The number one tip for helping seniors stay warm indoors during winter is wearing layers of clothing. Begin with a tank top, a t-shirt next, a woolen shirt, then a light jacket. As we age, we tend to be chilly in winter. Cocooning with layers can help.
We also have a tendency to get stir crazy, as evidenced in the questions callers asked during Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks’ telephone town hall on Tuesday. One woman was in a hospital room for the previous two days and was concerned about Medicare not paying for treatment of a family member’s Alzheimer’s Disease. She could not be consoled, and seemed distraught, even after Rep. Miller-Meeks said a relative of hers had Alzheimer’s and Medicare paid for treatment.
The questions were mostly good, although people need to do a better job asking them. Focus people! You are not in your media bubble at home! Try out your questions before joining the call. Practice! I know, it is a lot to ask.
I made it through to the end. The parts Miller-Meeks read, about the new golden age, energy dominance, and the like, were hardened talking points she used previously in her newsletters. Her way of saying these things drives me crazy. It’s like she’s paying tribute to the MAGA gods before getting started with her shtick, the way a priest says a prayer and does the sign of the cross before approaching the altar.
I took away a couple of things:
They are working on passing the budget through reconciliation, not regular order.
She is all in on DOGE.
Current Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will not be cut now, but any enhancements from the Affordable Care Act are on the table.
No answers on what to do to bring more manufacturing to Iowa.
USAID is not supported by her and others and will likely be cut dramatically or eliminated.
She waffled on the question about privatizing the VA.
I spent worse hours, like the time my boss made me listen to Rush Limbaugh while we were driving around Pennsylvania back in the day. At least I know how to stay warm in winter.
Tulsi Gabbard in the author’s neighborhood. Photo by the author.
Dear Senators Grassley and Ernst,
Associated Press reported Tuesday Tulsi Gabbard, President Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, advanced from the Senate Intelligence Committee in an 8-9 vote. Next steps are for the Senate to schedule a vote. I urge you to vote no on Gabbard.
When Gabbard was running for the Democratic nomination for president in 2019, I met her at a neighbor’s home. I am a U.S. Army veteran, and from this and one previous encounter in 2016, I can say I was not impressed with her depth of thought or with her qualifications to head a government agency. It is personal experiences like this that drive my opposition to her confirmation as director of DNI.
Thank you for your consideration. Regards, Paul Deaton
Before deactivating my Facebook account, I posted a photo of Rainer Werner Fassbinder as my profile picture. The New German Cinema was in vogue in Iowa City during the early 1980s. I saw more than 20 films by Fassbinder during a two-year period. He died on June 10, 1982, of a drug overdose/suicide. The joke was that as prolific as I was on social media, as Fassbinder was in film, I ended my own Facebook life by deactivating it, partly because I felt addicted to it. I suspect no one got the joke.
The changes in my social media use mentioned in yesterday’s post have had an immediate effect. Maybe not exactly cause-effect, but since I removed social media from mobile, I have been sleeping more soundly and more hours of it. I reduced mobile device screen time by half yesterday, to about three hours. I seem to be getting back to having seven or eight hours of sleep in a night. While that takes time from doing things I love, it is likely good for my health. Other positive changes seem to be happening.
It took a while this year, yet I am deep into revision of my current book. I had 63,000 words on January 1, yet the whole thing needs restructuring. I spent part of yesterday working on a new outline. It’s not finished. Having written the first book, I learned a lot about how to create a readable narrative. I plan to apply those skills as the major re-write begins. I will start with a solid outline and then, from the beginning, rewrite each chapter as if it were a stand-alone piece. The main epiphany is I need to focus on a smaller set of narratives. I’m thinking 25-30 stories. My whole life won’t fit, and there is no reason for it to do so. It’s not like I’m Robert Caro writing the biography of LBJ.
Yesterday one of my shoes wore out while I was walking on the state park trail. Water began to seep through the hole in the sole and by the time I finished 30 minutes of walking, my left foot was drenched. When I got home, I tossed the shoes in the trash and dried my feet. I made a note to buy a better pair of walking shoes soon.
There are a lot of moving pieces today. Having more rest and a new pair of walking shoes seems like a necessity. Also humor can help if people get the jokes.
Our home is a relatively quiet sanctuary for creative work and networking with family and friends. It is easy to enter a room and “do something,” whether it be cooking, cleaning, writing, reading, or working in the garage, garden or yard. We made it this way when we designed the house and its setting. We are constantly using computers.
I recently discovered a new widget on my mobile device called Digital Wellbeing and parental controls. It tracks screen time. The results were shocking: more than six hours per day. Since then, I’ve been using the tool to reduce screen time. Last week I averaged 4 hours 24 minutes per day, which is a still a lot. I am endeavoring to do better.
What did I do about it? First I sorted my social media accounts. During the last year I reduced my social media presence, deactivating Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. I left Threads on my desktop and had BlueSky on my mobile device. This morning I removed all social media from mobile. In doing so, I removed them from my bed room and living room.
Second, I turned my mobile device into the tool it was intended to be. Instead of garnering my attention on social media feeds the way a slot machine empties one’s pockets, I time my morning exercise, read ebooks, keep up with news and email, and monitor traffic on my blog. I don’t mind the screen time if I’m getting something other than distraction in return.
Since paring back social media my human interaction increased with more telephone time and emails. As the weather warms, I expect to have more interaction with neighbors outdoors. These are positive developments.
The main thing I learned through the widget is to think about how I spend my time and focus more of it on stuff that adds value. That doesn’t just happen by itself.
At the end of week two I continue to hunker down, waiting for the shrapnel and debris to settle from the new administration’s assault on the government. I’m not ready to come out of the bunker because destruction is just beginning. This is infantry tactics 101.
The bellwether for me will be the arrival of my Social Security check, which is scheduled for the fourth Wednesday of each month. February will be the first month in which the new group was in charge, so any variation in delivery will be a sign.
There have been few surprises since Jan. 20. The president is doing much of what he said he would, plus things outlined in the Project 2025 document written mostly by Russell Vought. Senate hearings were completed on Vought’s appointment as director of the Office of Management and Budget. We are waiting for Republicans to schedule a vote. I have been following Vought since 2015 and am well-familiar with his intentions for our government.
One surprising thing has been Elon Musk’s approach to the Treasury. He purportedly installed his team to review every expenditure as money moves from the government. On one hand, the owner or general manager of every small company I have known scrutinizes every invoice before payment. However, the scale of U.S. Government disbursal is about $6 trillion per year. That’s a lot of invoices to review — even with an experienced staff — without mucking things up. Time will tell if Musk survives the wrath of the president. The over/under of him surviving is Feb. 8 among my friends. We may be optimistic.
I view myself as part of the resistance. Anne Lamott wrote about the lack of visible action to resist in today’s Washington Post:
I think we need and are taking a good, long rest. Along with half of America, I have been feeling doomed, exhausted and quiet. A few of us, approximately 75 million people, see the future as a desert of harshness. The new land looks inhospitable. But if we stay alert, we’ll notice that the stark desert is dotted with growing things. In the pitiless heat and scarcity, we also see shrubs and conviction.
This is how I feel. I am ready to get active but not sure what I should get active doing. I write letters to the editors of newspapers, yet mostly am dealing with family issues and my own mental and physical health. As bad as these two weeks have been, I am confident there will be a reckoning for what the November election results have wrought. Robert Reich wrote today in his substack:
As bad as this “fu*king nightmare” gets, it will awaken Americans to the truth about what has happened to this country — and what we must do to get it back on the track toward social justice, democracy, and widespread prosperity.
On Friday, Jan. 31, 2025, State Representative Amy Nielsen and Solon Mayor Dan O’Neil hosted a town hall meeting attended by 17 local residents at the Solon Public Library. There was a lively discussion.
Overshadowing the town hall was the fact Republican lawmaker Martin Graber of Fort Madison died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 72. The Gazette story quoted House Speaker House Pat Grassley, “Our caucus is devastated by the unexpected passing of our friend and colleague Martin Graber.” “Our caucus” and no one else? A Democrat at the town hall suggested the obvious: there will be a special election to fill his seat. Let’s give partisanship a rest until the human is buried or cremated before thinking about politics. May Graber rest in peace.
Mayor O’Neil went first. The biggest project the City of Solon is planning is a new wastewater treatment facility. In part, the current one, built in the 1960s, needs updating. The population has grown considerably since the original plant and the city needs expanded capacity. They are one year into a five-year project.
The mayor also suggested the city welcomes increased tax revenue from recent growth. It leaves a little breathing space in the budget, he said. He also discussed the non-partisan nature of city council and would like to keep it that way. We all know he is a Democrat, yet the work is more positive when politics is left outside. He also talked about getting more representation on the county board of supervisors. The legislature is talking about “rural representation” again this year.
State Senator Dawn Driscoll introduced Senate Study Bill 1018 in the Iowa Senate, related to county supervisors and “rural representation.” She explained in her newsletter:
At the forefront of my week was Senate Study Bill (SSB) 1018, which is a bill I filed and am particularly passionate about. This bill requires county supervisors be elected from single-member, equal-population districts in counties with populations of 125,000 or more (or are home to one of Iowa’s public universities). This bill also requires these same counties to fill vacancies on their board of supervisors by special election, while all other counties must fill the vacancy by appointment. SSB 1018 gives a voice to the people of Iowa, especially those in rural communities whose voices can be overpowered by massive amounts of student populations. Given that I live in rural Iowa myself, I recognize the importance of rural representation. Our votes and our voices matter, and I believe SSB 1018 captures exactly this sentiment. The bill advanced through Tuesday’s subcommittee and the Local Government Committee meeting
I pointed out at the town hall that a lot depends upon how the maps dividing our county into districts were drawn. County Auditor Julie Persons was present and said depending on how the legislation is written, and whether it passes, her office would draw a district map and forward it to the Secretary of State for approval. In an Iowa State University study conducted after the 2020 U.S. Census, researchers found 83.3 percent of Johnson County is urban and 16.7 percent is rural. It’s hard to see how a single rural-dominant district could be drawn without extreme gerrymandering.
I want the freedom to vote for the best candidates for all five supervisor seats as the current at-large elections enable. The only Republican elected to the board of supervisors since we moved here in 1993 was John Etheridge. Republicans won by getting out the vote in the entire county in a low turnout election. There’s another reason to favor the at-large system. It elected the first Republican supervisor in many years. It seems like the bill will move this year, even though in our county, it would lock in urban rule by Democrats by district.
Rep. Amy Nielsen speaking to residents at a Town Hall Meeting at the Solon Public Library on Jan. 31, 2025
Rep. Nielsen covered many topics, including private school vouchers, home schooling, changes in special education, school lunch programs, and the higher education committee. There were questions about water quality, discrimination against LGBTQIA individuals, cancer, and nicotine use and control.
I raised two issues I would like to gain more attention.
Public discussion of contracted administration of Medicaid has gone silent in the state. Is it still costing us too much money? Is the current administrator going to endure? Are we going to require grandma to get a job while enroute to the nursing home? It was a good discussion that ended with my suggestion Rep. Nielsen address it in her legislative newsletter.
I also asked what the legislature was doing to address the statewide shortage of physicians, especially in specialties such as vascular surgery. This topic has not gained traction among Republican lawmakers whose past tendency has been to lower standards rather than incentivize qualified surgeons to move to Iowa.
Rep. Nielsen wears a white hat and even though she doesn’t represent my district, she has been very supportive of everyone in the county. It was a good night in Solon.
Gillett Grove, Iowa has a post office and 30 people, according to the 2020 U.S. Census. In 2000, there were 55 people. The whole of Clay County, where the town is located, appears in decline. In some ways, Gillett Grove typifies rural Iowa.
How did this come up? The way many things come up in a household: we got talking.
Its history is brief. “First settlers appeared in Gillett Grove in 1856 and the town, named after the Gillett brothers, was incorporated on May 13, 1874,” according to the website Travel Iowa. “The town was originally located west of the (Little Sioux) river and one and half miles North until 1899 when it was moved to the east side of the river along with the arrival of the railroad.” I don’t see railroad tracks on Google Maps.
The high school for the South Clay Community School District was located in Gillett Grove. It also served Webb, Dickens, and surrounding rural settlements. In a relatively rare for Iowa occurrence, this consolidated district was dissolved in 2010 when it had 132 students.
The website Zillow lists the sale of a house at 506 3rd Street at auction for $25,300. Built in 1900, the outbuildings appear to be worth more than the dwelling. It’s a fixer-upper, definitely. Who might live in such a place in this rural city with limited visible economic activity? It’s an open question, yet the website suggests the property could garner $816 per month in rental income.
How many towns and hamlets like Gillett Grove exist in Iowa? More than a few. There is not time to write about them all. What we do is discuss our connections with some of them and wonder what life might be like living there. Then the conversation ends and I’m glad to live where we do.
Editor’s Note: As I prepare for my exit from Facebook, I came across this list of quotes from a long time ago. They remain some of my favorites.
“For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie– deliberate, contrived and dishonest– but the myth– persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” ~ John F. Kennedy
“No ideas but in things” ~ William Carlos Williams
“If each citizen did not learn, in proportion as he individually becomes more feeble and consequently more incapable of preserving his freedom single-handed, to combine with his fellow citizens for the purpose of defending it, it is clear that tyranny would unavoidably increase together with equality.” ~Alexis de Tocqueville
“Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.” ~ Jacques Yves Cousteau
“Early apples begin to be ripe about the first of August; but I think that none of them are so good to eat as some to smell. One is worth more to scent your handkerchief with than any perfume they sell in the shops. The fragrance of some fruits is not to be forgotten, along with that of flowers. Some gnarly apple which I pick up in the road reminds me by its fragrance of all the wealth of Pomona, carrying me forward to those days when they will be collected in golden and ruddy heaps in the orchards and about the cider-mills.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
“Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell? Sleeping or waking? mad or well-advised? Known unto these, and to myself disguised! I’ll say as they say and persever so, And in this mist at all adventures go.” ~ William Shakespeare
“Radix malorum est Cupiditas” ~ from Chaucer, but older
“It’s always the old who lead us to the war. Always the young who fall. Now look at all we’ve won with the saber and the gun. Tell me is it worth it all?” ~Phil Ochs
“No. Try not. Do… or do not. There is no try.” ~Yoda
“Good navigators are always skeptical, not of the presences of things, but of what they see and understand. Good navigators are almost always lost.” ~Robert Finley
“Why, this is very midsummer madness.” ~ William Shakespeare
“You know? There’s the most extraordinary, unheard-of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it. But now this is true of the world as a whole. The agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way. Now I begin to understand what Tolstoi was getting at when he called on mankind to cease the false and unnecessary comedy of history and begin simply to live.” ~Saul Bellow
“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist…The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ~R. Buckminster Fuller
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.” ~ John Donne
“We harbor no illusions about the difficulty of bringing about a world without nuclear weapons. We know there are plenty of cynics, and that there will be setbacks to prove their point. But there will also be days like today that push us forward – days that tell a different story.” ~ Barack Obama
“And our mouths shaped words, And our destiny was shaped. With words we made our sacred songs, We took possession of language, And our being was borne on words.” ~ N. Scott Momaday
“As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men, For they are women’s children, and we mother them again. Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes; Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!” ~ James Oppenheim
“Fill ‘er up with love please won’t you mister? Just the hi-test is what I used to say… But that was before I lost my baby, I’ll have a dollar’s worth of regular today.” ~ Phil Ochs
“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.
Just give me the warm power of the sun. Give me the steady flow of a waterfall. Give me the spirit of living things as they return to clay. Just give me the restless power of the wind. Give me the comforting glow of a wood fire. But please take all of your atomic poison power away. ~ John Hall
“But your flag decal won’t get you Into Heaven any more. They’re already overcrowded From your dirty little war. Now Jesus don’t like killin’ No matter what the reason’s for, And your flag decal won’t get you Into Heaven any more.” ~ John Prine
I won’t miss Joe Biden because he became the face of America during his presidency, leaving a positive, persisting imprint across our government.
Althea Cole (Jan. 19) and Mike Hayes (Jan. 26), have been saying in the Gazette they won’t miss President Biden. They ran him down with words and stomped him like he was a dust ball in their closet. You may not miss Joe Biden but you will miss his policies.
I’ll mention three.
The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD), an Iowa program authorized by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 is bringing broadband to rural parts of the state where it had not been before. People I speak with say it is life-changing. Thank you, Joe Biden.
More than $200 million in National Institutes of Health funding comes into Iowa, supporting more than 2,500 jobs. Clinical trials and research are a part of so many of our lives. They include research into the prevention and treatment of cancer, which the governor highlighted in her condition of the state address. Biden supported this funding.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is expected to send Iowa $3.9 billion in Federal highway formula funding for highways and bridges. We all use highways and bridges. Again, thank you, Joe Biden.
It’s a free country and people can say what they want. What I’ll say about Cole and Hayes is they are not being Iowa nice even though they should be.
~ Submitted as a letter to the editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette
January and February are the best months to hunker down and write. I get outside almost every day to take a brisk walk along the state park trail. Some mornings the landscape looks like this. Then it’s back indoors and to work.
Today we’ll experience ambient temperatures in the 40s. I decided to run the buckets of compost out to the garden composter. They started to stink in the garage, so it was time to go. On January 28, it should not be this warm, but it is.
NextEra Energy Resources filed a request with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission to potentially restore the facility’s operating license as demand for electricity surges to power large data centers needed to handle the growth of artificial intelligence, the Cedar Rapids Gazette reported on Saturday. The plant was damaged during the 2020 derecho and has not been repaired. If the license were issued, management expects the nuclear power plant to be back on line sometime in 2028. My question about this is who pays? Except for those parts of the operation paid by the Department of Energy, all costs should be paid by the potential customers. We shouldn’t pretend bringing Duane Arnold back on line serves the public good.
The other question, and I believe it is the right one, relates to re-starting the Duane Arnold Nuclear Power plant because of the big electricity needs to power Artificial Intelligence. What people are not talking about is using new power plants to generate electricity for another energy hog, crypto-currency, to the detriment of our economy. Shouldn’t we be talking about that?
I’m losing confidence in our local media to cover this issue. For the most part, they seem to be writing stories based on industry generated information and not any specific facts.
Well, at least the compost is out in the bin ready to make a soil conditioner. That, I know I can put to good use.
Journey Home 
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