My social life, apart from the book club I’ve belonged to for the past ten years, is nonexistent, so when I saw this flyer at a local watch repair shop I decided to check it out. Last Sunday being the announced meeting day, I found my way to the Ward 6 office, not far from the university campus, and sat in on the Tucson Clock and Watch Collectors’ monthly meeting.
I didn’t know what to expect … I know what I feared, that it would be a pack of greedy watch flippers trying to buy low and sell high … so was relieved when it turned out to be a small group of (mostly) men my age, plus or minus, there to show and talk about the antique pocket watches, specialty clocks, and vintage wristwatches they’d picked up at auctions and estate sales. They knew their stuff and I learned a lot, and now I’m on the club’s email list. I’ll go again, and next time bring a couple of my own watches, and maybe a clock, for show & tell.
I promised you an AFIB update: three days after a cardioversion procedure to shock my heart back into a regular rhythm, my cardiologist performed another EKG and said we could put a more invasive ablation procedure off for now, as long as I understood that the AFIB will likely return at some point and that we’d go for ablation then. I was kinda hoping he’d say that, and happily agreed. For now, all is well.
Donna’s on the road to Las Vegas and will return in a few days. I’m home alone with three dogs and a middle-aged daughter who I hope will be mostly absent at a new job, which starts today. Fingers crossed for Polly.
Women and minority servicemembers who made notable achievements are being erased from military websites. Being “anti-DEI,” as Trump, his apartheid South African handler, and his new secretary of defense (the one with the white supremacist tattoos) claim to be, is a euphemism for their misogyny and racism. They want to airbrush women and minorities (and as of today, even the Navaho code talkers who helped us defeat the Japanese in WWII) right out of history, because in their view the only achievements that count are those made by white men.
I’m noticing an upsurge of social media posts about notable women and minority servicemembers, documenting and celebrating their achievements, put up by younger women and minorities trying to counteract the government’s attempt to disappear the earlier generations of women and minorities who paved the way for them. I hope they keep it up, although at some point, if Trump and his racist sidekicks aren’t run out of town on a rail, social media itself will become a target and those trying to preserve history will suddenly discover their accounts have been deleted.
These are, I know, baby thoughts and need some time to grow … I’ll have more to say about all this in time.
This, I thought, was fascinating:
Mark Kelly is not only a fellow military aviator and Breitling owner but also my senator. I don’t know when Kelly got his Breitling, but I got mine in 1990 and it, like his no doubt, has logged plenty of fighter time. In 1997, just before retiring, I helped organize the USAF’s 50th Anniversary Air Tattoo at Nellis AFB, Nevada. Breitling sent its aerobatic team to participate in the air show and also set up a VIP tent in a roped-off area by the runway. I got into the tent by flashing my watch. There were plenty of attractive hostesses inside, but none were scantily clad.
I posted the same screen grab, along with my Breitling VIP tent story, to a watch forum. Most of those who read it were amused, but a few had strong feelings about Breitling and the Playboy-esque adverts it used to run. Most were men, predictably saying they missed the sexy ads, but one was a woman who collects Rolexes and Omegas but, because of those ads, stays away from Breitlings.
And then there were a few MAGA types, sadly, who seemed to think anyone with the moxie to become a fighter pilot, astronaut, and senator is a fool, but hey, at least they didn’t call him a traitor for going to Ukraine.
What’s that they say? Never read the comments? One of these days I’ll learn.