Category: Retirement

shedding sunday — youtube

whbeebe2 Comments

I’m posting on a Monday what I did yesterday. It’s a set of actions I usually perform on a Sunday.

What is a Shedding Sunday? It’s a day where I drop, or shed, habits and applications that fed those habits. I’ve already written about how I’ve dropped the use of many/most social media applications, the latest being Bluesky and Mastodon. This Sunday I took to dropping many channels on YouTube as well as several recurring Apple subscriptions. Let’s start with the YouTube channels.

I am a liberal, definitely left of center. There is no longer anyway I can meet my conservative counterparts in the middle. The chasm between liberal and conservative has been widening since Obama won in 2007, and the Tea Party fully infected the Republican party. The roots of this can be traced back to Newt Gingrich and his Contract On America, but it’s full hideous flowering came about in the 2010 mid-terms. The Republican party has been totally insane ever since.

And the primary vector of that infection has been the right wing media, primarily Fox News. Having recognized that I’ve devoted considerable effort to avoid anything with a right wing smell. That hasn’t helped me to avoid controversy. I started following a number of left-of-center and just left YouTube channels because I thought I might find solace in those channels. For about a month I subscribed to a number of non-right-wing channels, watching every episode that came out on those channels. YouTube helpfully surfaced more leftish content, so that soon I was awash in left-leaning content. The only problem with all that left-leaning content was the penchant for all of them to publish oh-ain’t-it-awful content about all the right-wing excesses and sins, in particular about Donald Trump. While pointing out these sins I’d hear a clip played back of Trump speaking, which raised my hackles. After a while of this constant bombardment I came to realize that the liberal news channels were carrying water for Trump by playing back his clips. I don’t care how much you were criticizing what he said, the fact you played him back was enough to continue to spread his vile and hate filled message. He’s living for free on your channel and if I allow it, in my head. I found this depressing to the point where I finally stopped searching for and listening, and I unsubscribed from them all. The YouTube algorithms being what they are, it’s going to take me a while to “not recommend channel[s]” when YouTube peppers my feed with similar content.

After less than 24 hours I can feel the stress leaving me. The feeling that I’m uncontrollably falling into a depressive state has stopped. I’m calmer and I can think more clearly.

my yearly luncheon

whbeebe

Brad and I met up for a lunch today at a local pizza place called Lazy Moon on University. I hadn’t realized it until reminded by Brad, but it’s been over a year since the last time we got together for a lunch (see link/story below). Lazy Moon sells pizza by the slice; a very large slice. My slice was vegetarian (white base with broccoli, red onions, spinach and artichoke hearts on top). It was quite filling and I wound up taking home some leftovers for my wife to sample. I make pizza at home with a base of wheat, topped with Italian cheeses and olives (green and black), Vidalia onions, and artichoke hearts. I actually enjoyed the addition of broccoli at Lazy Moon. As a consequence I’m going to start adding it to various dishes I make at home. We spent about an hour just relaxing and talking about life both as a working stiff (Brad) and a retiree (me). Oddly enough there were still a lot of intersecting interests, especially when it came to living expenses. None-the-less it was a stress-free lunch, and we both had a great time.

Lazy Moon pizza slice box with Hypnotoad

I’m showing you the Lazy Moon pizza slice box so you can see how large a typical slice is. I also wanted to document how much I spent; $12 for the slice, and a free cup of ice water. I would have gotten a diet Coke, but a cup of any beverage there (tea or soda) is now up to $3.50. By comparison I can buy 2L diet Coke at Walmart for $1.88 right now, which means I can get two 2L bottles for a bit more cash ($3.76) than what I would have spent on that cup of soda I didn’t purchase. To make the contrast even starker, my wife and I can go an entire week drinking 4 liters of diet Coke, instead of me blowing it all on one luncheon cup of soda. These are the equivalencies you automatically think about in retirement.

As for why everything is in black-and-white, I’m in one of those “artistic” moods again. I pulled out my Pen-F and set it to black-and-white with minimal grain. The lens on the front of the Pen-F was Olympus’ 17mm/1.8, which in spite of all the haters for that particular lens, has never produced a bad photo for me. Because this is a four thirds sized sensor, not 35mm film sized, the 17mm is equivalent to 34mm on the older 35mm standard. This makes the lens equivalent to the film-era 35mm, a favorite lens of street photographers everywhere, myself included. Combined with the Olympus ECG-4 grip, the entire combination is easy to hold, simple to use, and totally unlike a “real” camera with its SLR hump. If anybody sees it they don’t get excited, assuming it’s some unprofessional point-and-shoot.

As a final photo to end the post, here’s Nicholas Joseph in one of the kitchen chairs this evening.

Nicholas Joseph Purry

Links

what i miss in retirement