Tag: Creative Life

Tools in Autumn

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date December 11, 2025

On the state park trail on Dec. 10, 2025.

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.

Tags Creative Life, creative process, tools, worklife, Workshop

Table From the Scrap Pile

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date December 9, 2025

Lumber to make a work table for the garage.

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.

After a few hours of furniture building I had to take a break.

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.

Table made from a top, four legs and salvaged lumber.

It’s bigger than I thought, but I will adapt. No adjustments were needed.

Tags Carpentry, Creative Life, creative process, Furniture Making, homelife, Living in Iowa, worklife, Workshop

Creative Life

Writing in Public

On the state park trail on Dec. 6, 2025.

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.

Tags #amwriting, Creative Life, creative process, creativity, Writing

Writing

Memorable Posts of 2025

2025 has been a decent year for my writing. I added 26,000 words to my autobiography, posted 20 times on Blog for Iowa, and produced more than 300 posts here, including cross posting my letters to the editor. It’s hard to digest everything, especially when I’m in the middle of writing more. This post is some links to posts I believe are significant.

On January 5, I wrote Right to Repair. This post starts with a high school friend and hot rodder who was building his own car to ride the ones in Davenport. It includes my maternal grandmother repairing her stove, and ends with her parents and grand parents settling land bought from the railroad in the late 1800s. Can we get back to a situation where people know how everything in their home works and repair it themselves? This post explores that idea.

If It’s About Workforce was posted on January 7. It’s about the Iowa Legislature restructuring the regents universities to purge diversity, equity and inclusion programs in education. Among the things they did was eliminate the American Studies Program from which I have a degree. There was talk about improving the workforce, yet I don’t believe higher education is about placing people in work. I also have a modest proposal.

2025 is a year I gave increased attention to photography. On July 24, I posted A Life of Photos, which serves as my introductory process. There was a time when popular photography was used primarily in two ways: it recorded memorable “moments,” and it provided a method and technology for creative expression. A third purpose has come into being and the series that began with this post explores what that is.

My 55th high school class reunion took place in September. Afterward, I posted In the Shadow of Hotel Black Hawk on September 28. This year’s reunion was better than others I attended in that by eliminating any formal program, the planning committee furnished a venue for classmates to socialize. I found the format refreshing and actually had a number of memorable conversations. This post remembers some of them.

Are people mixers or layerers? Eating Alone — Mac and Cheese, posted on November. 10, explores the difference and in doing so created a repeatable main course dish head and shoulders above the dozens of available boxed mac and cheese meals. I have become a layerer.

When I worked at the oil company I had no idea what was behind their big move to consolidate records in Oklahoma. Time to Change Hats, posted November 12, is about that and more. I wrote, “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.” I’m not yet on a single platform with visibility, yet that’s where I am heading. That’s what makes this post significant.

These posts only scratch the surface of my writing. I appreciate everyone who follows along here.

Tags #amwriting, Creative Life, creative process, creativity, Writing

Creative Life

Favorite Photos of 2025

Sunrise on the state park trail — January 2025.

Here are my current favorite photos from the thousands taken in 2025.

Tags A Life of Photos, Creative Life, creativity, photography

Creative Life

Taking a Different Trail

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date November 24, 2025

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.

Trail runs along the former railroad tracks.

There are only a few glass insulators left on the poles. I found one blue one and these clear ones.

Note the clear glass insulators. These are some of the last ones left on a pole.

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.

This construction is all new since last time I was here.

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.

East end of the north branch of Lake Macbride.

Development may be encroaching, yet there are still plenty of good photos to be taken.

These trees were mere sticks when I first saw them.

Tags A Life of Photos, Creative Life, creative process, photography

Writing

Sorting Tables

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date November 19, 2025

Our child brought home some unused bankers boxes which I quickly put to work storing all the stuff piled on these two tables. This is a place to layout projects. Importantly my writing project as I head into the final stretch of book two, but also a place to empty boxes and go through contents for disposition. A person needs surfaces like these.

The back surface is the oak desk I bought when I returned to Davenport after military service. It has been resting in this spot since 1993 where I assembled it after moving into our home in Big Grove Township. The front one is what appears to be the top of an old drafting table I bought at auction, standing on two saw horses I built. They have not been this cleaned off since we lived here.

With the sorting surfaces I’m ready to get back to writing.

I edited the outline for Part II of my autobiography yesterday and determined the break in the narrative will be when our child leaves home for college, and then leaves Iowa altogether after graduation. This decision has been hanging over me all year and for where I am in the narrative it is the right choice. So, chronological narrative through becoming empty nesters, and then being left behind by our progeny.

I’m still fussing with the order of chapters after that, yet it will include; development of the kitchen garden, community volunteer work, board of health, bloggery and social media, my first retirement, the year 2010 (which I believe was pivotal in multiple ways), newspaper writing, the environment, farm work, and maybe other chapters ending with new beginnings after the coronavirus pandemic. My problem is support documents and artifacts are mixed in with everything, with limited visibility. Enter the sorting tables.

I’m working on the same type of organizing surface throughout the house. In the garage I put everything on existing surfaces and set up a folding table. Now I need to organize. It’s the same thing: I want visibility of what I have so I can effectively use things. The major bedroom project was similar with the bed serving as the organizing surface. My clothing is now sorted and put away. Outdoors, I have a couple of places that serve as sorting places. Those change each season as the garden gets planted. Having a sorting station or surface made my life better.

It rained Monday night. We need rain. Indoors I’m ready to go with my newly cleared sorting surfaces.

Tags #amwriting, autobiography, Creative Life, creative process, Writing

Living in Society

Shoe Boxes and Avoidance

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date November 18, 2025

I pulled out a shoe box filled with papers from around the turn of the century as an evening project. I find I need something to do after dinner that engages me in staying awake, yet does not engage too much. Sorting through old, unorganized papers is a low-stress thing to do. After the project, I took steps to stay awake, and managed to add 20 minutes to the end of my day. Hopefully that will build until I stay up until 9 p.m. like normal people do.

I said the papers were unorganized, but that’s not true. Some circumstance of time and place gathered them together until I couldn’t stand to look at the pile. At that point I got a shoe box and put them away. In other words, I avoided a better disposition. The shoe box became an unlabeled time capsule to be opened when a whim from the great beyond drew me again to it. Sunday night was that time.

What was in it?

There were a number of cards I received on “bosses’ day.” I didn’t recognize most of the signatures on them. There were work-related holiday cards. One included a photograph of the customer service staff at the trucking firm. It was apparently a time when women used curling irons to style their long hair. The person with whom I had the closest work relationship looked nothing like I remember them. Most men in the photo could not muster a proper smile.

There was a white envelope with 8 x 10-inch photographs. I thought I would frame and display them. Some were work related: an aerial photograph of the terminal I managed in Richmond, Indiana; a staff photo at the Schererville, Indiana terminal. Some were political: me, my congressman and a county supervisor at a parade; an autographed photo of my former state representative at a different parade. There is the portrait I had done of the county board of health when I was chair. There were two photographs from my walks on the state park trail. At this point in history, none of them will be framed.

Being on the county board of health was a big deal. During that time our director left to join a child in Colorado and we held a public search for his replacement. There were clippings in the shoe box. Some of the smartest people I’ve yet known were on that search committee. We got things done and became good friends.

Trust me, I’m not going to review every bit of shoe box content in this post. Suffice it to say that we live our lives in one direction and there is no going back. I found the brochure from the Georgia O’Keeffe retrospective at the Chicago Art Institute. I remember it like it was yesterday. It wasn’t yesterday and that is my point.

The idea is to place all my possessions on a platform where I can see their entirety. It means touching every document, every artifact, at least once. There are questions to answer:

Should I:

Put all the cards in one place or sort chronologically or by sender?
What about obituaries?
What about young people who invited me to their wedding and then divorced? Keep the souvenirs or discard?
Should the brochures from events and exhibitions go together or maybe in a book by the artists if I have one?
There are a lot of ticket stubs and programs from theater. What about all that?

The questions could be endless, yet paramount is to avoid just putting everything back in the same box and sticking it somewhere, likely inside another box.

It seems time to address all of this and stop avoiding responsibility. Yet shoe boxes are so handy… and not that big… what could it hurt? That is, unless one has dozens of them.

Tags Creative Life, creative process, homelife, Productivity

Creative Life

A Life of Photos Part IX

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date November 15, 2025

Sunrise on the state park trail. Taken with my Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra smartphone.

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.

Tags A Life of Photos, Creative Life, creative process, photography, Writing

Creative Life

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.