On This Day in 2020, it looks like I caught the leading edge of an incoming haboob here in Phoenix.
My favorite waterfall in Iceland was Dettifoss, which is also the “angriest” waterfall I’ve met. What a cool scene. But it was only one of a number of cool waterfalls we visited On This Day in 2021.
I’m helping my mom purchase a vehicle after hers was totaled in an accident. Since it’s on my mind, I put together a list of my own highly opinionated rules for car buying.
My vista on this day last year.
A few waterfalls from OTD in 2023.
An essay in the New York Times this week—entitled I Reviewed Restaurants for 12 Years. They’ve Changed, and Not for the Better (🎁)—laments how technology has slowly dehumanized the dining experience.
It is just the latest in a series of changes that have gradually and steadily stripped the human touch and the human voice out of restaurants. Each of these changes was small, but together they’ve made going out to eat much less personal. Meals are different now, and our sense of who we are is different, too.
…
In my first few years on the job, I thought of restaurants as one of the few places left where our experiences were completely human.
It’s something I’ve noticed too, and wrote a little about earlier this year: Two Men in a McDonald’s in Small Town America.
20 seconds of Eilean Donan Castle in the Scottish Highlands, OTD in 2023.
My buddy is moving away, which means we needed one more Return to Paradise (Lounge).
#blogging #blaugust2024 #100DaystoOffload
My BlogPrompts.fyi site—which offers (you’ll never guess it) a whole bunch of random topics for you to blog about—now features over 350 prompts, FYI.
(and special thanks to Lou Plummer and Forking Mad for major contributions) #blogging #blaugust2024 #100DaystoOffload
A few shots from On This Day last year in Scotland.
On This Day in 2023: Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries. 🪵🐇
On This Day in 2019, I brought my dad up to an ASU football practice at Camp Tontozona, its annual training camp that’s located in the cool pines just under the Mogollon Rim. Camp T has been an annual tradition for more than six decades now.
A runway that changed the world
On this day 79 years ago, this runway on the small island of Tinian in the Mariana Islands changed the world. It was from this stretch of remote pavement that the Enola Gay took to the air with a ferocious new weapon, headed to Hiroshima to inflict unbelievable damage.
We visited the then-abandoned site in 2017 as part of our travel quest to visit all the major sites associated with the Manhattan Project.
Owning your music. Again.
Kelly Sims wrote some thoughts on Ownership in the Rental Age:
And so I find myself once again thinking about ownership. I owned this music, as much as anyone can really own anything these days. I took time to curate the music and time to carefully rip the CD’s into a portable format. Now, as I look through the songs I had added to Apple match, a large portion of them are now DRM’d as Apple Music files. I can’t ever take them to listen on some other player, which means I do not own these anymore. I effectively sold them to Apple for free. And in exchange for this “sale” I get to listen to some of them some of the time, all when Apple and the music licensing gods decide.
I’m right there with you, Kelly. This was the same issue I’ve faced. And for much of the last decade, I had essentially given up on the whole damn thing.
Until earlier this year. I upgraded my computer, added a home NAS, and decided that I was going to reclaim my music library. A branch of the Phoenix Public Library is just a couple blocks away from my house. So a few seconds to set up a hold request on some music I used to own, select the local branch as the destination, and a day or two later, walk over and pick up the CD, and via a $25 external cd drive, rip it to my computer.
And thereby, own it once again.
I’m a few days late, but finally posted a recap of July 2024. Not sure if I’ll do these each month, but wanted to give it a go at least once.
#blaugust2024 #100DaystoOffload #blogging
📷 One of my favorite parts of visiting London last year was touring the Churchill War Rooms. Seems nearly comical that they were conducting the war by using push pins in a wall map. How times have changed. OTD 2023
📷 Look up. OTD in 2023
I finally got around to posting a personal introduction for Blaugust 2024.
Since I’m going to blog on multiple sites during the challenge, I’ll keep a list of them all on this page.
#Blaugust2024
Along the Glenn Highway, Alaska - OTD 2018
Arizona has some interesting place names, and the town of Show Low in the White Mountains has one of the best naming stories around. OTD in 2020.
