Category: Home Life

Historical category no longer used.

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Home Life

What Gets Attention?

Lilac bush on March 22, 2026.

Ambient temperature reached 87 degrees on Saturday in Big Grove. On Sunday it dropped to the 50s, and Monday, it was below freezing. Not really Spring, is it? The lilacs appear to be surviving the temperature fluctuation… so far. It is hard to know what will hold.

While it’s still cold, I’ve been working on The Great Book Sort — more boxes of books to the public library used book sale, and a growing “to be read” bookcase. The project asks a question in 2026 America: What will get our attention?

Books are an easy answer. They are disconnected from the digital world and the daily discipline of reading at least 25 pages lends itself to both respite from society’s noise and engagement in new things. That hour a day with a book, and selecting the next one, are needed forms of intellectual engagement.

What else?

Let’s cross off some things. We don’t watch television in our house — no antenna nor subscription to cable television service. I am not a gamer. The extent of my computer gaming was stopping once at a truck stop during a blizzard and playing a Pac-Man console for a quarter. Mother showed me how to play Solitaire on her work computer when I visited her. Radio is something for listening in the car, or while working in the garage. It never gains my complete attention. Since the Saturday lineup on Public Radio was disassembled — about the time Garrison Keillor left A Prairie Home Companion the second time — that era ended. Mostly I listen for favorite tunes and to see which political groups are advertising.

If I know you and you send me an email, I will read it. Email is my most used social media application. I remember presenting a case for email to a company I worked for because it connected everyone in a global organization at my previous employer. They did not sign up right away. I also read texts, but contrary to popular culture, they are less immediate to me than email.

When our child streams on Twitch, I turn it on and have it in the background. My main interest is the sound of a familiar voice, someone with whom I have been since their beginning.

I read two newspapers: The Cedar Rapids Gazette and the Solon Economist. The former recently changed hands and format. The jury is out on whether I will continue. The latter was recently purchased by the Daily Iowan and is gravitating toward being a college newspaper in most respects. Two of them for now, about 10 minutes for each edition.

Bluesky is my social media account and I check in repeatedly throughout the day. I follow 88 other accounts and there is not a lot of action. It is a good source of national and world news.

The rest of my attention goes to work, family, and a few friends, mostly centered around home, cooking, cleaning, writing, home repairs, and gardening. On a chilly day most of the work is indoors.

I am currently reading The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu. The premise and business model most often used has been providing free diversion in exchange for a moment of consideration. Such attention is harvested, then sold to the highest-bidding advertiser. I’m sure my attention has been harvested. With some products, I’m not even aware of it, yet I can think of only a few instances where it hooked me.

For example, I watched the appearance of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. That summer, I bought a trade paperback book about the Beatles at the corner drug store. In the fall I went with Mother to the King Korn Stamp Redemption Center. The television show had me thinking I could be a musician. I remember a light snow falling on us as we returned to the car with my new Kay acoustic guitar.

As The Great Book Sort continues, I harvest my own memories while touching books I bought for many reasons, the least of which was whether it was advertised. When spending my attention on a life imperfectly lived, there is hope I can avoid the pitfalls of the attention economy.

Sometimes I simply want to walk on the state park trail and pay attention to the sunrise of a new day. For now, that is enough.

Pre-dawn light on the state park trail, March 23, 2026.
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Home Life

In Mid-Winter

Before sunrise on the state park trail on Feb. 4, 2026.

It’s hard to believe half of winter is gone. Ambient temperature pushed toward freezing Wednesday afternoon, yet it didn’t quite make it. The lake remains frozen.

While I planned for it, political work on Sunday and Monday took a lot of energy. I’ve been recovering ever since. I finished the work by writing a personal note to each voter who attended caucus. The letter carrier just picked those up.

So today is a photo and a couple of paragraphs while I continue regaining energy. Life could be worse than that.

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Home Life

The Sun Will Rise Again

Trail Walking on Jan. 1, 2026.

With holiday season schedule deviations, I have a difficult time remembering what day it is. My spouse will be away at least for a week, and that makes daily life even more detached from society’s time line. I know I need to get to work and am doing so, despite the weekend. It’s Saturday, by the way. I knew that.

There are tasks and projects demanding my time on the third day of the new year. I spent this week reviewing them. Some got pitched, some moved up in priority, and others were declared finished. Importantly, I decided to continue this blog for another year. The other firm goal is to finish the rest of my autobiography in the first half of the year. What else?

  • I need to take care of me first because without personal health and a positive frame of mind it is difficult to get anything done in society.
  • Life’s too short to be bitchy, so I plan to strive for positive interaction with my fellow humans. I will express the occasional curse word, though.
  • I already wrote about continuing my reading program. I’m setting a new goal of finishing one book per week with the hope of beating it.
  • Exercising and being outdoors continues to be a high priority. Trail walking and gardening are the two main ways this manifests.
  • I want to live a simple life by reducing the amount of time spent on things other than friends and family, writing, and food production.

I wrote about using artificial intelligence in regular life here. The projects currently in queue are related to household operations, food production in the garden and kitchen, and living better. If a computer can help me be better with any of those, I’m willing to listen. The machines don’t really know me yet they give perspectives I hadn’t previously considered. At this point, the service is free. I experimented with giving ai a writing assignment. Mother of Mercy! It doesn’t know what in Hades it is doing there. That wasn’t a poem it wrote! It was a bowl of word salad and the bowl has a hole in it.

Our home has four functional places where I work indoors: Garage, lower level storage, kitchen, and my book room with a writing table. Each has goals for 2026. I mentioned the writing goals above. Here are the rest:

  • In the garage my work is primarily projects in one corner and garden prep in another. I am working on rebuilding a cabinet damaged in a move. I need to dispose of a lot of unused stuff to make room for the garlic harvest in July. When one project finishes, another immediately steps into place. I fix a lot of stuff on my workbench.
  • The main goal for lower level storage is to reduce the number of things stored. Our child is using part of the space after their apartment building caught fire last year. The rest of it is the parents who have way too much stuff. Creating open space here is a goal heading for reality, not a dream.
  • The kitchen must produce meals every day. In that constant activity I’m developing new dishes. One category is those we liked until one of us became vegan. The latest experiment is taking a casserole we made for many years and replacing the eggs and cheese with something else to make it vegan. It will require at least two trial runs before it goes into the meal rotation. This is not a quick fix project because taste and nutrition are both important. Another category is called “use stuff up.” An example of this is I got quite a few pounds of quinoa at a very low price. Figuring out what to do with it was delayed, but now I would like to get things going. I discovered a little goes a long way because of the expansion while cooking. I have three dozen quinoa disks in the freezer waiting for an application.

If we don’t have goals, we won’t accomplish much. These are my beginnings.

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Home Life

Time to Change Hats

Project hat issued by the management team when Amoco Oil Company moved all their hard copy data to Oklahoma as part of a large data consolidation project.

After a 25-years of work in transportation and logistics, I accumulated a lot of baseball-style caps. The one in the photo is commemorative of a project where Amoco Oil Company consolidated business information under a single platform. The oil company operated in more than 100 countries when I worked there in the early 1990s. It had almost every computer platform that existed in its wide-ranging, international operations. The goal was to bring computer operations into compliance on a single platform located in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and consolidate all historical paper records in a nearby salt mine. There were six or seven semi-tractor-trailers that hauled the records from 200 East Randolph Street in Chicago. It was such a big deal, they scheduled the move over a single weekend and chartered multiple aircraft, including a large Boeing passenger jet to transport incidental workers involved with the project. That they gave us a hat was a small fraction of the cost of the move.

As you can see in the photo, my data consolidation cap is well worn. Time to let go and choose a new one to use while doing yard work. There is something in the story about the oil company relevant to where I am.

Who doesn’t want all the information and stuff in our lives organized under a single platform? For businesses in the 1990s, data consolidation was a wide-ranging practice among large companies. Part of the de-cluttering process underway here in Big Grove will result in the same thing. With increased visibility of my history, I should be a better family member, citizen, and writer. It should be easier to navigate through the stuff of memories.

Yesterday, at the Armistice Day commemoration in Iowa City, I spoke with a friend about disposition of all of my writing related stuff. I said I would likely burn it all, as our child has little interest in a dozen boxes of personal records. He seemed a bit alarmed and suggested I shouldn’t underestimate the level of interest in archival materials. I’m in something of a yank to go through everything. Disposition is an open question to which there is no pressing need for an answer.

The next step is to pick out a new cap to wear daily and consider disposition a bit further. First thing I need to do is find all of my hats and put them in a single box. That simply requires persistent work. The resulting consolidation should be good for everyone. Perhaps I will appear more stylish.

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Home Life

Gap in the Canopy

Two dead ash trees in the front yard.

If I’d have known the Emerald Ash Borer would take out our two ash trees, I would not have planted them. Yesterday I described the process of removing them.

The sparrows didn’t notice they had been felled. They continued to perch as a flock on the leafless branches. I saw a squirrel checking out the base of one stump. They nest in the Autumn Blaze maple tree and used the dead branches as a bridge to get to the large tree in our neighbor’s yard (On the left in the photo). They would start from the nest, walk across the tall branches to the Bur Oak, to the dead branches of the ash, and then to the neighbor’s tall tree, all without touching the ground. I created a gap in this pathway. The squirrel did not indicate any thoughts on the matter.

Now begins the real work. Anyone can fell a tree: cut, cut, cut… TIMBER! Now is the time for good people to take our saws and make it into firewood and brush. If I had a chipper-shredder, I would make mulch from the brush. For the number of times per year I would use a chipper, the expense is not worth the reward. I got my safety glasses out, filled the oil reservoir, tightened the bar, and ventured out to work after donning my steel-toed boots.

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Home Life

Glorious Autumn

Leaves of deciduous trees on Nov. 4, 2025

Despite the lack of rain, this has been one of the best autumns I remember. It is a pleasure each time I step outdoors and take it all in. With everything going on in the world, we need that type of solace.

Autumn is the time to get the chainsaw out and clear dead trees from the property. A neighbor and I felled two ash trees killed by the Emerald Ash Borer. The occasion gave me a chance to wear the steel-toed shoes I got to work in a Kentucky steel mill back in the day. They even have metatarsal protection.

Steel-toed shoes with metatarsal protection.

I took the first tree down by myself. It took some time to determine where I wanted it to fall. I made a notch cut in that direction. It is important to take the time because as the old saw goes, measure twice and cut once. I made the felling cut and the bar and chain of the chainsaw got stuck. I must have done something wrong.

Hitch to the yard tractor.

I stopped and disconnected the bar from the motor assembly, and was able to pull it out. Not the chain. No problem. I went to the garage and got out my rappelling rope, tied one end around the tree about 12 feet from the ground, and the other to a carabiner attached to the rear of the yard tractor. I positioned the tractor on the cement driveway so there would be traction and gently tugged the tree until it fell over.

First ash tree felled on Wednesday.

My neighbor arrived and we worked together on the second tree. This one had grown with a yoke separating the two main branches. If I felled the southernmost branch the wrong direction, I might take out the neighbor’s fence. We positioned the yard tractor and tied the rope to the tree about 14 feet above ground. I made the notch cut and then my neighbor got on the yard tractor and put tension on the rope. As I made the felling cut, he increased tension, although he lost traction because of the leaves on the ground. No worries the tree fell in the intended direction.

Two tree stumps.

We felled the other main branch and called it a day.

This was the most difficult part of the operation. Going forward, I plan to spend about an hour a day cutting the trees up. I made a place for a brush pile and will salvage two relatively straight limbs to use to stack firewood outdoors and off the ground. I will burn the brush pile when conditions are suitable, and hope to find a home for the firewood. A lot of neighbors are flush with winter firewood presently.

It will take me a week or two to clean up the yard. That part I can do by myself. Autumn days were made for a fellow and his chainsaw.

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Home Life

End of the Season

Lake Macbride on Oct. 24, 2025.

We have been expecting the first hard frost. I was awake when it hit in the wee hours of Friday morning. The average date is Oct. 13, so we are 11 days behind. Nothing to say about that other than that is where the day began.

It was chilly indoors so I turned on the furnace when I couldn’t stop shivering. I set the thermostat at 65 degrees and that took care of the shivers. When I went for my morning walk I donned my winter coat and needed it. I saw the sunrise light show from the dining room windows, yet had things to do and didn’t get out until daylight. The way light falls on the trail is always a show in its own right.

I felt like crap when I woke. It is likely the COVID vaccination on Thursday. By evening I felt myself again. The main accomplishment this week was going through clothing to see what I want to keep and what goes to the thrift store. I reduced the number of blue blazers to the one that fit best. I kept only one pair of slacks to go with it. The others will go into the back seat of the car with other clothing donations until I drive by the drop off point.

On the to-do list was fix the short garden hose attached to the spigot in back. For whatever reason the hose washers came up missing and I got quite a spray yesterday. I found two new ones in the first drawer I opened. Hose washers are not something for which to make a special trip to the hardware store. The main hose is stored in the garage until spring.

I aired the front left tire on the John Deere, stored the grass catcher for winter, and fueled. I mowed one last time for the season. It went quickly and looked okay when finished. That tire needs replacing so I backed the tractor into the garage so I can get at it, jack the front end up, and remove the tire and rim. The thrift store is not far from the tire shop, so I’ll put the old one in the back seat so it can be dropped off on the same trip.

Before sunrise I made a dish of enchiladas. I’m not sure when I will bake them, yet likely over the weekend. The refrigerator and pantry are full of food so there are plenty of meal options. Thank goodness my Social Security pays for most basic stuff of living.

Now that the garden is finished attention turns to the two dead ash trees. My chainsaw is kaput so I need to get to the hardware store and see about a new one. I noticed the Ace Hardware in Mount Vernon is a Stihl dealer. I’ll likely start there and see where it takes me. I hate the expense for a tool to use two or three times a year. However it is more expensive to pay a tree service to remove dead trees.

It has been quiet in the neighborhood. As if the whole world is preparing for winter and can’t be bothered. Days like this I notice my mobile device usage is pretty low. There is plenty of work to do as the season turns in the real world.

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Home Life

Summer Rainstorms

Donation to community food pantry on July 7, 2025.

The gutter clogged during a Saturday afternoon rainstorm. I looked at the forecast and rain was expected, on and off, for the next six hours. I decided to get the extension ladder and climb on the roof to clear the blockage so water wouldn’t overflow into the lower level of the house. I waited until the driveway showed signs of drying and went outside. Even though a misty-feeling drizzle hit my face, I persisted. From the time I got the ladder down until I returned it to its rack was less than 15 minutes. At 73 years, I should limit my time on the roof, yet the problem was immediate, the consequences of doing nothing were unacceptable. The situation wants a permanent solution.

I had a fitful night’s sleep the evening of July 4. Community fireworks were scheduled for July 5, so that didn’t keep me awake. News of the administration’s budget reconciliation was likely at the heart of my restlessness. That, with the courts enabling parts of their agenda. It’s as if every good public work I have done since graduating high school is being undone. It’s intentional, so my restlessness is not without reason.

Today there will be a decent harvest for the food pantry. Yellow squash, cucumbers, and leafy green vegetables, for sure. When the sun rises, I’ll take my daily walk on the state park trail and get into the garden. With the rain, the garden is really producing, to the benefit of our household and some who are food insecure.

Rain has consequences, both challenging and positive. A summer rainstorm provides opportunities to improve our lives, if we are open to seeing them.

Yellow squash.
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Home Life

On Self Reliance and Grease Monkeys

Kayaks stored by the state park trail.

I was sidetracked by being a grease monkey for 90 minutes at the beginning of my outdoors shift. When I removed the wheel to replace the tractor tire, I did not realize the role the key plays. It uses friction to to keep the wheel turning as gears engage and turn the axle. No key, no movement.

I started the tractor and put it in reverse: nothing. A couple of YouTube videos later I understood what was wrong, retrieved the key I discarded from the trash and reassembled everything. The grease on my hands won’t come out using special soap, so I will have to wear it off. I drove the tractor to mow a patch in the garden… good as new.

My father eschewed being a grease monkey and encouraged me to find a different way to make a living. Toward the end of his life he was assigned duties as a forklift operator in the meat packing plant. He made a point of wearing decent clothing as he hauled pallets of meat around the warehouse. Decent meant a minimum of homemade repairs. His message was we could rise above the quotidian circumstances in which we came up and found ourselves. He graduated from college at age 40 as an example.

I was glad to resolve the issue created by mounting the wheel improperly. I resisted an urge to call the repair shop and ask them. I just solved the problem using tools available. Self reliance is essential if we will survive the authoritarian regime in Washington, D.C. We need to save our money for more important things like taxes, food, shelter, clothing, and healthcare. Today’s political trends have me living closer to the means of production. That’s a good thing.

Editor’s Note: I finished planting most of plot #3 on Wednesday. I’m waiting for the hot peppers to mature before transplanting them into the final row. Next step is preparing a tomato patch. In the meanwhile, my posts here will be shorter than normal. I do plan to return to “normal” at some point after the garden is in.

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Home Life

Thistle Removal

First tomatoes of the season.

This year thistles grew near the east side of the house. While planting the garden, I let them grow. Now came the time to remove them and start a brush pile.

After morning reading, writing, and cooking, I took an old sweatshirt from the closet and put it on. Over that I wore coveralls. Socks, garden shoes, a ball cap, and heavy leather gloves completed the ensemble. The idea was to prevent the thistles from puncturing my skin. For the most part that was accomplished. Ensemble is a pretty fancy word for my attire. We don’t do much stylin’ around here.

These jobs seldom take as long as I plan. The idea is to do them well and do them once. While I had the lopper out, I cut back low-hanging branches I’ve been dodging all year while mowing. I cut back a total of five trees. By the time I pile up all the brush, it will be a decent stack. After I add the brush stored in a fallow garden plot, and conditions are good, I’ll burn it. I put the brush pile over the stump of a locust tree, having heard the fire will remove the stump. We shall see.

The first tomatoes ripened. Orange cherry tomatoes as is usually the case. The garden is a bit of a mess yet it is producing like crazy. The refrigerator is at capacity and there is no shortage of ingredients to prepare a meal. This abundance is complicated by the fact my spouse has been helping her sister for three weeks. I’m doing my best to prepare meals without leftovers, although that is hard to do dining alone.

When J.D. Vance was selected as the Republican vice presidential candidate I pulled down my copy of Hillbilly Elegy and read it. It hasn’t been a priority until now. The ivy league lawyer who grew up in poverty has a story to tell, yet, he makes generalizations that don’t ring true. I’ve known more than a few people, mostly family or kin, who are poor and live in Appalachia. To a person, the word hillbilly was never used to describe themselves. From there the book went downhill as having any broader application than his personal life. Vance’s story is engaging, yet it seems written to support his conservative point of view. When I went to Goodreads to declare I finished the book, the software wouldn’t let me rate the book. I got a message that said,

Do you suppose people are dunking on Vance now that he is running for high office?

Each summer I make iced tea a couple of times. I heat up the water and brew three black tea bags in a teapot purchased for our child’s long ago school project. I buy the cheapest black tea available and it serves. I drink it over ice, no sugar. It is one of the pleasures of summer. On a Saturday afternoon, there is little else more satisfying to a septuagenarian pensioner.