The portion of my autobiography after leaving a transportation and logistics career looks a lot like the ice in this photograph. Parts of it are smooth, yet thin, because only recently it was open water. Parts have frozen and thawed so many times it is difficult to determine where the surface could support a human. This morning, I stood on the bridge to where the boat docks will go this summer and felt I didn’t know what I was writing.
I haven’t given up. I’m deep in 2010, which was a pivotal year across my life in writing, politics, home ownership, work, and family life changes. I felt economic pressure from leaving a regular paycheck combined with depletion of savings. In my life, however, money was never anything to fret about.
The backlash to the election of Barack Obama was severe that year. It took less than a year, yet Republicans demonstrated they viewed little about Obama’s election as permanent, including the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act which was signed into law that year. They reorganized themselves around right-wing figures while blocking and undoing the good things Obama did. That struggle continues.
I held a job trying to get U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley’s vote for the New START treaty, something D.C. lobbyists for nuclear abolition thought possible. When the Senate ratified the treaty on Dec. 22, 2010, we had not won Grassley’s vote.
There was a long automobile trip west to the high plains with a lifelong friend. Upon my return, I helped organize a 40th year high school class reunion which put me in touch with people I hadn’t thought of for decades. These were both positive and re-established my roots. I had a lot of material originating in 2010 and crammed as much as I could into a single draft chapter. Perhaps that was not a wise tactic.
The best approach to this revision may be to not work at all. Let everything sit for a few days. Focus on other projects and forget about writing. For this book to be any good, there is no deadline, even if I still want to finish by the end of this year.
I set it aside, thinking, maybe I could use a nap. I read in David Morrell’s book about writing, shaved, showered and re-started my day. I already feel the better for it.
Some days we feel spent. Our wood burned while leaving embers to warm us only for a while.
There is so much going on with writing this week it has taken most of my energy. Partly, the resolution is knowing when to set it aside and let the stories breathe within us.
On the plus side, celeriac is up. It’s tray partner celery is not. There will be arugula in a few weeks. The ground is frozen, yet the garden springs indoors.
It’s cold outside, the kind of cold that stings my cheeks while walking on the state park trail. I’m standing at my workbench sorting seeds for early planting. The heat pad is already plugged in. Grow lights hang overhead. In front of me is a cabinet with last year’s leftover seeds, sorted by variety. On the bench are two dozen packets with this year’s seeds. I’m still looking through seed catalogues. It’s time to decide what to plant first, what to wait on, what to try for the first time, and what to abandon. Each small seed packet represents a choice made long before anything reaches the kitchen.
Every decision reflects a value. Food is no exception. In this series of posts, I will discuss the idea of a “food algorithm” to see where it goes.
Simply put, an algorithm is a repeatable sequence of steps used to accomplish a task. With food, this could be a recipe, yet that’s not what I mean. The intent is to take food from the seed, seedling, or cutting as the first in a series of decisions about what goes on a table.
Agriculture is a large field to consider, but food algorithms are individual. An active agent — a person — decides whether to plant a bean seed, use raw beans from a farmer, rely on prepared, canned beans from a retailer, or use beans that have been prepared with other ingredients. This decision is elemental and part of a discussion most cooks have when preparing a dish. My focus is at this entry point, not to gather and analyze recipes, although one could.
An algorithm is simply a structured way of getting from here to there. We use them constantly in many aspects of our lives. Following food from seed to table is a more comprehensive look at a process we follow, yet do so largely unawares.
I see three interlocking layers:
Biological logic — the natural requirements and rhythms of the plant or animal.
Human practice — the gardener’s labor, the farmer’s tradeoffs, the cook’s improvisations.
System forces — markets, logistics, regulation, energy use, and scale.
By showing how these layers interact, the discussion could make visible the hidden structure beneath everyday meals.
Taking steps in the process from seed to table represents ordinary choices that shape resilience, community, and ecological health. It could create awareness and the quiet power of understanding the paths food has taken before it reaches us.
The adventurer in me wonders what will be next. I hope readers will too.
The weather this week looks dry and cold. It’s a good time to make chili and cornbread, at least in this Midwestern countryside. Short post and photo today. The week is shaping up to be busy indoors.
Hope readers find a warm place to hunker down and feel good about getting things done!
ChatGPT is offered as a free service across multiple platforms, with usage limits that eventually prompt users toward paid subscriptions. It responds with language similar to how queries are submitted, something humans rarely do. It is a small but telling sign of how seamless the technology has become. I use it for quick factual questions and longer processes, such as planning a garden season. Because it is free at the entry level, I feel free to use it. I suspect many people do.
Ease of access matters. When a tool is free and always available, people experiment. A person awake at 2 a.m. might reach for a phone and ask how to sleep through the night. If a solution seems helpful, word spreads. Usage grows not because of marketing campaigns, but because of social diffusion. This is how habits form.
The question is whether such growth — multiplied across millions — materially stresses infrastructure, including the electrical grid.
The U.S. Department of Energy reported in late 2024 that data centers consumed about 4.4 percent of total U.S. electricity in 2023 and could rise to between 6.7 and 12 percent by 2028, depending on growth scenarios. That range is significant. It reflects assumptions about adoption rates, model size, efficiency gains, and capital deployment. These are projections, not certainties.
In public discussion, however, projections often harden into inevitabilities. Upper-bound scenarios become planning baselines. Large numbers circulate with little context. Some usage statistics are widely repeated without clear sourcing. Investor forecasts about billions of weekly uses and massive subscription growth are forward-looking, not present realities.
This is where a larger question emerges:
Is enthusiasm for artificial intelligence and data centers outrunning prudence in financial investment? In other words, do investors have fear of missing out and therefore accept speculative arguments about market capacity more than they should?
Comparisons are sometimes made to the 2008 financial crisis. That collapse was driven by mortgage-backed securities embedded throughout the banking system, amplified by leverage and mispriced risk. Institutions such as Lehman Brothers and insurers like AIG were deeply exposed. When housing prices faltered, the system unraveled because debt was layered upon debt.
AI investment today differs in important ways. Much of it is equity-funded venture capital or corporate capital expenditure rather than highly leveraged household debt. Data centers, chips, and transmission lines are tangible assets, not synthetic securities. Losses, if they occur, are more likely to be concentrated among investors rather than embedded in consumer balance sheets.
Yet there are echoes worth noting. In both periods, capital flowed rapidly toward a dominant narrative. In both, optimistic forecasts shaped infrastructure decisions. In both, participants understood risk existed — but incentives encouraged staying in the game.
The concern is not that investors seek profit. We know that. The concern is whether optimistic projections become assumed outcomes. If infrastructure is built on the expectation of maximum adoption, and adoption plateaus or efficiency improves faster than expected, overcapacity can result. That is not necessarily a systemic crisis. It may be a costly misallocation of capital.
Critics such as Bill McKibben, citing technology writer Ed Zitron, argue that the economics of large AI firms may resemble a bubble: vast capital expenditures today justified by revenue expectations that may or may not materialize. That critique is itself an interpretation, but it highlights the degree to which AI investment rests on assumptions about future returns.
My own daily queries consume negligible electricity. The grid impact, if any, arises from aggregate industrial-scale deployment and the assumptions embedded in those decisions. Casual consumer use is a marginal contributor. Large enterprise integration and model training cycles are the dominant drivers.
So the core issue may not be whether AI will use more electricity — it almost certainly will — but whether forecasts are being treated as destiny. Markets routinely oscillate between overconfidence and retrenchment. The challenge is distinguishing durable growth from narrative momentum.
It is possible that artificial intelligence becomes foundational infrastructure, like electrification or broadband. It is also possible that investment temporarily overshoots practical demand. Both can be true at different stages of a technology cycle.
The prudent stance is neither inevitability nor collapse, but clarity: separate measured data from modeled projections, and projections from belief. When enthusiasm begins to substitute for disciplined evaluation, that is when risk accumulates unawares.
~This essay was developed with the assistance of ChatGPT, an AI tool created by OpenAI, which I used to test arguments, fact check, clarify projections, and stress-test comparisons. The ideas and conclusions are my own.
Two Canada Geese swimming in a sliver of open water on Feb. 19, 2026.
It snowed enough Friday morning to shovel the driveway. That 40 minutes of exercise substituted for trail walking yet I got this photo the day before. Ambient temperatures the next couple of days are forecast to be in the teens, so geese swimming in open water may have to find something else to do. I have plenty to do indoors.
I’m working on a new project with tentative title, “Food Algorithms.” The idea is to describe steps in the process of creating food from seed to table. My first step is creating a series of six or so posts that experiment with the language of this. If that goes well, a book-length text will be next in queue after I finish my autobiography. Stay tuned.
When I published my first book, I was in a big yank to finish and print it. It was imperfect, and I expected that. This time, I learned a lot about writing prose, and it shows in the text I shared with key readers. As a result of this learning I know what I want the text to look like, which things to cut, and which to enhance. I guess I am becoming more of a writer. Nine more chapters to re-work on this pass.
Another short post today while I get back to editing. The cooler weather suits me for now.
Snow on Big Grove pine trees.2010 garden space.Pruned apple tree.Vegetable broth.Outdoor tools.Apple orchard in 2010.Iowa State Capitol in 2010.Maybe we should talk to Iran. Sign from 2010.Up against a brick wall.
Short post today. I haven’t considered my early days on Blogger and WordPress until now. They were outlets for all kinds of writing.
Been working on a chapter about the early years of social media and blogging. This paragraph needs work yet it captures one way I used the platforms in those early blogging days.
When I began blogging in 2007, I had no idea where it would go. I wrote more than 5,600 posts since the beginning. For a long time, it was the only writing I did each day. It became a writer’s workbench to test ideas and how to express them. Some days the posts were cringe worthy. Some days I touched the sky. Part of me would like to return to handwriting paper journals the way I did before 2007. Part of me does not.
I also re-wrote the first paragraph of the chapter. Next I will re-do the rest.
I also mention social media in it. I was active on half a dozen platforms and joined Facebook in March 2008, after which made this brief post:
Tonight I joined Facebook. Yikes! Facebook connects us to people we have not thought of in years. In some cases we haven’t made contact in over a quarter of a century. All within a couple of hours. From moment to moment, the number of “friends” builds. What to say on the site? What elements to show? What pictures to place? How much time to spend? When a friend accepts the invitation, it feels good. The wave has broken, now I’ll ride it in.
If there was excitement at first, when our child stopped posting there I lost interest. It took a while yet in 2025 I deactivated my account. My problem was the contrast between lots of activity and the loneliness I felt as a result of being increasingly away from the real world. There is a kind of relationship on social media, I determined it was not a good one.
The purpose of the chapter is to figure out the meaning of all this. Maybe I will.
Winter is escaping, and with it the best time of year to write. It has become a household meme that “I am losing more darkness every day!” There is so much to get done on the book project. Monday the ground was frozen, yet soon it won’t be. Putting the garden in is also a major undertaking.
That said, posting here will slow down as I focus on completing the current editing pass on my book. If all goes well, it will take a few weeks. A photo one day, maybe a video of a favorite song, a few kind words. All place holders until the book is where I need it to be come spring.
Canada geese on the margin between open water and ice.
Things are happening in Big Grove Township. Songbirds are migrating, the ice cover on the lake is melting, and parts of the ground are thawing. Ambient temperatures hit 68 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday — it was shirt sleeves weather. Due to high winds and combustible material everywhere, the National Weather Service issued a special weather statement with elevated fire danger in the mix. Welcome to the new winter.
Each day I spend an hour or so outdoors clearing the garden. Once the ground thaws it will be more time than that. There is a lot to do, yet I’ve been to this rodeo. Steady work as the ground is ready gets the garden in.
Journey Home 
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