I’ve kicked off the Resolution Revolution for 2023 and I’ve been focused on finances. Over the years I have accumulated some recurring subscriptions (redundant?) in Apple’s App Store. They are for apps that I use with some regularity and quite frankly it’s unfortunate that the tech industry has moved to this recurring charge model.
I wiped out a LOT of little subscriptions today. To the tune of savings around $1000 a year. $50 a year for web access to a task manager? Gone. Nearly $400 a year for aviation software that does practically everything but fly the jet? Reduced to General Aviation levels. Linux servers in the cloud? Relocated to home, where they run for free.
I get that developers need to make cash but our bank account can’t afford to be so gratuitous to these folks. If there’s an open source version that I can support and run on my own server I’m going to do it.
I feel like there’s some turbulent times in the financial world coming for all of us 2023. It’s time to get things in a row so we can weather the storm.
It’s official. My husband and I have been married for more than a quarter of a century. Today we are celebrating 26 years of wedded bliss and honestly, I don’t know where the time has gone.
We are going out to dinner this evening at a nice place called Commoner and Co. here in Tucson. We may go shopping beforehand.
We had a lot of activity in the house this week. Much of the damage from Monsoon Season 2021 was finally repaired and the house is looking intact again. Last Thursday and Friday the drywall company was here and replaced the missing drywall that was removed due to water damage. On Monday and Tuesday this week, our new exterior doors were replaced. The original doors were never installed correctly and the floor and door framing underneath the exterior doors on the second floor were in really bad shape. The contractors had to remove and rebuild the flooring in our bedroom in front of our door that goes outside.
The contractors made a small hole in the floor to inspect the damage. They went to seal up the hole when they noticed cat hair on the edges of the hole. Truman was missing. They were confident he’d gone down the hole.
We searched around the house, searched around the property, searched the roof (where the second floor doors provide access), no Truman. The contractor said, “I see the insulation mashed down, he’s down there”.
Kitty was almost sealed up in the floor while sniffing the floor joists between the first and second floor.
The contractors ended up taking out a much bigger section of the floor and climbing down in to see what was up. A few moments later we heard the unmistakable sounds of a cat being pulled out of a hiding place by his paws and he was not happy. But he was out of the hole and back up in the house where he belonged.
I raided my casino winnings for a very nice tip for the extra work the contractors did to extract Truman from the floor joists. Truman demanded treats upon his extraction.
When I was hired at WOWZ/WOWB in 1994, it was as their Music Director and night time air personality. I was excited about the gig; the Top 40 radio station I had been on was sold, the entire staff was fired, and the station was switched to Classic Rock. This left a gap in the market and I was excited to be signing onto this new station to bring it to the masses.
The station didn’t have a clear direction for its first 18 months or so; they wanted to be “Adult Contemporary” during the day (for at work listening) but at night they wanted to turn up the heat with dance and rhythmic Top 40 music. A radio station will not succeed without a solid identity, a cohesive format, and most importantly, without listeners. Women 18-54 tuning into the day didn’t want to hear the rhythmic music at night and vice-versa. After a couple of poor performances in the Arbitron ratings, the Program Director was fired, I was put in place as Program Director, and I was given the green light to make it a Top 40 Rhythmic Station with a focus on dance music full time.
Earl and I would drive around the state on the weekends and listen to what other stations were doing and I stole ideas from all of them. By the end of 1996 the station had a cohesive sound in both identity and music, was starting to get traction with the audience, and most importantly, started showing decent ratings giving us two things: more advertising dollars and “reporting status” in Radio and Records. Record companies didn’t care about radio stations that didn’t have reporting status. Once they found out who we were and that what we played matter, I was suddenly everyone record company rep’s best friend.
One of the challenges I faced at the time was filling in the back catalog with music from the mid to late 1980s. The disco stuff was easy to find; there were plenty of CD collections out at the time with the likes of Chic and Blondie and Pamala Stanley and Gloria Gaynor and the like. It was the dance music that had been released in the mid to late 1980s that was hard to find, as it didn’t make it to collections on CD yet and cassette singles sounded awful on the air.
Up until the days of Napster and Limewire (and I will never admit that I played music obtained through those services because of course I didn’t, wink wink), we relied on 12-inch singles found in record shops. I’d end up recording the 12-inch singles onto reel-to-reel tape and then editing down the longer formatted tracks to a friendly radio length. Because of this we would play versions that were familiar to listeners but weren’t quite the radio edit heard back when the songs were originally released. One or two of these edits caught the attention of record reps that were visiting the station and they made their way back to the record companies to get released on compilation albums or other music services.
One of the songs I had a really time getting my hands on didn’t actually do that well in U.S. Top 40 radio but plenty of folks knew it. (It had hit #40 on Top 40 radio in 1989). The song had done fairly well in U.S. clubs but had done really well in Canadian clubs, so there was enough familiarity with the track to put it into the back catalog. The 12-inch single was scarce, but I finally scored a copy while combing through the record collection of a club DJ. I never edited down the 5+ minute mix and instead just burned it as is to a CD-R; I figured the DJs could use the track to step away from the console to use the bathroom. We’d often jump in 20 seconds to start the song, but some of the jocks didn’t do that.
We decided to run some errands after dinner on Wednesday night. We had some gifts to pick up, so we made the rounds of the neighborhood. I asked my husband if he wanted to stop for a drink and he thought that was a great idea.
There’s a couple of nifty bar and restaurants in our general vicinity. I’ve been telling Earl I would like to find a happy hour situation for a once in a while visit with perhaps other folks that work full time from home. I really enjoyed going out like this once in a while when we lived in Chicago (until the pandemic brought that to a halt) and I said we’re not doing it enough now that we live in Tucson. So we’ll probably do this a little more.
I just remember that’s it’s a drive, and not a train that gets us home afterwards.
We are fortunate to have a glass fireplace that faces both into the living room and out to the patio. I snapped a photo of the fireplace and found the reflections fascinating.
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.
