Hi there, Dear Reader, and welcome to another edition of Musings & Thoughts. It’s Friday, September 25, 2020, and as I write this it’s late morning in my corner of Florida. The current temperature is 79˚F under mostly sunny skies; with humidity at a whopping 89% and a 3 MPH breeze blowing from the east-northeast, the feels-like temperature is 91˚F. Per my phone’s AccuWeather app, we don’t expect any rain here over the next few hours, although the long-range forecast suggests that we’ll have thunderstorm activity on Monday.
I spent most of my morning reading from Peter Caddick-Adams’ massive Sand and Steel: The D-Day Invasion and the Liberation of France. I would rather have been writing a review of Star Wars The Black Series Luke Skywalker (Death Star Escape) for this blog, but even though I have the actual figure – still in its box, by the way – I often need to be online to get information as to when it was produced/released. But if I am offline, I can’t look anything up on my PC; I have to use my phone, and sometimes that’s harder for me to do.
Here’s the problem: We have connectivity issues if too many people try to connect to the house’s Wi-Fi at the same time, and because the owner of the house is working from her home office, she needs 100% connectivity from 8 AM to just a bit past 5 PM during her work days, I’m not sure how many of us are online simultaneously; I do know that the Wi-Fi signal strength varies from room to room, and I have noticed that if three of us (out of five individuals) try to connect to the Internet at the same time, the connection is just awful.
Because of this, I really don’t have a lot of options as far as keeping entertained or productive. I have to read out in the living room or write on my computer in silence since I can’t work online or watch TV anywhere. My study is located between two occupied bedrooms, and one of them is occupied by a college freshman who needs a tranquil environment in which the student can attend virtual class or work on assignments. The other room is also the realm of the homeowner’s oldest, who is currently unemployed – he quit his job due to fears about getting COVID-19 – and stays up all night gaming and sleeps during the day. So I can’t watch my TV here, and I can’t go watch TV out in the Florida room because its adjacent to my hostess’ home office.
If I had my way, I would be looking for a nice two-bedroom house or apartment where I could live independently or at least semi-independently. However, even after the sale of my townhouse, I don’t have enough money to buy a decent, solidly-built, no-remodeling, no-renovations-needed property…at least not one which would comfortably hold me and my belongings.
Anyway, today I’m expecting another package from Amazon: the 2-CD Star Trek: The Motion Picture 20th Anniversary Collector’s Edition with legendary film composer Jerry Goldsmith’s score on Disc 1 and an updated version of Inside Star Trek, a 1976 recording that Gene Roddenberry and several guests – including William Shatner – made for Columbia Records at what I believe was a Star Trek convention on Disc 2.
I have not owned the musical score prior to my recent purchase of this 2-CD set, but I did have the original 1976 version of Inside Star Trek on eight-track tape back in the late 1970s. The one on the 1999 CD is different; it features many of the tracks from the original 1976 edition, but it also has a new intro and a closing by actress-singer Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant – and later Commander – Nyota Uhura from the original Star Trek TV series and the first six feature films).
From what I see on my Amazon Orders – on my phone, natch – the soundtrack album has 18 tracks, and so does Inside Star Trek. I have never heard the former – just the score in the movie – but I did listen to Inside Star Trek many times when I was in high school, and many of the track titles are familiar.
Right now my order is in the same metro area where I live, and it’s currently Out for Delivery.
It looks like my one-hour window to use the Wi-Fi will open soon (it was 9:30 AM when I started writing this post, now it’s almost 11) so I’ll close for now. If I can dig up the info I need for that Star Wars The Black Series figure review, I’ll be working on that from 12 to 5 PM and post it as soon as I can reconnect to the ‘net. If all goes well, I’ll see you later.
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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