Retired for One Year

Today it hit me that I have been retired for one year.  It doesn't seem that long ago when I was out-processing, and I couldn't wait to get home that day.  I have no regrets about going out when I did.  I miss the people I worked closely with and I am in occasional touch with them.  It was great getting to serve on that kind of team.  But situations like that are not forever, and for me it was time to get out.

Looking back, I thought I would have done more road trips than we have.  I want to reprise that one we did when we went up to Four Corners and back.  Dang, that was some really neat scenery we saw when we were up there!  But as I said in my  last post, we want the next one to be Alamogordo.

As for all those projects I told myself I was going to do..........well I've started a bunch of them.  And I'm still working on those.  The "Ugly Money" page has three times as many images as it did a year ago.  My coin collection has been worked on.  I've done a lot of reading, alternating between previously read books and those that have been on the shelf for more years than I would like to admit.  And with another heat advisory (this one "severe") underway there's been a lot of reading.  And very little yardwork.  

In spite of all of that, there have been a lot of necessary but not fun tasks at hand.  Today we took a truckload of items to Goodwill.  Some from my mother's house, some from the master bedroom closet, and some books that I know I will not be re-reading.  I guess this begs the question, what books am I keeping?

I still have all of my college textbooks.  On a rare occasion I will pull one out, thumb through it, mainly to see if I still understand what I studied 45 years ago.  Not a lot of it was used as a reference during my career.  I think the degree I earned is evidence that I was trained how to think like an engineer.  There wasn't a single course I took that addressed satellite engineering or aircraft engines.  But I had an understanding of why they worked they way in which they worked.  

I've also kept the Tom Clancy and James Bond novels.  All are interesting reading.

The Isaac Asimov novels are remaining in the bookshelf.  I have read all of them at least twice, maybe three times.

The recipe books, which I really need to dig out and get some ideas on what to cook.

So, what do I foresee in the coming year?  I'm not going to dwell on that in this post, but I can list some goals.

One, some more traveling, preferably via road.  We are looking at getting a trailer and living out of that during our adventures.  I have researched solar panels which we intend to use to power the trailer, and I've somewhat recently purchased a ham radio rig that's ruggedly designed for portable use.  

Two, have my coin collection and currency collection better organized.

Three, some more reading.  

Four, more genealogical research.  I'm not sure if I should dig some more into my Bonsall roots, or to concentrate on my Pilkington ancestry.  As of late it's the Parkers I've been looking into.  

The bottom line is that I will keep busy.  The challenge is to live long enough to get the rest of the things I want to do done.

7/9/26: Thursday

I can't say that there's been a whole lot that's worthy of report here.  We either have high heat warnings or high wind warnings, and we need more rain than we're getting.  I've spent some time scanning my QSL cards for my ham radio blog, and some defaced banknotes for my "Ugly Money" page that's on this blog.  The defaced nots are also posted on a webforum that I frequent, along with others who share this unusual enthusiasm for collecting these kinds of things.

I'm also going thru my US banknote collection and getting that organized.  I have a healthy collection of foreign banknotes, and I want to get that inventoried, organized, and post scans of that on a new page.  I have many archived scans that I could start with.  Foreign money has interested me for many years, and my collection of foreign currency is viewed as an art collection.  

And just think, in a matter of a few weeks I'll have been retired for a year.  I hear from tech recruiters on an almost daily basis and it's rare for me to respond.  I've seen two of the jobs that smell rather badly of attempts at industrial espionage.  I don't like to discuss what I've worked on in the past except in very generic terms.  I've worked on orbiting satellites, satellite ground stations, circuit cards, aircraft engine monitoring systems and cancer detection equipment.  I miss the good times when I was a satellite engineer and the overseas travel that I got out of it, but I'm not going back to it.

That said, I won't rule out updating my resume and throwing it out there.  One former supervisor has the right of first refusal if I do go forward with this.  Plan B is another supervisor who I know but did not work for.  I can think of a Plan C and a Plan D if I want to.  But I've got to work on getting my mother's house sold.  The work on the house itself that we've wanted done to it completed this afternoon and I expect we will have this one the market before the end of the month. 

And after that, I want to do a road trip.  I'm looking at Alamogordo, northern New Mexico, northern Arizona and historic 66 on this one.  Maybe then I'll entertain the idea of making some good money on the side.

Dang, I almost forgot.  Last week while doing some genealogical research I discovered that I am related, although distantly, to Jeannie C. Riley of Harper Valley PTA fame.  We share a 5th great grandfather, that being John Parker, born in 1725.  Her descent from there comes down a different son from this John Parker.   As far as I can tell that branch of the family was one of the pioneering families of what was then the Mexican state of Texas.  

There is also some information about this John Parker's forebears which, if reliable, goes back further than 1725.  If that information is true it would explain why there is a Massachusetts/Connecticut connection to the Parker family, which keeps coming up from more than one source, and one of those is reliable.  I know that the Parkers owned land in Virginia and North Carolina because I've seen the property tax rolls as well as other documentation.  But did they own land down south while living up north?  I can't prove they were in New England at this point in time.

I think with that I'll call this a post, and watch some Looney Tunes.  

Those were some of the best cartoons ever made.

Buc-ee's Has Come to Arizona

If you don't already know it, Buc-ee's is a famous chain known for huge amounts of gas pumps, a huge store, a huge selection of items, and is fast developing a following.  I have known about them for some time but have never been to one.  I've had a few people tell me I should go at least once, but I don't plan on going out of my way to get to one anytime soon.

Anyway, they opened up their first Arizona location in Goodyear, right off I-10.  I honestly would have thought they would have opened in Eloy first.  The opening was a big event here in the state, with hotels being booked to capacity and law enforcement having to re-route traffic.  I don't know if the hubbub has died down yet, and I don't have occasion to pass thru Goodyear.  If I need to use I-10 west of Phoenix metro, I take the bypass thru Gila Bend to avoid Phoenix.

I could criticize those who camped out for a few days before the grand opening, which if I do, then I'd have to hope that no one ever finds out I stood in a long line here in Tucson when In-N-Out Burger opened their first location here.  The honest truth of the matter is, those people who are fans of Buc-ee's aren't out robbing liquor stores, and I consider them more desirable to society than lottery addicts.  

As for why I don't see myself going to Buc-ee's, it's for these reasons.  One, I'm something of a Quik Trip loyalist.  They opened up in Tucson some years back and it's my convenience store of choice.  Two, if you buy something to eat from a Buc-ee's kitchen, they don't provide a place for you to sit down (some, but not all, of the Quik Trips do).  Three, I don't like crowds very much.

Now if I happen to be on the road somewhere and need some gas, I might stop there to check it out.  I'm sure I would go in and wander around some, to see what they have.  I might even grab a brisket sandwich to see what that's all about.

All of that said, it has to be noted that what we have here in Buc-ee's is an American success story.  They are doing something right to have the kind of following that they have.  Bucky Beaver is on his way to becoming as recognizable as Ronald McDonald.  

And I just might be missing out on something if I don't check it out.

To Virginia and Back

Last week Sheila, Courtney and I boarded a plane to take us to Sheila's sister out in Chesapeake, VA.  After connecting in Atlanta (my first time thru that airport) we arrived at their local time at 1:00 AM.  The folks at the Avis counter were top notch in that one, and Delta Airlines managed to regain some points with me.

I had met my sister-in-law when she was here in Tucson, but I had not met the rest of her family.  They were great hosts and I felt an instant connection to my brother-in-law.  Side trips were made to Virginia's Eastern Shore and down to Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina where I got to visit the spot where the Wright brothers changed the world on one cold December morning over 100 years ago.  

While in the Tarheel State, I sampled some eastern North Carolina barbecue, which I had when I was last there in 2012.  This time it was a different place, and no offense to anyone there, but I just wasn't impressed with it.  Don't get me wrong, it had flavor, but my palate seems to be more favorable to what I had in Texas and what I've had off of my grill.  It's that I won't go out of my way for eastern NC barbecue, but I hope that sometime next year I will be in the western part of that state to try it Piedmont style.

Virginia is a beautiful state, and was when I lived in Manassas in 1975.  My memories of Manassas are very fond, and for a long time I wanted to go back there and live.  While in Arlington on business in 1989 I drove to Manassas and saw that it had changed so much that I wouldn't even consider living there now.  It's grown, the traffic was worse, and I'm sure that it's reached the intolerable point some time ago.

I should post some pictures of this, which means I might create a photo album page at some point in the future.  I'm still too jet-lagged to do anything like that today.  We got back late Wednesday night, and I'm slowly unpacking and getting things back to where they used to be before we left.  We enjoyed that trip very much and definitely want to do it again next year.  

There's still some traveling we want to do.  Our next road trip will take us over into the Land of Enchantment, as that I want to visit the Space Museum in Alamogordo as well as some other places.  After that I'm thinking Prescott and Sedona.

Before I go, one announcement that I didn't think I'd be making.

I'm giving some thought to coming out of retirement.  No, I am not bored or anything like that.  It's that some of the jobs that the recruiters have been contacting me about look like they'd be really fun and interesting to do.  I have turned down lots of interview requests recently, but I'm thinking, why not update my resume, throw it out there, and see what happens?

Ideally it would be a part time contracting gig, and one of my former employers would offer me that, and possibly another former employer.  The money would be useful and would help further my recreational pursuits.  

It's something to think about some more, but I can't tell you which way I will go on this.  

But as busy as I have been in retirement, if I go back to the workforce then I could get some rest.

Mexican Restaurants in Tucson

For very many years I have had a weakness for Mexican food.  There are some good places in San Jose.  I know of a good one up in Mesa.  There was one in El Paso I was at many years ago that was good.  Not that I'm biased or anything, but I think Tucson has some really excellent places, and after a great meal that we had two nights ago, I figured I would do a blog entry about what we have here.  And all that I mention are recommended.

The Mexican cuisine here is heavily influenced by our neighboring Mexican state of Sonora.  If you know where to go here you can get Mexico City style or New Mexico style.  In no particular order, here are the places we like to eat.

In South Tucson, we have had a lot of fine meals at Guillermo's Double L.  This place features Sonoran cuisine, with the #1 combo meal on the menu being my go-to.  My most recent visit was with two friends who were co-workers when we worked at Paragon Space Development.  

Over in Catalina, north of Tucson on state highway 77, is Carlota's.  I've met the same two friends up there as well.  I was introduced to it on my first day on the job when I was with Tucson Embedded Systems.  Their lunch combinations are all good.  They have since moved to the western side of the highway and have expanded their menu.  Folks, they have some selections that I haven't seen anywhere else.   You can't go wrong here.  And it's Sonora style.

On the east side here in Tucson, is Poco & Mom's.  This place features New Mexico style.  As far as I've been able to determine, it's the real deal.  I have eaten New Mexico style in Deming and Silver City.  This style has some more zing to it than Sonoran style, which means "mild" is zing and "hot" is rocket fuel.  The breakfast sopapillas are a favorite.

Also on the east side is the family-run Los Nopales at Golf Links & Harrison.  My way home from work took me by this place, and I noticed that their parking lot was always full, even on a weekday.  A full parking lot is usually a barometer of how great the food is, and when Sheila and I tried it we learned why the parking lot is almost always packed.  It's Sonoran style, generous portions, and family-run.  They close on occasion for vacation, during Holy Week, Fourth of July week, and of course Christmas.  We were there two nights ago.  

Over in midtown, there is La Parilla Suiza.  This is Mexico City style, with some selections you're not going to see elsewhere.  Sheila and I had our first date there.  There are other La Parilla Suiza locations and I've heard that one or two of the others are not as good as this one on Speedway, but I haven't verified that.

While we're still on the Mexico City style, this can also be had at any of the Guadalajara Grill locations.  This was founded by a husband and wife team, and they added a second, and maybe a third location, before they divorced.  Two of the locations mysteriously burned down to the ground when the divorce proceedings started.  That was some fifteen years ago.  Anyway, they are back in commission.  I've always enjoyed the food here, but I happen to like the others you just read about somewhat better.

One other Eastside Tucson gem is El Sur on 22nd.  This is a family run restaurant, somewhat hole-in-the-wall, and excellent honest Sonoran cuisine.  The drawback is the parking is a bit challenging.  And the inside is almost always packed too.

Finally, one local chain here is La Herredura.  We are partial to the one on Tanque Verde near Bear Canyon.  Their menu selection includes some seafood dishes that I don't see elsewhere.  One seafood dish pictured in the menu, I'm guessing it's filete ajo or something like that, is a favorite.  Their #7, red chile and green chile combination, is another excellent selection.  I need to get back there in the near future.

With that, it's a wrap, and a bit different type of article than the others I've written here.  

Sunday, 3/29/26; Checking In

In a few days I will have been retired for eight months.  I have made the observation that on some days I am busier now than I was when I was in the workforce, and my last job as a Product Test Engineer was one of the busiest jobs I ever did in my career.  I still get dreams that I am back there, and if the dream continues long enough I think "wait a minute, what am I doing here?  I'm retired!"  One of the reasons why I am busy is that I give myself a lot of things to do, some of it necessary, some of it fun, and very little idle time, if at any.  I have taken to forcing myself to do some recreational reading for one hour a day or so, and I'm currently working on one of the James Bond novels written by John Gardner.

For many years I have been something of a James Bond fan.  I remember watching "Diamonds Are Forever" when ABC had it as a Sunday night movie back when I was in junior high.  I figured back then when it came to the movies, you had to pay strict attention to what was going on in the beginning if you were to understand the rest of the movie.  I couldn't get my head around that as a junior high schooler, but I did take note of the stunts, especially when our hero was climbing the outside of a hotel in Las Vegas.

In the 1984 timeframe, my interest in the movies got going.  I rented the VHS cassettes from a rental store where I had a membership, and I watched them all..........and understood them better.  My favorite was "For Your Eyes Only" which I saw in a movie theater in the summer of 1981 when I was visiting a friend in Maryland, and really enjoyed the stuntwork in that one.

Anyway, that year I was collecting all of the Ian Fleming-authored novels, and learned right away that his novels quickly diverged from the movies early on.  "Diamonds Are Forever" is one such example of that divergence.  Although Las Vegas was in the novel, the plot was different.  

Fleming got away from us too soon if you ask me, and it wasn't for many years when John Gardner was approached about bringing James Bond back into the novels.  I have all of them, have been re-reading them, and enjoyed them.  

Now some of the Bond fans panned Gardner's novels.  The first in the series was a decent read, and yes, the critics were right that Gardner wasn't Fleming.  But Gardner did not set out to be Fleming, and the subsequent novels are entertaining and I'm having trouble putting The Man from Barbarossa down.  I know that there are post-Gardner novels out there and I have a few of them that I haven't gotten to yet, and the next recreational read might be a Tom Clancy novel, or one of the many books that Thomas Sowell authored.  There is one of Dr. Sowell's in the bookshelf that I want to re-read, and I might be bringing that up in its own separate blog post.

As for some other activities, there is of course, ham radio, but I'm currently on a hiatus from the airwaves.  As passionate as I am about that hobby, I find it helpful to take the occasional break from it so that I don't burn out on it, so to speak.  Thus, this afternoon had two, maybe three hours of reading, and if it isn't a novel then it's articles from radio magazines in an effort to better understand the digital modes I have been experimenting with.  But here comes something else I am considering.  Learning a foreign language.

Now I took three years of Spanish in junior high school, and if I had kept that up I would be fluent in it.  At my peak I could have been dropped off in South America and been able to find my way home.  Those three  years made it easier to learn Italian, which I needed since I knew I would be spending time there.  I found Italian to be a very fun language, and got to where I could be conversational in it.  It came in handy while over there on a business trip in 1997 as that one of my co-workers and I got lost in Rome, it was night, and we needed directions.  I was able to converse with the manager of a benzina station and understand his instructions on how to get back to the hotel.  He slowed down his speaking, and my comprehension was 100%.

In that same trip, it came in handy when my supervisor and I went to a restaurant.  I was able to order the pizza, with the toppings that we wanted on it.  The waiter was so impressed to meet an American who could speak his language, and when we asked him to call a cab to take us back to the hotel, he drove us over in his car instead!  And folks, a compliment of that magnitude doesn't happen very often in a lifetime.  

Anyway, I have learned a little Portuguese, as that I talk to Brazil quite often over the air, and I like giving the signal report and my location in Portuguese.  The operators over there like that very much, even though I think many of them want to practice their English.  I have thought about developing my Portuguese some, I have thought about trying to recapture what I knew in Italian and Spanish, but there's also French and German that I could learn, even though the odds of my going to Germany or France, much less Quebec, aren't really there.  I guess the justification here is to tell myself that I've broadened my horizons.........somewhat.  

There are lots of online language lessons out there, and my most recent dabbling in them was for the purpose of learning how to count to ten in French.  I know how to count to ten in English, German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, and with more practice I will add French to that list.  We'll see.

With this I now close this post, and head upstairs.  And I think I will knock off one more chapter in The Man from Barbarossa.

The Kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie

The now week-old kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of news anchor Savannah Guthrie, has made national headlines in addition to consuming a lot of local attention here.  I haven't been one to comment on current events lately mainly because I don't have anything to add to what's already been said.  I risk that with this posting, but nonetheless here we go.

The news of the Bitcoin ransom broke shortly after this, with my thinking that there might be a few out there trying to scam the family as that scam emails starting popping up in my spam folder with one of the email accounts that I have.  The scammer claimed to have access to my files and had been watching me with a webcam, which is not possible as that the computers I use have them all disabled.  Sure enough, someone from California was caught demanding a ransom via Bitcoin, and in spite of covering all of his tracks he was caught.  And I hope he's locked away for so long that when he gets out there is no one left alive who remembers what happened.

Of course, as I write this, Nancy Guthrie remains kidnapped, and there is no proof one way or the other that she is even alive.  Ransom demands are still coming, the investigation is ongoing in addition to being intense, and although I have read up on all of the publicly available details that doesn't tell me how close the Pima County Sheriff's Department is to solving this case.

And since I don't know, I will speculate some on this.

There is something that's not right with this.  By that I mean, whoever did this had to have some inside knowledge of the family and residence.  This suggests that a family member, either by blood or by marriage, knows some things about this that the rest of us doesn't know.  This also suggests that there is a motive behind this that is connected to some inner drama of that family.

I say this because the victim here, Nancy Guthrie, is difficult to keep alive relative to most of the rest of us.  She is in need of some medications that must be taken on a daily basis for starters, and since to our knowledge, those medications weren't taken with her, this suggests that whoever did this really isn't interested in keeping her alive.

Also, this happened in the dead of night.  Whoever did this is well familiar with her residence.  He or she knew which security cameras to unplug, may have known that an understaffed sheriff's department would not be quick enough in responding to prevent this (and/or knew something about the company doing the monitoring, if applicable), and had to have had entry somehow.  

Would Nancy Guthrie have let some stranger in who knocked on the door in the dead of night?  Or was this a forced entry?  I don't know how the intruder got in, but I can speculate that the intruder or intruders knew some things about that residence that were just not known to the general public.

Of course the kidnapper(s) could have scoped it out beforehand.  Is it possible that it was someone who came over there to fix the air conditioner or clean the pool?  That kind of person might have had the knowledge needed for this.

Like most of the rest of us, I would like to see Nancy Guthrie emerge from this alive and well.  I am hoping that a family member or close associate is NOT involved, because that would be, in my opinion, one way for this situation to be much worse than it would be otherwise.

I could also be wrong about all or some of this, and if I am, then it won't be a blow to my ego.