It’s been a cloudy, hazy weekend here in the Soronan Desert. We have winter like weather coming up this week, with the snow levels coming down to Tucson city proper by this weekend. There’s also a hard freeze in the forecast. Exciting times.
The predicted snow at this point isn’t a huge deal as it’ll be just a dusting that will probably melt quickly, but I’m sure it’ll still make an impact on the area. If it happens.
It’s been raining a lot for the past 48 hours. I still find the lights of the city to be quite beautiful, even under the clouds.
I’m always a fan of YouTube channel Trek Trendy. The reviews and sharing of experiences gives me a chance to see parts of the world I have not seen yet. I also feel a sense of inspiration to keep working hard to do some of these things shown on the channel.
For this latest video, a 17 hour first class flight from Dubai to Auckland, NZ on an Emirates A380.
It’s a quiet day here in the Desert Compound. My husband is watching football (his second game today), the dogs are sleeping near my feet, Truman is sleeping in his cat tree, and the rest of the family has gone on a movie date to see 3 1/2 hours of Avatar.
I’m enjoying the relative downtime.
I’ve been using this quiet time to clean up my computing experience a little bit. I’m always tweaking my setup here and there. I’m determined to not buy any new computers in 2023 and 15 days in I’m still holding to my word. I don’t need a new computer, of course, but once in a while I think about buying something to use at work as part of their “Bring Your Own Device” program. I have a cantankerous relationship with my work-issued, Windows 10-based laptop at best, but when all is said and done it gets the job done and that’s what’s important. I just need to take a focused approach at using the dang thing so I don’t get into my own head about buying another computer.
I’ve also been using the quiet time to engage in some of my hobbies. I’ve been watching flying videos, chatting with other pilots of aviation forums, and looking into some other flight opportunities in the area. The weather for the next 48 hours is rainy, cloudy, and cold, so I might as well engage in my aviator blood through other methods.
I’m also doing more research and planning for Storm Chasing Trip 2023 coming up later this spring. I’ve been looking at maps and the like, figuring out some key places I want to visit should I run into any downtime between storms.
And if that’s not enough, I’ve also been doing some research on my vintage point of sale systems hobby site. I found a video focused on John Lennon’s death and the impact on a local Tower Records back in 1980. It was quite interesting in itself, but I also noticed the Data Terminal Systems cash register featured in the video. It’s been over nearly four decades since these cash registers were in the mainstream, and they probably populate too many landfills, but I still hold out hope that someday I’ll find a unit I can clean up and restore for my own amusement.
Truman has been wanting to get outside so we occasionally let him out on the roof over the garage for some fresh air. The space is surrounded by a railing that he can’t get through, so I’m not worried about him jumping off the roof.
However, he has discovered he can climb up to a higher roof for a better bird’s eye view. So he does not go outside without human supervision.
I enjoy reading. My mom used to joke that once in a while she’d come down to the kitchen while I was eating breakfast and find me reading the phone book because I couldn’t find anything else to read. At 16 years old that was absolutely true. At 54 years old that doesn’t happen because we don’t have a phone book in the house.
Computers and the Internet have kind of thrown my reading habits sideways. I still enjoy reading, and I read a bit before falling asleep every night, though I use the Kindle App on my iPad Mini and I don’t find that experience to be particularly fulfilling. I need to get a Kindle so that I don’t have something with harsh backlighting. I’m convince that mobile devices are straining our eyes far more than books ever did.
With the tendency for Internet experiences to be short spurts of reading material, I’ve found that my already scatter focused mind drifts a bit while I’m reading, much more than it did when I was younger. I found a new approach to placing type on the screen and it’s called “Bionic Reading”. Bionic Reading places emphasis on the leading letters of words, creating a somewhat unnatural pattern in a line of text, which trains your eyes to move across the entire line of text instead of skipping around a little bit. While designed to help the reader comprehend text better, it also helps those with wandering focus to stick to the text instead of looking at the squirrel jumping around outside the window.
Because I’m an elder-Internet user with an old-school blog, I still use RSS feeds to aggregate my reading material of the day. My application of choice to consume this information is Reeder 5, available on iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS. While I don’t pay for an RSS aggregation service (I have my own server doing that job for me), Reeder 5 has built in functionality for your own aggregation lists and more importantly, it has Bionic Reading built in as an option.
As I’m tying this blog entry I’m realizing WordPress may have a Bionic Reading plugin that I can make available here for this blog. That’d be rather nifty.
Sedgwick, Colorado, June 2022, right before my first tornado intercept.
Even though it’s the beginning of January and my 2023 storm chasing trip is scheduled for mid May, I’m already excited about the whole affair.
With Twitter going completely sideways since Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform, I’m remembering how dependent I was on the service last year when it came to seeing what other storm chasers were up to. There are plenty of other data sources to see where storm chasers are located. I belong to the Spotter’s Network and I track other sources through various apps, including RadarScope. But Twitter was incredibly convenient for incoming data. While my two remaining Twitter accounts remain dormant, I’ll probably fire up my aviation and storm chasing account when we get closer to traditional chase season, even if I just use it for monitoring and following. That is if Twitter is still around and people are actually using it. I keep hearing about tons of folks leaving the platform.
There’s always Facebook for this information as well, but with its kooky algorithms I’m left with a feed of a bit of storm chasing information, a bunch of ads trying to sell me shaving cream or beard balm, lovely pictures of friends’ cats, and then an ad for a politician I have no interest in.
Today’s popular Internet services are not really designed for those that need a focused data stream. And let’s face it, we all need a more focused data stream.
I often write down bits and pieces of a blog entry throughout the day and then try to formulate the mess into something a little more coherent before winding down and heading to bed. Occasionally the winding up and posting the entry for the day happens in a batch effort on the weekend. Sitting down and making my thoughts a bit more tidy before releasing to the masses for consumption is a bit of a cathartic activity, and it gives me a chance to see where my head was at various points throughout the day.
The pressures at work, which are not really that unusual for a person in my position and management level in a corporation, can sometimes get to me. Balancing the needs of my retired husband, my family back East, my family here in Tucson, and my personal needs can sometimes be overwhelming. As a loner and introvert (even though I can fake extrovert quite well for short amounts of time), I can easily become overwhelmed with too much sensory input. Driving a car in a rural locale, flying an airplane, or sitting at my desk, gathering my thoughts and writing them down through various medium, keeps me sane. As the Internet has opened up the world to the individual user, reading the experiences of others with similar thought processes and challenges is somewhat comforting to me. Even though there are times when I want to be alone, it’s good to know that my hyper focus on one thing and lack of focus on a lot of things is not a unique situation. And this is where technology has been an asset to my life.
In addition to this blog, I have a personal journal that I maintain on a daily basis. I’ve been doing this for a little under a decade and it’s a bit of a hoot to go back and see where my head was at on the same date several years ago. I notice many patterns, and where we’re living or what I”m doing doesn’t seem to make a difference, I still have definite patterns in my thoughts and dreams and struggles and successes.
The key is to keep the patterns moving in a positive direction.
At work I manage a team of nine software ware developers scattered across the country. They’re all really good at their job and in addition to my management responsibilities, I am also a full time software developer. Luckily my team is good at being autonomous and are all trustworthy, so I just have to keep things moving in the right direction, assure they have what they need to do their jobs well, and speak to upper management on behalf of the team. I’ve had much worse gigs in my life.
I used to be able to manage all of this stuff in my head, keeping track of the status of various projects and the like, and then able to recite the status without referencing notes. My brain chemistry provides surprisingly robust memory powers, but unfortunately, it’s more geared to things I’m very interested in, I’ve witnessed or experienced, or how I felt during a recalled situation. I can remember project dates and statuses fairly well but the details seem to fall out of my cranial rolodex with some regularity. I know my husband gets frustrated when I ask for the same details of an upcoming event over and over again. I attribute this all to growing old because after all I am in my mid 50s.
I still can’t believe I’m in my mid 50s, but that’s a whole different subject.
The reduction of memory bandwidth in my head frustrates me from time to time as well and admittedly it worries me at times. Even though Earl is eight years older than me, I’m convinced I’m going to lose my marbles before he does. Forgetting things along the way just reiterates this belief for me and that doesn’t help the situation.
I’ve taken to writing things down, when I remember to write things down, and it seems to be helping but with all the notes we were forced to take in junior and senior high school and college, I don’t seem to have developed a great skill set when it comes to note taking. I’ll write down a few sentences on a given subject during a work meeting and an hour later I have no idea what I meant. I end up focusing really hard on how I felt and some other obscure detail during the meeting, for example, “Matt was wearing a green flannel shirt when he said this” and then I can occasionally remember the details around the paragraph I wrote down. I need to get better at note taking.
The solution to all of this is probably realizing that as I get older I can’t go as fast as I used to with writing down notes and paying attention and all that stuff. Slowing down a little bit seems a little contrary to the way I’ve done things for over a half a century but it’s a reality I just have to accept.
While my computing experience is decidedly a mix bag of ecosystems and companies these days, one of the things I love about my Apple Watch and our Apple One family subscription is Apple Fitness+. (How many times can I type Apple in one sentence? Wow).
If you’re not familiar, Apple Fitness+ offers a slew of fitness activities oriented around the Apple Watch, Apple TV, and your iDevices. One of my favorite features is “It’s Time For A Walk” structured around going for a walk. The new season just started up. For the first episode this season we went for a walk with Jamie Lee Curtis.
I’ve always found Jamie Lee Curtis to be pleasant and I know that’s she created and/or been involved with a bunch of humanitarian efforts over the years. Her conversation on this week’s “It’s Time For A Walk” was very inspiring. The vibe of the episode just pushed me in the positive direction I need to be shoved towards and it left me feeling happy, but more importantly it created a wonderful sense of groundedness that I was missing at the beginning of this work week.
I’ve decided to try a new airplane rental place located at nearby Marana Regional Airport. They have a couple of airplanes I’m very familiar with, the Cessna 172 Skyhawk and I look to be flying them soon, but they also have a Cessna Cardinal 177 available for rent. Designed after the C172 and manufactured for a shorter time, the C177 is roomier inside and offers better views as it doesn’t have wing struts.
I’d never flown a Cardinal before and I had to get checked out by an instructor in the airplane before I could rent it. Instructor Austin is a younger pilot with many ratings, including flying private jets, so we went up and I showed him I could fly an airplane. It’s been my experience that it would take a couple flights for me to show my proficiency in a new-to-me kind of airplane, but the Cardinal 177 handled wonderfully through the required maneuvers and landing it was easy. I think after all these years I’m realizing I know how to fly airplanes.
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.
