Earlier this month my husband and I went to a local furniture store looking for a new couch for our TV room. The couch we bought when we moved to Chicago in 2017 has not held up as well as we had hoped it would and the furniture store was having a sale so we thought we’d take a moment to browse.
As usual I went off on my own looking at various odds and ends through the store, and since the location is large, I called Earl up and asked him where he was located so we could meet up and settle on a couch.
“I’m on the other side of the wall”. This is what I was looking at when he gave me this vague description.
It turns out he was on the other side of the larger wall, over in the bargain bin area of the store. When he asked me “what other wall is there?”, I showed him this photo.
Our marriage works because in many, many ways we have two different thought processes. I tend to be the more literal one of the two of us. I have always thought literally. As I get older I find my brain is headed further in that direction.
We have an indoor pool. I was very excited when we bought a home with an indoor pool and spent many months swimming on a daily basis.
My body then decided I’d used up all my swimming tokens and now I break out in a light rash when I swim in our pool. No one else in the family has this issue, so my skin has just decided to do its own thing.
I now swim just once in a while.
The experience is enjoyable but I have to take an off-brand Benadryl for a couple of days afterward to cope with any itchiness.
The lumber yard/hardware store/contracting business owned by my Dad’s side of the family sold General Electric appliances. The GE “ball” logo was everywhere in our home, especially after Dad built the house I spent the latter half of my childhood in. At one time, my grandparents, and each family of my dad’s siblings had the exact same dishwasher, and they were all emblazoned with “GE Potscrubber” across the front. You could also change the color of the front panel of the dishwasher, but that’s a different blog entry.
As a child of this GE atmosphere, coupled with the fact that both paternal grandparents at one time worked for General Electric at Electronics Park before I was born, I learned to associate GE with quality. It’s one of the reasons I chose GEnie, the General Electric Network Information Exchange, as my first online experience.
One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about the GE brand is that the company and its subsidiaries have maintained a consistent logo for over 100 years. There are slight variations in the “GE Ball”, but for the most part, anyone and everyone knows what that symbols means. Unlike Coke and Pepsi and Target and Walmart, who update their logo with the times, GE’s logo is timeless. Aside from that first incarnation in 1892, it has looked the same for nearly 125 years, and I think that’s pretty nifty.
It’s a quality logo that has withstood the test of time.
The only time I’ve found GE branding confusing is as found on a spacemaker laundry unit in the condos at Walt Disney World’s Saratoga Springs Resort.
Here’s the unit was simply labeled “GE Quality Product” any in no place featured the familiar GE logo. I can only assume someone else built the unit for GE and GE was just licensing out the name. Today GE’s laundry products are actually made by Haier, and GE lends out their logo to maintain familiar branding.
One of my favorite fonts was also created by GE. I use this font all through my Linux desktop setups (Windows and Apple don’t let users change the font). This font is called GE Inspira and it has a nice modern touch to it. You can find it through a simple web search.
I now have the old jingle, “GE, we bring good things to living, we bring good things to life” rattling around in my brain.
I often spend weekend mornings finishing up half-baked blog entries I’ve written during the week. I also use this opportunity to respond to comments and other correspondence around my social media presence. There’s a few blog entries that remain quite popular, usually those around cash registers, or old department store chains like W.T. Grants.
Data Terminal Systems Series 400 cash register from an abandoned mall (still intact) in Kitsault, British Columbia. Photo found somewhere online. I don’t remember where.
As I was sorting through my email, I saw a message from WordPress, which is the software that supports this blog. I subscribe to WordPress’ “Jetpack” service, even though the blog is self hosted on my own server. The Jetpack service seems worth the money and it allows me to see visitor counts if I so desire, but it also helps in automating much of the maintenance one has to do on a website in these here scary Internet times. It’s less fuss, less muss, and that’s fine by me.
The message in question indicated that I had received several subscriptions for email notifications this week. I was vaguely aware of email subscriptions to the blog, I thought there was a handful of them at most, but it seems there’s many more than I originally thought. So, I’d like to say to everyone that subscribes to my entries via email: Hello! It’s wonderful to have you here.
Taken as I write this blog. I am unfed, unshowered, and unshaven at the moment.
At last night’s dinner, a party of four was seated at the table next to us. They were pleasant and lively and we could hear bits and pieces of their conversation. Apparently one of the members of the party considered himself a YouTube Influencer of sorts and I could hear chatter about video editing and plans on ramping up his channel, though I couldn’t ever discern what his influencing way about. The bits of gray in his large beard indicated he was probably in his 40s. I took a moment to try to find him online last night, but with the small bits of information I was able to glean from eavesdropping, I couldn’t find him anywhere.
I have little desire to be some sort of middle-aged Social Media Influencer. I have no desire to focus on that sort of thing, but when I hear that there’s some people following along to our 21+ years of documented adventures and the what not on this blog, I’m a bit humbled.
Truman enjoys building forts in his spare time. This week he decided to rearrange all the throw pillows on the bench around the kitchen table and then hide under a certain selection. He has done this since he joined our lives four years ago; many afternoons he can be found burrowed under the blankets on our bed. He’s not one to get under the bed, he prefers being under the blankets.
My annual salary increase was a little larger than anticipated. When I received the news on Monday, I told my husband I’d like to have a date night at a local restaurant, and the night should include a bottle of champagne.
We had a very nice time at Charro Steak and Del Rey here in Tucson. Living on the outskirts of the city, it’s a 30 minute or so drive to the downtown area. I enjoy the vibe of Tucson’s downtown. It’s small but feels rather up and coming and I like the area.
Our reservation was for 18:30 and we were seated just before the restaurant seemingly filled to capacity. I understand the restaurant to be two restaurants that were combined into one; we took a peek to the other (behind the wall with the bar) and the same atmosphere seemed to continue on over there.
The food was delicious and our selections were rather decadent. This sort of activity is not something we can do every week, even with my higher than anticipated raise, but once in a great while is rather fun.
While I have historically enjoyed trying different craft beers, as I get older my stomach doesn’t enjoy beer as much as it used to. I also enjoy a good glass of wine, and adding some bubbles to the experience was a nice change of pace. Actually, I’m discovering I really like Champagne and Prosecco when the mood is right. Years ago I read that Larry Hagman enjoyed drinking Champagne while performing as Major Nelson on “I Dream of Jeannie”. I don’t think I could do that. Once in a while is just fine for me.
Sidney, Nebraska. June 2022.Copeland, Kansas. June 2022.
My next storm chasing trip is just three weeks away. We’re starting to get into the zone where long range forecasts start to mean something. Nothing changes like the weather, but this far out one can start to see how things might shape up.
There’s several weather and storm chasing blogs and other outlets that I follow on a regular basis. Most are predicting a lively experience the week that I plan on being out there. I’m looking forward to seeing and experience some of Mother Nature’s feisty moments, in a safe manner of course. After all, I do need to return the rental car still intact. My brain chemistry won’t allow me to just destroy someone else’s property just because I have insurance.
It looks like I might be going a little farther east than I did last year. I’m also going a month earlier than I did last year, so theoretically I shouldn’t have to drive as far north as I did in 2022, but only time will tell. I’ll drive where I need to drive.
If the week turns out to be quiet, I still have plenty of towns and cities and the like to explore, and that can be just as fun for me, albeit in a very different way than riding out 60+ MPH winds, but still enjoyable.
I plan on being a little more active with sharing content from my adventures during this chase week in May. I’m still not sure how Twitter will figure into the mix, any foundation of stability and reliability with that platform is quickly eroding, but I will be sharing photos on Pixelfed, and unfortunately, Instagram. I’m not a fan of the Meta owned properties but I use them because so many folks I know are there.
I may also stream on YouTube, we’ll just have to see. I’m trying to decide if I need to build a new YouTube channel specifically for storm chasing and associated content. After all, the monsoon here in the desert can be lively as well, so I’d have plenty of opportunity to share videos and the such there. I think all the cool kids have a specific focus to their channels; I should probably do the same.
I’ll definitely be sharing my experiences here on Ye Ol’ Ancient Blog. Deciding to drive the entire trip, instead of flying to a starting point, has given me the opportunity to carry a little more in technology, so I should have plenty of horsepower at my disposal to make sharing a bit easier.
I’ve had the new M2 MacBook Air for a few weeks now and I’m still quite pleased with my purchase. The build quality of this computer is phenomenal, although I still prefer the keyboard on my Magic Keyboard case for my iPad Pro over the keyboard on the MacBook Air. It’s nowhere near the questionable experience of the Butterfly Keyboard Apple put in their machines in the late 2010s, but there’s something about the keyboard that feels slightly off when compared to the iPad Pro.
I’ve mentioned before that work insists I use a Windows 10 laptop. I have this docked to a large monitor with a standalone keyboard and mouse, because I don’t really enjoy the keyboard built into the Dell ultrabook. I wish they’d given me a Lenovo ThinkPad, those keyboards are wonderful, but alas, dude you got a Dell.
The standalone keyboard I’m using for work these days is a bluetooth Microsoft keyboard and after using it for a month or two it’s starting to miss characters once in a while or slowing down to wake up for work. I was hoping the Microsoft keyboard would give a PC version of a Mac keyboard experience, and it’s not bad. The spacing feels a little cramped but it doesn’t make the noise my mechanical keyboard makes, which is good for Zoom-type meetings and the like.
I still love the keyboard on my old Lenovo ThinkPad T460s, except the CTRL and FN keys are swapped and that throws me off from time to time. Linux is still quite enjoyable, and I just updated the ThinkPad to the latest version of Fedora. It’s now running Fedora 38 with Cinnamon as the desktop of choice.
My productivity is best on the MacBook Air, and that has become my daily machine. Linux desktops are quite nice but don’t feel quite as intuitive as Mac OS when it comes to getting things done. Too many of the desktop environment choices of Linux try to be something else. I really wish someone, somewhere would come up with something completely different from the desktop experience. I was hoping the iPad Pro and iPadOS would fill that niche, but Apple is just trying to shoehorn desktop functionality into a tablet. I’m hopeful that AI will someday be able to look at a “data stream” coming into your computer and basically ask you want to do with that data. For example, you get an email suggesting dinner out with a friend. The AI should be smart enough to present a few of choices: respond to the email, open your calendar, suggest a restaurant, or make the reservation. This is where walled garden data sources don’t work well and why I always lean on my data in one app being available to data in another app.
Maybe we’ll get there before the end of this life.
NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform. In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter’s decision to first label the network “state-affiliated media,” the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries.
Follow the link in the first paragraph for all the details. This is just another stone kicked out from the crumbling foundation of what’s left of Twitter.
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.
