Life Is Such A Sweet Insanity.

I have no idea how the Tucson Unified School District works. I know that even though we live in the city limits (our properly line is against the city line) we do not live in TUSD, but rather we live in the Tanque Verde Unified School District. It seems there’s a high school every three blocks in Tucson, mainly because there’s charter schools and magnet schools and public schools and private schools. Students appear to start school at the end of July in these parts, but only if you go to certain school districts. When I look at nationwide ratings, Arizona isn’t high on the list.

Thank god we don’t have kids.

I try to strike up a conversation with my husband about the education system here in Tucson and how I compare what I see here to what I experienced growing up in a small town in Upstate New York. There was one school district in our town of 3000 or so people. If you wanted to go to Catholic school or something, you still went to public school but every Monday afternoon you walked over to a different building to go to “Religious Ed”. I don’t know what happened there but I like to think there were nuns beating on students with rulers for writing with their left hand or something. If you went to private school, and opted out of our public school system, you were shipped away to a far away land to join the military or be rich. Toward my senior year there was rumors of home schooling and some religiously oriented students moved from a neighboring district to our school system, but otherwise it was PACS all the way.

My eccentricities and incredibly accurate, while highly selective, memories of my school years put a smile on my face and give me points of conversation. After 27 years of discussing these things with my husband I’m surprised he can’t tell me what room I was in for grade one. (It was Room 104 with Miss Kania).

When we were recently at the movies, a local elementary school was advertising on the big screen to entice elementary students away from the public school system and into their “traditional school”. I don’t really know what that means but I assume there’s highly curated curriculums, uniforms, and God.

I wouldn’t trade my public school education for the world.

When it was time for college I wanted to go to a private college for my music education degree. I didn’t really want a music education degree but I had been convinced that was all I could do so I went along with it. My parents couldn’t afford the private college so I applied at two state schools, auditioned at one twice, and got in on the second try. I didn’t even try that much at the SAT but I pretty much aced my ACT and that got me in. Also, the fact that I played tuba and no one else did made it easy for me to get into music school. I flunked out in express fashion by the end of my freshman year. I don’t blame my public school education for this. I don’t blame anyone for this, outside of my lack of interest.

I can think of a dozen or so classmates that started kindergarten and walked down the auditorium aisle for graduation, the likes of us attending all 13 years of public school together.

Many are friends on Facebook. I really don’t know why but we are.

And even after typing this blog entry I still can’t figure out how Tucson Unified School District works.

Amen.

Our friend Diggs was in town for a couple of days. We had a nice dinner out.

The Lathem Time Company is best known for their time clocks. They have also made synchronized clock systems for many years. At the end of the 2000s they introduced their AirTime system, a wireless synchronized system that allows customers to install a clock anywhere they want without having to deal with traditional wiring. The system is controlled by a small master clock, which gets the current time from the NIST Atomic Clock and transmits to any compatible clock within a 500 foot radius. Other master clocks can pick up these signals and transmit them as well, expanding coverage. The entire system is battery powered, and Lathem had a solar charged version of wall clock as well.

Other companies do something similar, Primex and Sapling coming to mind. However, Lathem, being an “older school” clock company, built their Airtime clocks to the same standards of the clocks they’ve offered for decades, with offerings of a metal case, large numbers, etc. Unfortunately, Lathem discontinued the line a few years ago. I don’t like the plastic clocks available from other companies. It’s a shame Lathem stopped their Airtime line.

Now, one can buy clocks in both digital and analog flavors that synchronize directly with the NIST Atomic Clock, but the AM band used to transmit this information often fails to get to clocks on the interior walls of large buildings. Hence Lathem’s system where the master clock can be placed in an ideal location and then transmit the data to clocks anywhere in a facility.

The clocks rarely come up on eBay, as the system was never very popular, but this clock from a school in South Dakota makes a good addition to my man cave.

I’ve posted this video before. My soul needed to hear “Running Up That Hill” this morning, and I really enjoy this cover by Australian based “SingItLive”.

Ajo.

We decided to go for a ride yesterday. The news was making such waves about Hurricane Hilary that I decided it’d be fun to drive westward to see what all the hype was about.

We ran into a little rain, but we were also 24 hours ahead of schedule.

The drive from Tucson to Ajo via the appropriately named Tucson-Ajo highway, (State Route 86) is enjoyable, if desolate. The vast majority of the route crosses through the Tohono O’odham Nation. We took a slight detour to drive through the business district of Sells, where we saw a few wild horses and roaming cattle in the streets. We also passed by Kitt Peak National Observatory, but many signs let us know the road up there was closed so we didn’t get to see what that was all about. Instead I snapped a photo from the main road.

We had lunch in Ajo at the Agave Cafe, where there were two other customers and friendly folks working behind the counter. It was an enjoyable experience and it was nice to strike up some conversation with the other folks. One woman was visiting from Ticonderoga, New York. When she found out we had lived in the Mohawk Valley she asked if we missed it and we said, “not really”, the weather in Tucson is much more enjoyable.

We made our way up to Gila Bend and then to Maricopa before jumping on Interstate 10 to make our way home. Overall is was a very pleasant day.

I’m always looking for an app that allows me to focus on writing and only writing, without the interruptions and such often associated with the Internet.

If I was a hipster you’d probably find me sitting in Starbucks with a manual typewriter, banging away creatively and thinking I was impressing everyone within a 1/2 mile radius with my ability to type on a Royal manual typewriter, but I’m not a hipster so I settle on typing on my iPad or laptop.

After reaching out on Mastodon to find something that resembled a word processing program from the 1980s or early 1990s, I abandoned that approach and decided to go back to the IA Writer application on my iPad again. I forget that I have this program because I have an unfortunate tendency to want to try out the latest and greatest shiny thing, but here I am, typing away in “typewriter” mode on the application and it’s working exactly as I wanted it to.

Some of the joy around writing this blog is that I am able to quiet the noises in my head, bring focus to my thoughts in a positive way, and hopefully get into that flow state the enhances my mood and makes me feel more alive and in tune with what’s going on around me.

I often feel like having my iPad Pro is redundant in my setup; my laptop (MacBook Air) does just fine with all of the tasks I want to do, but I find myself getting easily distracted while working on my laptop. My thought wanders and before I know it I’ve moved to another screen, fired up a web browser, and I’m looking for photos of a Kmart in 1986 to reminisce about the scent of their awesome popcorn that was oddly served near the jewelry counter instead of in the back at the Kmart cafeteria.

Guess what I did between the last paragraph and this one?