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.

1/24/26: Odds, Ends, and Musings

These are very interesting times we are living in.  I could go on about what's been happening in Minneapolis recently, but I am not.  Anything I could say about it has already been duplicated many times over on social media platforms and comments sections of news sites that choose to have them.  And as it is, this really isn't something I feel like discussing, thus this post will be odds, ends, and random musings.  So here we go.

As of the past couple of months I have developed an appreciation for hot sauces like never before.  This started some six months ago when I started putting some on some of the food that I eat, and bolstered more by that trip to New Mexico last November.  I have since broken open those bottles that I've brought back.  I've since discovered that most of the brands I got over there can be gotten over here, with one exception, and that being the La Anita red sauce that I got in a four ounce bottle.  That was one of my favorites of that bunch, with El Yucatero being almost rocket fuel and is used somewhat sparingly.

Of the major brands, my favorite are the Cholula sauces, with their red sauce and their chili garlic sauce being the favorites there.  Zing, but not rocket fuel.  I still have those chili pods that I brought back from Silver City and yes, I really need to get off my sitting end and make some from scratch.  I have found that adding sauce has helped some with my digestive tract.  The issues I had been having have since passed with using sauces.  I am convinced that there are health benefits to these sauces.  I don't usually add them though when we're out to eat at any Mexican place, since the local favorite dishes don't need any additional ingredients.

Also over the past couple of months, I've been very busy in ham radio.  The thinking is that the solar peak has passed, and the we're in the downward slope of the solar cycle.  I am trying to make the most of these conditions while we have them.  I'm up to 159 countries worked already.  I've also made some good friends via the local ham radio club scene, as that I'm active in two clubs and I've learned a lot.

Over in the precious metals market, I'm amazed at what gold and silver has done, especially silver.  I have kicked myself many times over for not buying more gold back when it was $310 an ounce or so, but I did stock up on silver coins when silver was $4.50 an ounce.  I wanted to get some dates/mints that I didn't have, and the side benefit was that I regarded it as a long term investment.  I could sell off 10% of what I bought and recover the dollars that I put into it, but it goes without saying that the dollars I recover are worth less than what I spent back in the day.  I can make the argument that I should have bought more silver, but I stopped when I felt like I had had enough, aside from the one ounce bullion coins that some countries have issued.  Now that silver's broken the $100 an ounce barrier, I don't see myself buying any.  I'm wondering if we have a bubble here that's getting ready to burst.  My gut tells me there's still some upside potential, but I'm also old enough to remember silver breaking the $50 an ounce barrier back in 1980 and how far it fell from that level before it picked up again.

As for retirement, I'll admit that I've toyed with the idea of coming out of it and returning to one of my former employers as a consultant, but that won't be happening until April at the earliest if I do.  If the work is interesting I could see doing some.  Thing of it is, I have given myself too much to do, some of it fun, some of it necessary, and things aren't where I want them to be.  My problem is that if I get too close to the goalposts then I move them further back.  Maybe deep down inside there's this fear of not having enough to do.  I have changed jobs on the grounds that there wasn't enough to do.  I am busier now than I was a year ago, and yes, I sometimes joke about going back to the workforce so that I can get some rest.

Yes, there's more to do.  More recipes to try out.  More books to read.  Some foreign languages to study.  Some things to sort out.  Some guns to shoot.  Some fish to catch.  Some places to visit.  And some family history to research.

And speaking of which, there is an unverified trace to William the Conqueror, as well as an unverified trace to Charlemagne.  I have read where ole William is the ancestor to quite a percentage of those of British blood, and I've got at least a pint of British blood flowing thru my veins.  I probably ought to go ahead and pop for one of those DNA tests.  

With that I'm going to call this one a wrap, and maybe in the next entry or two I'll do some musing about Star Trek.  

Cheers, beers, and don't forget to pet a dog or a cat!

Tuesday Evening, 12/23/25

Well here we are, my first holiday season as a retired person.  I find that I am nowhere near as stressed as I used to be at this time of year.  I don't have to travel anymore these holidays, and if I need something at the store then I can go in the midmorning before the 9 to 5ers get off work and make things more crowded.  It is busy at the church I'm a member of; I am supporting most of the services we are having this month.  I will be glad when Christmas is behind me as that we seem to have this lull of a few days before New Year's Eve arrives.  My boss at Radio Shack said that New Year's Eve is Amateur's Night as that the professional drinkers stay home.

Anyway, we have been blessed with some really fine weather.  When it's in the low 80s in the early afternoon, I want to be out on the shaded back patio with a good book or a radio and with the dog.  The view to the back of me is the back wall of a public storage place that's on the other side of the wash, and that wash is gated off so the only foot traffic is that of javelinas and roadrunners.  Well, some coyotes might get back there too but I won't know for sure unless I remember that I eventually want to get a motion-sensitive trail camera to see if anything really happens back there when I'm not looking.

As for Christmas, I'm sure that the family I married into will be gathering together for some quality time.  Years ago I would usually be off to San Jose to visit my family and friends up there, but with each passing year I have less and less reason to go there as that a lot of the people I was close with have either moved out or are planning to.  As I am tracking down the histories of the families I am researching that I am descended from, everyone scatters and that seems to be a common thread throughout most of human history.

Meanwhile, in the news, it's being reported that the Powerball jackpot is up to $1.7 billion.  The drawing is tomorrow night, and maybe for grins I will pick out some numbers here and we'll see if I have "won", which I won't, because I'm not buying a ticket.  When I had to go to Albertsons for some scrip I noticed a line of five customers itching to make a donation to the Powerball jackpot, and I overheard one of them getting $20 worth of tickets.  

Well it's their money, and it really isn't a societal ill that needs addressing as long as the casual lottery players aren't robbing liquor stores to get money to buy the tickets.  The lottery addicts, on the other hand, are spending much more of that on every drawing, and those are the lottery players that have the problem.  The addicts really wouldn't be that much of an aggravation if they would stop insisting on holding up the line at the Circle K wanting to "go over" all the scratcher games................"are there a lot of winners with this game?  How long will this game go on?  How many winning tickets did you sell with this one?  How often do you see a thousand dollar winner?  What are the new games that are coming out next week?"  And on and on and on.  

As for the casual players, or maybe even the addicts, I'm sure many of them are saying to themselves, "if I win this jackpot, I'm going to do good things with this money.  I'm going to donate some of it to charities.  I'm going to give gifts to my friends and family members.  I don't want to be like one of those rich people who I hate."  The reality is, they're going to go into hiding first, and then face problems they never imagined.

All right.  Enough of that.  Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.

I want to find time to send out some emails to some people I am close to, and hopefully the day won't get away from me like some of them have been.  I have been spending a lot of time with ham radio and getting my logs caught up.  I joined six other hams yesterday for an outing at Saguaro National Park, where a station was set up and we participated in the long running Parks on the Air program.  I QSOed enough hams to be credited with my first activation, but I'm going to have to first register with POTA and get that credit.

There is also a Summits on the Air program, and an Islands on the Air program, which gets people with licenses on the airwaves and communicating.  Yesterday's outdoor operation was a great deal of fun, and we'll be doing more of these in the near future.  We're also talking about going over to New Mexico and operating from there.  

In the meantime, Merry Christmas!  

A Visit to the Land of Enchantment

One week ago tomorrow Sheila and started my third road trip since retiring.  We wanted to retrace the route we took back in August 2016, but with one major difference:  overnighting for two nights in Silver City NM.  Like the last time, day one was spent driving to Deming, where we stayed at the Comfort Inn & Suites, as we did in 2016.  For the evening meal we walked over to the family-run El Camino Real Mexican restaurant........which was of the New Mexico style, my favorite.

The enchiladas I had were almost nightmare grade, which I mean in a good way.  Beyond zing and almost rocket fuel.  In New Mexico, the custom is to have eggs served on top of your enchiladas, which I did.  The next morning it was off to Silver City, with a stop at City of Rocks State Park, which I recommend.

The next stop was the Bayard Food Basket, a local supermarket, where we got some items and beverages for our stay in Silver City.  After getting back to the truck, I kept thinking about that large package of dried Hatch chilis.  I went back, bought a bag, after we ate a somewhat late lunch at a Mexican/Salvadorean restaurant called La Mexicana.  

Our stay in Silver City was the historic Murray Hotel.  It was our first time in a historic hotel, and we liked it.  The only drawback is you have to hope there is street parking nearby and finding it was a challenge.  We fortunately landed a spot within half a block, but we also knew that we couldn't dare do any side trips or we would lose that spot.  That was OK, we wanted a full day downtown, so we booked two nights.

While there I did some online research about those chili pods.  Now that I have them, what do I do with them?  I found a recipe for chili sauce from scratch, and I thought I had better buy more bags of these.  On our way out we stopped at the Silver City Food Basket, where I picked up three more bags.  It was slow, so the cashier gave me a quick rundown on how she makes chili sauce from them.  I intend to be making a batch in the near future, with near future meaning this week.  I also picked up some hot sauce brands that I don't see here in Tucson, so as you're guessing my home cooked meals are having a Southwestern twist to them.

Saturday we drove to Willcox, where we stayed for the night.  Lunch was at Big Tex BBQ, which I highly recommend.  We spent Sunday morning driving to the Chiricahua National Monument where God's signature is all over the creation that is found there.  The rock formations are unique.......towering cylindrical shapes that reach up to the sky!  That afternoon we were back in Tucson, and I've spent today mostly resting.  

We love road trips, but it's really great to be home.  Our next trip hasn't been planned yet, but I'm guessing we will visit Laughlin NV, Oatman AZ, and if my cousin's available, we'll stop off and see her in Lake Havasu City where she and her husband now spend their winters.  

There's not very much else to report, and that's a good thing.  I have some projects to take care of, and I want to spend some time on the air.  

Retirement is great!  I miss some of my co-workers, but not the corporate crap.  I won't rule out going back next year as a part time consultant.  

11/3/25: A Warm Monday in the Old Pueblo

One great thing about living in Tucson is the mild winters.  Those of you up north or back east probably don't want to hear me tell you that we are in the mid 80s this afternoon.  The sky is clear with a few clouds here and there, and the desert is just as beautiful as it ever was.

There really isn't much in the way of news to pass along, so it's going to be random thoughts this afternoon.

One of my retirement projects has been re-reading an anthology collection of history articles back when I was taking History at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose.  We had a great history teacher, a Mr. Ron Zarcone, who was a gifted lecturer and made it interesting.  I have kept almost all of my college textbooks since, and these two anthology volumes were on the re-read list.  I haven't read these since 1977.  Although all were not assigned reading, all of them are interesting, as I am working my way thru articles of what Christopher Columbus really knew before sailing across the ocean, details about indentured servitude, and the Salem Witch Trials.  It makes me wish I had continued studying history after college, and although I have read some books about history I have only scratched the surface.  That's one favorite activity.

Another is going thru my coin collection, but that's been on pause these past few weeks.  I have had to work on two necessary projects recently, and one was taken care of last week.  The other big one?  Not much left to do on that one except for a phone appointment with a senior manager helping to get my second pension activated.  

And as you might guess, ham radio has kept me busy too.  We had really great band conditions during a major worldwide contest the last weekend of last month, and I picked up two new countries.  The 10 meter band was the best I've ever heard it in a half century of this hobby.  A total of 48 countries were worked, thanks to the sunspots and low geomagnetic activity.

I said half a century.  It isn't lost on me that I have many memories that are half a century old or more.  I was still in high school, taking electives in electronics, and fifty years ago at this time we were preparing to move from Virginia to California.  I did not intend to stay in San Jose for as long as I did, but a lot of the memories there are good too, and two lifetime friends were made there.

Now here I am in Tucson, retired, and still not missing work.  It was a great field to be in and I lived really well because of it.  I don't miss a lot of the corporate crap that I went thru.  It was fun, but there were times when it was brutal.  Now I go back to it if I want to, and this time in an advisory capacity.  The thought of doing that is intriguing, but not until I catch up on some things and do some more fun stuff.

With that, I think it's time to wrap this post up.  

To Trashcan and Back

Earlier this week I was in Las Vegas, for the first time since I left to return home in February 2016.  I was originally going to be there last week but a medical issue in the form of infection erupted, and Sheila had to go there with one of her daughters while I stayed home to get medical attention.  It wasn't serious, but it likely would have gotten that way if I didn't get a doctor to look at it.

Sheila came back, and on Monday we drove up to retrieve her son who she drove up there some days prior.  If I hadn't had the infection we would have made side trips to Rhyolite and a few other places.  As it was, we drove up Monday, I was too tired to do much of anything the next day, and on Wednesday we drove home.

While I was up there we did drive around the old neighborhood where I lived, and by Bigelow Aerospace, where I worked when I was up there.  The only employees remaining at Bigelow are the security guards who don't have very much to do unless some coyote trips the perimeter alarm.  As for who I knew when I was living up there, we've all scattered to our separate ways, and the only one I'm now in touch with is Ron S. who is on the east coast and will be retiring.  I would like to get out there and see him, he's a really great guy.

Anyway, I was really glad to be home when we got back Wednesday night.  Yesterday I had a follow-up appointment with the specialist about my infection and I am well on the mend.  Today I was exhausted for some reason and some things I needed to do were put off until Monday.  I have spent a lot of time playing radio, and Mark and I have been experimenting with some interesting modes on the ham bands.

As for Las Vegas, I think I would now enjoy a three day stay there, provided it's Downtown and not on the Strip.  I definitely want to see Rhyolite again; it was the first ghost town I ever visited and it's something I want to see on those rare occasions when I'm in the area.  I hope that on the next trip we overnight in Fallon, and then drive across to Ely, and then back down to Las Vegas before we start the trip home.

Being able to do this when we want is one of the many blessings of being retired.  I am enjoying this much more than I thought I would.  I haven't forgotten some conversations I've had with a previous employer and I have reason to believe I will be working part time next year.  

In the meantime?  I feel the need to research some more family history.  There is evidence, not  yet corroborated, that I am a descendant of William the Conqueror, thru my paternal grandmother.  There's some more research I want to do re the Parker family who settled North Carolina and Virginia.  I am way overdue in creating pages on the Bonsall and Pilkington families.  

I think with that, I'm going to call this a post.