back office there were printing models of these Monroe machines and they were the closest thing we had to something like a cash register.
Photo from ebay
Today I did a little search on Monroe Systems for Business and found that they’ve continued the tradition of quality calculating products, and the robust functionality is present in their equipment over 50 years later.
I was happy to see the layout of the keyboard is nearly the same as it has been for decades, and the approach to separating multiplication/division functions from the add/subtract/accumulator functions is intact.
My geek heart is happy. I might have to get my hands on one of these machines for my office.
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.
