Some favorite images from the last week. As much as it looks like it is here already, winter begins next Sunday.
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Sunday Before Winter
Category: Creative Life
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How Many Sunrises?
While dropping off four fire extinguishers for recycling in the county seat, nature called. The nearest public restroom was in the county administration building. The parking lot was almost empty, so I pulled in and did my business. On the way back to the car, I ran into the sheriff in his dress uniform. We exchanged pleasantries.
I’ve known him since he was elected to the city council in 2008. When he and his family moved outside city limits, I advised him as he started a garden. I worked on his campaign for sheriff. During the 2024 precinct caucuses, he, his spouse, and I were the only people attending on that cold, snowy evening. He is one of the good guys. If it matched his uniform, he would wear a white hat.
The encounter served me to ask, “What’s going on with my life?” That’s a rhetorical question because I know quite well what’s going on. I retired early so I could have some kind of creative life before I get infirm. As I exited the parking lot and turned west toward the warehouse club, I wondered how many more sunrises will I get?
A fierce urgency consumes me, or as Dr. King put it, “the fierce urgency of now.” There is much to accomplish, and given my good health and time left, more than a few things can be done. I need immediate, vigorous, and positive action in my life. The brief conversation with the sheriff informed me there is no reason to wait. The time for good works is now.
Each day I walk on the state park trail I observe my world. Because of when I walk, sunrises are a main feature. Not only can the sky be beautiful at that hour, it reminds us of the promise of a new day. Sunrises are more than enough reason to go on living. And so, I shall, as long as there is another.
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Tools in Autumn
After I finished the work table, I sorted stuff in the workshop. In other words, I filled the table with stuff thrown hodge-podge in every nook and cranny. This will be a long process, yet I am heartened by having another surface to use for this work. It is beginning with tools.
The table project was easy, with the radial arm saw and power drill being the main power tools. There were a few hand tools, but all of them are frequently used, and easy to find. That’s not the case with things tucked away in the workshop today.
I brought home a lot of tools when my father-in-law died. That was almost 30 years ago. I never really incorporated them into my workshop. As a result of this neglect, I don’t have visibility of every tool I own. When I’m starting a project I’m running blind. I hope to remedy that.
This tool visibility project began with my red Craftsman toolbox. It has three drawers and a compartment in the top. I took everything out of the drawers and rearranged it.
All the fixed wrenches went into their own tool box. I don’t use them as often as crescent wrenches and I’ll know where to find them when I need one. Crescent wrenches and pliers filled a drawer. One drawer has gripping tools. Most sizes of screwdrivers are on a pegboard, so the ones in the toolbox are either specialty drivers or extra. Screwdrivers get their own drawer, which isn’t enough space to accommodate them all. The solution to that will wait until I see what else I have. When I replaced some tools with others, the idea was to keep thosek most frequently used in the red toolbox.
There are also what I’ll call specialty toolboxes. One is full of drill bits of many kinds. I keep a separate drill bit holder on the bench so I can quickly find common sizes. There is a toolbox with woodworking tools. There are all kinds of them, although I am hardly a woodworker. One toolbox has a set of metric and imperial sockets. In the cabinet, there is another whole set of Craftsman sockets. This is just the beginning.
The main goal of this project is to gain visibility of what I have. I am tempted to acquire one of those tall movable toolboxes with many drawers. I hope that is a passing infatuation. For now, just knowing what I have should be enough to get started on new projects. The new table led to this, and who knows where the forking paths ahead will lead? Being aware of what tools I have is a good start.
I look forward to discovering where this goes.
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Table From the Scrap Pile
There was a time when I attended estate and farm auctions and bought things on the cheap for later projects. The years since then can be measured in decades. At a point in my life when I have to either do something with stuff, or otherwise dispose of it, I got out the top and legs of a table I bought for a buck at auction. It was time to make something. Since I rearranged the garage, I have space for a work table that is shorter than the custom-height workbench I made when we lived in Indiana.
I went through the woodpile and found planks to make an apron and five of rescued lumber to reinforce the top. I laid the materials out on this workbench made of sawhorses and thought about what I would do for a couple of weeks.
After looking at local hardware stores and large online retailers, I finally found a packet of figure 8 steel desk top fastener clips with screws. They are not commonly available. To make a recess in the apron for the fastener, I got a 20 millimeter forstner drill bit. $20.12 all in.
After 12 cuts on the radial arm saw, I was ready to assemble. I spent about three hours on the project before my attention began to wander. I am better at recognizing when that happens, so I knocked off for the day. If everything goes together as planned, it will take an hour or two to finish assembly.
I don’t plan to refinish the wood. Inside the garage it will be protected from the elements. I expect it to get scuffed up with heavy use, so what’s the point of a coat of paint or finish? The wood it’s made of has been around for a long time, based on the assembly techniques my predecessor used to build it.
Fingers crossed the final assembly passes muster and I can begin using the new table immediately. One never knows about these things until the work is done and the piece is in operation.
Here is the finished product in the garage.
It’s bigger than I thought, but I will adapt. No adjustments were needed.
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Writing in Public
This post is about social media and blogging. My perspective on these two technology tools is they both require a creative process of putting together meaningful words and photographs in a way that provides insight to readers. When I use them, I am a content creator, although those two words don’t really capture my vision for what I’m doing. I seek to bring understanding to the complex and ever changing world in which we live.
I joined Facebook March 20, 2008 to follow our child. They had graduated college and moved to Colorado in 2007. While I could easily drive in a single day to visit, it was a long trip to spend much time together. My reaction to Facebook? Yikes! Here is my blog post about joining:
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. (On Facebook, Big Grove News, March 20, 2008)
In the end, our child quit posting on Facebook and while I developed a Facebook life, it was not good for me. Social media introduced loneliness in my days, something with which I had little experience. It reinforced loneliness. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I am aware of being alone yet don’t experience much loneliness. I feel connected to the whole of society. If I continued with Facebook, even with all of the familiar faces and common experiences, I would feel how much apart we are. I deactivated my account in February this year.
After much experimentation, I ended up with an account on BlueSky, which is a text-based social media platform where it is easy to connect with like-minded people. My posts there have been hit or miss, yet I need the creative outlet. BlueSky is my only social media account.
My first blog post was on Nov. 10, 2007. I first titled the blog Big Grove News, then Big Grove Garden, Walking There, On Our Own, and now Journey Home. The purpose was always the same: provide an outlet for creative expression and pull in pieces I wrote for other purposes to make a record of them.
When I began blogging I had no idea where it would go. I wrote at least 5,600 posts since beginning. For a long time, it was the only writing I did each day. It has become a writer’s workshop to test ideas and how to express them. Some days the posts are cringe worthy. Some days I touch the sky. Part of me would return to handwriting paper journals the way I did before 2007. I may yet do that, but not in 2026.
In writing my autobiography I find I repeat topics often. For example, the story of the apartment in yesterday’s post has been written and re-written with different details and posted on my blog at least a dozen times. An early reader of my autobiography commented about my propensity to repeat myself. All I can say is I’m working on that.
I used to write blog posts in the early morning. Lately, especially since I began learning about circadian rhythms and tuning my physiological life to them, my best creative time is in the afternoon work blocks. I still work on creative writing in the morning but it is more the next chapter of my autobiography until that work is finished. I am more alert when I write blog posts. The quality of writing seems better. Like everything, it is a work in progress.
People do read my blogs. It is hard to believe the number of people in real life who identify me as a writer. A lot of this is due to letters to the editor and posts on Blog for Iowa. That type of feedback is rare and precious to me. It helps me feel like part of a community.
Is there a limit to the creative expression I put into my writing? If I have to get a job to make up for the percent of Social Security that will be absent after the trust fund runs out, there will be a loss of time for writing. For now, though, I’ll continue on.
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Favorite Photos of 2025
Here are my current favorite photos from the thousands taken in 2025.
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Taking a Different Trail
I’ve been meaning to get out on the eastern part of the state park trail and Saturday I did. When we moved here, I said to my spouse that all of the land between us and the nearby city to the east of us would eventually be developed. It didn’t happen in the first 32 years, yet it’s got a good start.
My normal walk is designed to be 30 minutes along the same part of the trail. The walk I took Saturday afternoon was much longer at 80 minutes. It was no hill for a climber.
The Hoover Trail has been a tremendous perquisite for those living in the area. The paved trail is wide enough for bicycles to pass each other going in the opposite directions. It is also clean. During the coronavirus pandemic I rode my bicycle on it almost daily. One of the first things to see is this old barn.
The trail was made in the bed of an old railroad track. The power lines have been moved, leaving the old poles to decay in the encroaching woods.
There are only a few glass insulators left on the poles. I found one blue one and these clear ones.
The worst part of the trail walk is the development. The homes in this photo were not there the last time I was on this stretch of trail.
In addition, a lot of the wooded and prairie areas were cleared and mowed. We are moving the opposite direction from a nature preserve.
There is a fancy intersection where the Lake Macbride State Park Trail intersects with the Hoover Trail.
Waterfowl like the east end of the north branch of the lake. Probably because the growth prevents we humans from getting too close. That and the relatively shallow water makes it easier to catch fish.
Development may be encroaching, yet there are still plenty of good photos to be taken.
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A Life of Photos Part IX
If it seems impossible to curate my life-long collection of analog and digital photographs, that’s because it is. My presumption is of making a useful archive for others to use when I’m gone. However, that is an old school idea poorly aligned with the way photographs have come to be used. I am fine with sharing photos via social media and email. I also believe they have more than transient value. This is at the core of my struggle to make progress in curating my photographic work.
I am interested in technology. My maternal grandmother participated in photography culture and bought a Kodak Brownie and Instamatic 126 at the local drug store. She developed her exposed film at the same drug store. It was a creative outlet for her, creativity being something her family discouraged when she was young. When she asked us to pose in our Easter best clothing, how could we refuse? She had the camera and wanted to preserve the moment. That felt important.
In college, I experimented with a Minolta SRT-101 I bought from one of my band buddies. I got away from posed photographs to the extent possible and captured where I lived, both in my residence and on day trips to neighboring places. I bought a small 35mm camera and a dozen rolls of film to take on my 1974 trip to Europe. When my backpack was stolen in France, I lost all the film and ended up with only two rolls to develop after three months away. When I bought a mobile flip phone, I took a few photographs with the built in camera, notably one of Senator Barack Obama at the 2006 Harkin Steak Fry. In 2008, I bought a Kodak EasyShare digital camera, and then when I converted to a smartphone in 2012 the smart phone became my primary photographic method. There is a whole story in technology. My experience since the 1950s is likely not that different from other amateur photographers in my cohort.
The cultural aspect of my photographic history is more interesting. I was able to own a simple camera because I had an income from delivering newspapers. I became the person in the family called upon to record an event when Grandmother was not available. My early photographs are packed with domestic images of holidays and birthdays, vacations, and the stuff in our lives like pets, houses, cars, and more. In high school, I worked part time at a department store and had means to use photography. I accumulated photographs in shoe boxes and a few albums. Mother had a short filing cabinet on wheels where all of her photographs migrated. Photography has always been a simple, affordable, and happy thing to do. There was always a half life of attention given to photographs. However, we couldn’t bear to get rid of them.
To some extent, my photographs are a visual record of how I lived. At the same time, I have been journaling since 1974 and have given more thought to what I wrote than I did to photographs. As I write an autobiography, I decided to use only one photograph in the first book, and am not sure whether or how many I might use in the second. To avoid consideration of photography as part of my life would be decidedly wrong.
Social media changed how we use photographs. With digital cameras and smartphones, photographs have no operating cost other than the time and attention paid to them. When I take a photograph like the sunrise in this post, I make multiple exposures and edit them to pick the “best” one to post. This form of curation was not easy in analog photography, yet is basic to posting photographs on social media. I archive all my saved photographs on the cloud, yet seldom go back to them.
On social media, we get to know people a certain way. For example, on BlueSky, the 99 accounts I follow post photos and create an account ambience I came to recognize over time. This is a real thing, yet not the same as having an in real life relationship with a person. I submit I have a different relationship with someone I know in real life as compared to their social media account. Both seem valid.
Photography in 2025 does not entail a lot of curation. We take photographs, briefly edit and share them, and then forget them. Seldom do we have a processor make prints. I’m okay with that. When I curate four photos for a post on social media, that suffices to sate my urge toward a creative life. Maybe I will use the same photographs in a blog post, or maybe not. I want to believe there is more to this creative process as I look at thousands of images captured over a life and work to define their meaning and gain insights. Because of my current autobiography project, I am willing to devote time to photography. I continue to believe the words are paramount.
Will I end up with a usable archive? It may seem impossible now, yet I hope it ultimately isn’t. Figuring this out is just another part of my life.
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November Sunrise Photos
I walk for 30 minutes on the state park trail almost every day I’m home. The timing is about 20 minutes before sunrise so I can view the transition in the sky. I don’t think I will ever tire of seeing a sunrise.
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Fog at Sunrise
It is usually quiet on the state park trail during my morning walk. If someone is coming I hear their footsteps, or if they are on the phone or in a group, their talking voices carry a long distance. It was foggy Sunday morning when I heard young women talking. Before long, I could see headlamps bobbing above the trail. It was plenty light, yet the idea of a headlamp gained prominence over whether or not one was actually needed. I wished them a good morning as they passed me going the other way. They returned the sentiment. Even at dawn there is traffic on the trail.
I leave for the trail 20 minutes before sunrise. It is usually light enough to see and the transition period presents great light for capturing photographs. On Saturday I started walking on the boat dock to get an unobstructed view of sunrise. There was frozen frost on the deck and I slipped and fell on my backside. I let loose my mobile device and feared the worst. When I got up it was just less than halfway over the edge of the dock. I had visions of it plunking in the water, yet not this time. I am one lucky guy.
Last winter I walked the trail almost every morning regardless of ambient temperature and snowfall. I expect to do likewise this year. The state park trail is the perquisite that comes with living here I enjoy most. It also provides an opportunity to work on my photography.
Journey Home 
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