Monday was a challenge for several reasons. The weather forecast was rain just after sunrise, so I reviewed radar and decided to take my walk about 40 minutes before dawn. Light was beginning to creep over the landscape, when I encountered a fellow trail walker who brought their own illumination in the form of a flashlight strapped around their head — much like the way a coal miner lights underground passages. Being ex-military, I eschew such luminary devices in predawn hours. I made it home before thunderstorms came.

We don’t know the cause but our internet provider experienced an outage during the thunderstorms. We could access the internet on a different network using our mobile devices, so the inconvenience was that writing at my desktop was delayed. I logged into our account on my phone and saw about 220 connections were affected by the outage and service was expected to return by 12:30 p.m. Then the update was 5:30 p.m., and then, 11:30 p.m. When I woke this morning, service had been restored.

Processing vegetables in the kitchen continued. I separated parts of the celery plants into stalks, leaves and smaller branches. I froze half a dozen bags of celery leaves for broth, and seven one and a half cup bags of sliced celery stalks, mostly for soup. I continue to locate space in the freezer. The last remaining project is dealing with eggplant. I decided to keep what I had this week (instead of donating it to the food pantry) and make something for the freezer. The most useful thing is to bake it in slabs and then dice it for later use. Tomatoes are another story, but we are a week or more away from a large harvest.

I drove to town to buy a lottery ticket and a gallon of milk. I stopped on the lane that accesses the highway to take photographs of a colony of Queen Anne’s Lace. This year has been one of identifying wildflowers in my local setting. The software called Google Lens has made it an easy, if imperfect process. Of course, I’ve been able to identify Queen Anne’s Lace for more years than I can count. It was one of the first wildflowers about which I learned.

Without the internet, I tackled the sorting table outside my writing space. I came upon a trove of books purchased in the early 2000s on topics like mall shopping, globalization, clustering of like-minded America, and social theory. I read some, and some, I didn’t. I queried each one on Goodreads on my mobile device and read the summaries. I can see why I acquired them 20 years ago, however, the ideas inside them may have been eclipsed by modernity. Of the dozen or so, maybe one or two deserve revisiting.

At present, I am an Amazon user. Using its artificial intelligence tool on my mobile, I entered half a dozen queries about my buying habits. I also reviewed orders going back to 1998, when I placed my first one. In those early days, the online retailer was a source for books first, and then VHS tapes of movies. I wish I could go back in time and advise that younger me that VHS technology would rapidly become extinct. Instead I have two bankers boxes full of tapes I may never view again.

In 2016, I ordered my first non-book, non-VHS item: a Black and Decker rechargeable battery for a power tool. It was one of three orders I placed that year. Soon thereafter I was buying socks, shaving cream, kitchen items, and other home use products, moving to 5 orders in 2017, 11 in 2018, then 26 in 2019. Books continued to dominate my orders, although I bought some headphones, more socks, and a tortilla press in those years.

During the pandemic, Amazon shopping really took off both for me and more generally in society. I bought a lot of books, but increasingly foodstuffs. The food was partly because I could not find organic beans, spices, and pasta locally. Partly it was because of the lockdown. I also bought a lot of bicycle accessories: a new helmet, inner tubes, bikers shorts, and the like. During this time, outdoors exercise experienced a boom from people who didn’t want to go to the gym. I rode my bike on the recently opened Hoover trail on a daily basis. Sadly, I learned I couldn’t get replacement spokes for my Austrian-made Puch Cavalier and had to abandon it when a loose spoke couldn’t be tightened and kept puncturing inner tubes. The bike was 40 years old and the veteran of a century ride in the 1980s.

I don’t know how I feel about Amazon any more. As long as the prices are low, and they sell products not locally available, I will buy things. Clothing purchases are particularly attractive because of the impersonal shopping experience and easy returns if something doesn’t fit. I shop first at my local hardware store for household needs like fluorescent lamps, screws and such, but they don’t have much inventory. The pandemic converted me into a regular Amazon shopper. Whether I remain one is unknown.

I had a delivery yesterday when the ambient temperature was 88 degrees, and the heat index was 104. The driver arrived wearing a tube top, short shorts, and heavy boots. With all that skin exposed, I would be worried about getting cuts and abrasions, but she moved confidently about her business, delivered my package, and moved on to the next stop.

I don’t know for whom the driver worked, and that is an issue with Amazon. They created an immense delivery system responsible for 5 million daily deliveries and shield themselves from liability by hiring large parts of it done. We did something similar when I worked for the trucking company, yet not on this scale. The matter is made murky by the fact that even though the delivery force is largely subcontracted, the Amazon branding is on the trucks, the driver clothing… everywhere. We couldn’t have gotten away with that in the mid-1990s.

To end the day, I made dinner: a vegan burger, green beans, and fresh, sliced Black Krim tomatoes. I still use Heinz Ketchup for burgers, mostly because I met Teresa Heinz Kerry at a political event in Mount Vernon a while back. I buy ketchup at a local grocery store.