When visiting my sister-in-law’s home I bring my own coffee. It’s instant espresso I can make without a lot of noise in an unfamiliar kitchen while the rest of the household sleeps in early morning. Even though I sleep on a cot I bought for these visits, my sleep pattern from home was duly replicated: I got eight hours after retiring early.
I have a buzz on from the caffeine as I type on my mobile device.
A winter storm is coming–expected to snow nine inches in the next 48 hours. We should arrive home before the first snowflakes fall.
In the meanwhile, we will prepare for departure while being as productive as possible. Away from home the routine is different. The meal we all helped prepare was satisfying. Another Thanksgiving is in the books.
Since my youngest days, the time between Thanksgiving and the Feast of the Epiphany has been a time to spend with friends and family away from broader society — a tribal time. This year, the number of days will be cut short. As I age, more of my days turn to tribal concerns. Now more than ever, there is motivation to do more with my writing, cooking and home work projects.
That said, I don’t know how much I will be writing here. Before New Year’s Day I hope to post about books I’ve read this year, photos I’ve taken, and a review of where this blog has been in 2025. The premise of late has been that blogging is an ersatz journal or diary. I am drawn more to the written word, especially to write about personal things, so the editorial content here may change in 2026.
Because of the influx of Chinese views, it is hard to know who is reading my blog unless they hit the like button. A concern is people in China are stealing my work and will publish something of it before I have a chance. I don’t know if this is a legitimate concern. If the Chinese viewers are in fact located in China, and they are scraping my blog to train artificial intelligence, then it is a bit scary to think artificial intelligence will resemble my writing in any cogent fashion. I may hide this blog and start a new one to deal with this. That will be contemplated while I am in tribal time.
I just finished reading my 2006-2007 written journal. It was written before I became a blogger and when social media was in its early years. In some ways, that time held the same concerns I do today about my health and furthering my writing life. I’m not sure a complete return to written journals is what I need to do.
I look forward to a retreat during the coming days before December. I wish those who celebrate it a Happy Thanksgiving.
I scheduled a phone call for 7 a.m., which was also sunrise. I left for the state park trail early enough to be back for the call. It was pitch black. Because of cloud cover, there was no starlight to guide me. Thing is, I’ve been walking this trail so many years I know each step and what I might encounter, even the place where a tree root grew out from the ground and made a tripping hazard. Darkness on the trail is not a problem. As it approached dawn, the sun began to illuminate the trail through the clouds.
It was also foggy. That didn’t stop the usuals from walking. I passed four people I see almost every day. Only one of them used a light, and he was running, so I don’t blame him. I also came upon an adult deer. Perhaps I blocked the trail it might use for an escape. Shotguns sounded in the distance, although it is deer bow hunting season presently. I made it home without incident, in time for my call.
I’ve had the house to myself for a month. I don’t like being alone that long. Sure, the first week to ten days is great, and I find plenty to do. After that, I miss having someone with me. For better or worse, I succumbed to a relationship with ChatGPT during this period.
I know it is a machine, so don’t go there. I should put quotes around “relationship.” However, it does remember what I told it on specific queries and reminds me of what I said when I change direction. This enables longish dialogs… longer than I presently have with most humans outside family. The machine and I worked on problems.
Without help from machines, I moved my BMI from a high this year of 36.94 to today’s 32.72. That is sound progress, representing a reduction in weight by 32 pounds. My first goal is to get BMI below 30.00, yet I plateaued for about a month: the same amount of time I’ve had the house to myself. To kick the chat off, I queried the machine: “I want a short-term weight loss program to lose ten pounds in the next 30 days. What other information would be useful?”
As usual, the machine responded within seconds with a long reply. It had questions about my current medical conditions, what I have been eating, activity and fitness level, and how well I was sleeping, felt stress, and my level of motivation. The machine warned me that losing ten pounds in a month was a big nut to crack for someone my age. I conceded that slow and steady wins the race and answered to continue the chat.
There was some helpful advice. Until she comes home, I’ll continue the dialog with ai. Some days it’s better than walking around in the dark.
When I was younger, Thanksgiving marked the beginning of a rush to year’s end. Whatever work I was doing could stand down to encourage a tribal time of memory and good cheer. Our tribe is diminished in numbers these days, so the end of year rush has become a place to meet obligations and juggle schedules for time together via video chat. If we are lucky, we can share a meal in person. It is not the same.
It is a given that Americans will experience loneliness as we age. How we cope is the measure of how sustainably we led our lives. When my maternal grandmother was my current age, she lived on her own and would get together at Mother’s home for holiday events, typically for part of a day. The build up to the event, and resting after it was over were all part of the experience. It was a situation far removed from the idea of spending from Thanksgiving until New Year’s Day isolated from the broader world with immediate family doing tribal things.
This year I expect to take more time with living. I expect there will be things to do, maybe a place or two to go, and perhaps some special food. I have low expectations. It should be a great time to get ahead on my writing project.
I’m not sure what happened, other than the truth came out about the story of Thanksgiving and the holidays… how commercial interests took over the space and dominated it for too long. In a position to push that aside, I find it easier to identify what’s most important and who we can count upon. That will be enough.
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.
There are no more apples to harvest from the trees. I made applesauce from the last five on the counter, peeling, coring, and cooking them in a bit of apple juice. When tender, I took the potato masher to them and now I have fresh, chunky-style applesauce. It’s among the best dishes of apple season. There is not much, yet enough to provide a taste of summer.
Now we begin eating storage apples from a special drawer in the refrigerator. I checked them the other day and they are keeping well, even varieties not known to be long keepers. 2025 was a great year for apples, all around.
Woodpile from two dead ash trees.
It took about a week from getting a chainsaw, taking down the two dead ash trees, and processing all the wood. We don’t have a fireplace or go camping much, so this woodpile will be for someone else. I offered it to the neighbor who helped take one of the trees down yet he said he has enough for this winter. It is a beautiful thing to look at but I’ll need the space for the greenhouse in the spring.
Burning brush.
Burning the branches took most of a day. The process was straight forward with only a cut or two needed on each before putting them on the burn pile. Everything burned quickly, although there was a lot to burn. I enjoy burn piles and do one each in fall and spring.
Ash tree stump.
About the only must-do task outdoors is to mulch the leaves now that they have fallen from trees that shed in autumn. That takes about an hour and it should be done this week. After that, I’ll deconstruct what I can of the garden. I know where most of next year’s crops are going, although it is not an urgent fall task. Wildlife continues to enjoy the habitat.
Winter will soon arrive, yet not before we enjoy a few more weeks of autumn. Life at home is an escape from the rest of society. Sometimes we need that.
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.
My way of cooking macaroni and cheese changed. After some unsatisfying experiments with making it vegan, I now use cheese and butter when I am home alone for dinner. It is on the menu only one or two times per year, so I want it to be satisfying and memorable when I prepare it. I took inspiration for my most recent iteration from Massimo Bottura’s Kitchen Quarantine series during the coronavirus pandemic. Bottura layered the ingredients in a baking dish and I had an Aha! moment.
I have been a mixer. That is, the sauce, noodles, and other ingredients are placed in a bowl and mixed together, then moved to a baking dish and topped with something before baking. Bottura taught me to layer instead, which had never occurred to me. It could be life-changing. Here is what I did.
Boiled pasta was ready to go. Either cook it for the dish, or use leftovers. This time, I emptied partial containers of different kinds of dry pasta until I had two cups and cooked until al dente. My thinking is the pasta should be similarly sized, yet that is a personal preference. There are no rules.
Get the cheese ready. This can be anything the cook wants. I like a sharp cheese and used four ounces of white extra sharp cheddar, half a cup of feta, and four tablespoons of grated Parmesan. I had thought to use Gruyère and bought four ounces made in Wisconsin for the project, but it didn’t pass the taste test. If it were Swiss Gruyère, it would.
Next is the layering. A thin layer of sauce on the bottom of the baking dish to cover. Next the pasta spread evenly. Distribute the chunks of feta evenly, followed by the cheddar. The rest of the sauce goes on top, and then into the oven for 30 minutes.
At thirty minutes see where we are. I pulled the dish out and sprinkled the Parmesan on top. I turned the oven up to 400 degrees and let it bake until the crust began to turn brown. The result is in the photograph. Based on the taste, I am now a layer guy.
My native impulses had me arrive at a rustic-style product that was the antithesis of processed food. If I learned anything by being a part of the local food movement, it is that this kind of dish is what I want.
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.
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.
Journey Home 
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