(written on the 27th)
Spent most of the morning just chilling in my van hoping to get a little bit of online work done, but it’s been really really slow, or perhaps better said, very very hard to get questions that are worth answering.
I might need to resort to getting my computer out and trying to get a quicker connection, so I’m not trying to survive on everyone else’s awful leftovers. 😅
Anyway, I did some gospel stuff I think, work stuff, and probably wasted some time as well. 😅
I finally went in the house somewhere around noon and spent the next several hours chatting. I helped my dad get the Gemini app downloaded to his phone, and he’s had a lot of fun with that.
I have, too. AI is absolutely amazing.
I’m super excited to see what happens in the coming years, although I also know that it’s likely going to have some pretty significant downsides to it as well as people utilize it to cause harm instead of good, like most technologies.
My dad had fun jumping back and forth between several different languages, with the Gemini AI holding conversation and speaking with beautifully pronounced accents.
I’ve used it with spanish, and… man, what a game changer! I think back to when I was a Spanish teacher. I used to have assignments for my students to speak I think maybe it was like 10 minutes a day or 10 minutes a week with a native Spanish speaker? I forget exactly what the assignment was, but it would be so much easier than now with an AI that cannot only speak back to you in perfect grammar and pronunciation, but you can also ask it to correct your mistakes.
Fun stuff. 🙃
It’s kind of funny, though: Periodically, the AI will lose its proper accent and start speaking with a British gringo accent. 😆
And it doesn’t recognize that it’s messing up. 🙃
I’ll call it on its mistake, and it will deny that it made any mistake at all. 😆
I think I might have gotten it to admit to its mistake once, though.
AI is interesting.
Anyway, circumstances with my dad and Cindy made it so that it was going to be best for me to leave today instead of staying longer, so after chatting with them all day, eating dinner with them, and watching their daily episode of I Dream of Genie, we took some quick pictures, and I headed out.
I wasn’t sure exactly where I was going next. The next official destination is to visit my sister who lives in california, along with her kids who live in nearby cities to her, but it would probably be best for me to show up closer to a weekend, so I’m probably going to spend a fair bit of time just enjoying the beauties of California. I’ll probably spend some time on the beach. I might do a rerun of a trip I took with one of my other sisters to Yosemite back in the year 2000.
Not sure. I’ve got some extended family in Las Vegas, so I thought about stopping in Vegas to say hi instead of just driving right on through.
One challenge is that the back and forth saga of is it allergies or is it cold seems to have settled on it being a cold, as my throat was starting to get scratchy as I was getting into Nevada night before last, and I started feeling more and more like a cold was coming on.
Probably one more good reason to not have stayed longer at my dad and stepmom’s place.
Anyway, so that also potentially complicated the idea of visiting one of my cousins in Vegas because it didn’t want to get her sick, but I also didn’t want to drive through Vegas when it’s been a very long time since I’ve done that, without at least stopping to say hi.
So after hemming and hawing next to the department of transportation compound next to the 5:15 freeway on ramp having come from the highway that goes to Moapa Valley, I finally decided to go ahead and drive south. Part of me had thought about going back to St George to try and sell my ammunition before I got into the western states where I wasn’t as confident in the laws about private ammunition sales.
So I headed to Vegas, bought some gas at one of the really big Maverick gas stations, had a potential customer interested in buying my ammunition who was in vegas, but they decided the last minute not to buy any.
I sent a message to my cousin asking if she would want to get together even though I’m sick, but I didn’t send the message until like 11:00 p.m., so after hemming and hawing again, I finally decided to just crash right there at the maverick, as it was one of those places where there was room for truckers to stop as well, so I figured nobody would care.
And that was the day. Things got a little nutty I think maybe around 1:00 when I rolled over to police lights flashing everywhere and lots and lots of police cars it seemed like. They were all around me, but gratefully, they weren’t there for me. I’m not sure exactly what was going on, other than before I crashed for the night there were multiple cars in the parking lot just chilling out, and one of them looked like it was all jacked up with someone working on it, so that might have been part of the issue. Who knows.
Gratitude:
- I’m grateful to have been able to spend time with my dad and stepmom. They’re definitely getting older, my dad has outlived every single ancestor that he’s aware of.
- I’m grateful it wasn’t beastly hot. I think it might have gotten up to 80° today. Last year, they had an entire week at 120°
- I’m grateful Maverick had cheap gas compared to a lot of the other stations around. It was only $3.35 a gallon, and there were some places that were over $4 a gallon. 🎉
- I’m grateful for the opportunity to practice my Spanish with the Gemini app. Super useful. And super grateful to have such an intelligent digital assistant! I definitely prefer the “personality” of Grok, so I’m looking forward to when Grok has a voice that works with android, as right now they only have it for the fruit phones. 🙃
- I’m grateful to have found a place to stay relatively easily. Thanks, Maverick!
Success:
- Hmmm… I chose love over comfort today in a particular instance.
Improvement:
- I can feel myself slipping a little bit back into some of the things that are habits of mine as escapes and distractions, but I don’t want to go back. Lots of work to do to hold off.
Loves!
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 