I got up, filled the car with gas and washed it, came home, walked the dog (as best I could given the heavy equipment running incessantly,) ate lunch, showered and played ball with the dog for an hour or so then saddled up and drove to Palm Springs.
I was expecting the grueling stop and go traffic that has become so common every hour of the day or night here. So I left early for an appointment out in PS.
Thing is, traffic wasn’t the usual insanity. In fact it was a pleasure driving. That’s something I haven’t experienced in California for a very long time.
The last time(s) the freeways were this open I can count on one hand. Sept 11, A day without a Mexican, and the height of COVID panic.
No, Really, I’m not being racist. The organizers called it, “A Day Without a Mexican”. It was a protest organized by an organization that helped illegal aliens and they wanted to make the point about how many Mexicans provided various services such as labor, to the Los Angeles region. The whole thing backfired spectacularly.
As requested, the Mexican labor force didn’t show up to work. And the freeways were blissfully wide open. No broken down cars or trucks littering the I-10. No gardening equipment was bouncing randomly on the 405 during rush hour. And no one was inconvenienced at all at any of the fast food joints. The whole thing was so noticeable AM and FM radio personalities were saying we needed to have “A Day without a Mexican” on a regular basis.
I think the organization the set the protest up is no longer around. I haven’t heard anything like their rhetoric for a very long time.
Anyhow, I was moving along so well, and the online freeway maps were all showing green, that I dropped into the Apple Store and purchased this nifty little charging stand. It was inexpensive and super neat, ( I wish I’d thought of it!)
If you’ve got an Apple Watch, you’re familiar with the magnetic charging puck you set your watch on to recharge. Apple makes a bigger version for charging iPhones. I’ve had the iPhone charging puck for a few years. The problem with the thing is that it’s not anchored to anything and it’s light enough that if you pick your phone up, the puck stays attached to your phone, so you put stress on the cable, and if you’re in a hurry you’ll pull the phone off the puck and the puck lands on your desk, nightstand, or counter, with a bang.
In my case the wooden nightstand. The puck has enough weight to ding the top of furniture. Especially if it lands edge on.
The nifty little stand I purchased lets you snap the Apple charging puck into it and then holds your phone via the magnetic puck at a nice viewing angle. It also allows you to use a new feature in IOS that turns your iPhone into a very nice bedside clock.
I like that the phone is up off the nightstand, (so I don’t put my water glass on it, mistaking it for a coaster in the middle of the night,) and I found a clock face on my phone that is nostalgic. This particular face is reminiscent of an old Sunbeam electric alarm clock in my parents room when I was a child. My mom kept that bedside alarm clock until the grinding of the gears kept her up at night. Yeah, we’re talking analog, with a gear train and it was always warm to the touch due to the a/c motor and neon lamp inside.
Goofy as it sounds, seeing that face in the night makes me feel like “I’ve Arrived…”
Arrived at what, I don’t know. Perhaps the stage where nostalgia puts a smile on my face.
Apple Store purchase completed, I got back on the road to Palm Springs. And I flew! Just being able to drive without dealing with morons blocking the freeway because they were texting, jerking off, smoking dope, or finger banging themselves was bliss!
I love my car, but I really love my car when I can open it up.
Admittedly, there were a couple of times yesterday when I punched through the inevitable knots of stupidity before those knots fully formed and “solidified”.
I punched through these tiny annoyances at 95MPH.
FUN!!!!
I wasn’t in a hurry, I was just enjoying the power and smoothness of a machine that I really enjoy.
The down side to my enthusiasm, is that I arrived at my appointment 30 minutes early. It would have been 45 minutes early, but for the Apple store stop!
After that appointment, I’d planned to meet a friend at one of the bars in the area. The plan was to have a couple of drinks and then wander off in search of food. Whoops! Last weekend was Palm Springs Pride. The weekend before that was Palm Springs Leather Pride. Several of the bars that I like were closed on a Tuesday night due to “Pride” fatigue.
REALLY!!???
Pussies! In my misspent youth I was the energizer fucking bunny! Party Starting Thursday Night go to work Friday Morning, with clothes stashed in the trunk of my car “just in case”, and party right on through the weekend, go to work Monday morning and I was driving all over hells half acre to bars and friends places.
(Honestly, I don’t know how the hell I did it. Oh, right… There was speed involved! Uhhh, well, okay, I retract my earlier “Pussies” comment.)
I met my friend outside the closed bar we were planning to meet in, his dog recognized me after 3.5 – 4 years of not seeing me. My friend recognized me too, which felt amazing since he looked so damn nice and I feel that I’m aging poorly and at an accelerated rate!
We negotiated the bar closures, and several restaurant closures to find ourselves sitting out on a patio having a lovely dinner & drinks.
We caught up, and enjoyed each other’s company. Then as these things go, it was time to call it a night. My friend had an early morning and I had a long assed drive.
Fortunately, I was once again able to enter the time warp on the freeway, and got home at a decent hour.
Jesse was throughly displeased with me.
I think he might have thought he’d been left alone forever. He was outside, it wasn’t too cold, he had food and water, but the house was dark and he might have remembered the events of January. Maybe he thought he’d lost me, I’m not sure.
When I got home, the lights turned on automatically, the garage door opening may have woke him. When I stepped out onto the deck I was greeted with happy zoomies, then several balls were dropped at my feet.
Then… My dog slut shamed me!
No I hadn’t had sex, but I had been with another dog so for the next 15 minutes every inch of me was sniffed. The look on Jesse’s face was really funny. On the one hand he was glad I was home, on the other hand he’d caught me cheating. Last night, he wasn’t letting me out of his sight. He went so far as to keep grabbing my arm.
I learned that I don’t like being away from him for extended periods. All told I was gone about 8-9 hours. I missed him. I think we need to start going places together. This is going to be a pain in the ass at first, but I would like for him to be able to be a good traveling companion. I think it will be worth the time and effort.
I need to find some decent seat covers!
I was planning to head out to the grocery store this morning. But as upset as Jesse was last night, maybe I’ll wait to do that until tomorrow. There’s a Petco near the grocery store. That would give me the opportunity to shop for seat covers and a padded harness that wouldn’t hurt him in an accident or hard stop if he was secured via a seatbelt.
Now I’m off to make amends by sharing my breakfast.
Have a great day.
I’m happy about the Speaker because he seems untainted by the rampant corruption in Washington. Time will tell. I do really like the thought of him whipping Congress into working something like real business hours instead of what we’ve been seeing. We’ll never get our money’s worth out of Congress. That’s a given, but maybe this new guy will put an end to Congress sitting around jerking off instead of passing budgets, laws, and finding ways to cut the obscene waste our government finds all too easy to create.
Yesterday Apple released a lot of software.
I don’t have that many apps on my phone. Part of that is about security and part of it is about not really seeing anything that I would call mind bogglingly useful given the way I live.
Other times they don’t!
A simple example would be the AI deciding to present information on a display that was dark gray on a black screen for the sake of saving energy. Think of an OLED screen where you might only need to turn on the elements in use instead of firing up every element in the display. Keeping the used elements very dim would really be saving energy.
Automated testing is great, but eliminates the human element. That means, that human things like information on a display can be overlooked in testing, and yet the automated tests passed with flying colors.
Hmm another defect just popped out at me.
It may sound like I”m bashing on Apple. I’m not intentionally.