Winter is escaping, and with it the best time of year to write. It has become a household meme that “I am losing more darkness every day!” There is so much to get done on the book project. Monday the ground was frozen, yet soon it won’t be. Putting the garden in is also a major undertaking.
That said, posting here will slow down as I focus on completing the current editing pass on my book. If all goes well, it will take a few weeks. A photo one day, maybe a video of a favorite song, a few kind words. All place holders until the book is where I need it to be come spring.
I’m from the government and I’m here to help. Now that I on-boarded with the county auditor to be a poll worker, I can truthfully say that. Ronald Reagan made a joke about those nine words, yet voting is no laughing matter.
On-boarding consisted of driving to the county administration building, locating the appropriate area, entering data on their system, and providing my I-9 documents for photocopying. I completed a time sheet with ten minutes and 20 miles. Easy-peasy.
About eight of us used IBM Think Pads for data entry. IBM sold that business line in 2005 and the company that bought it soon discontinued the product. I’m glad to see our county government using technology to get every last penny from the investment. I had forgotten how to use the track pad, so needed help.
As is usually the case, I ran into people I know from politics. I maintain a friendly relationship with everyone I helped elect at the administration building.
I made two other stops while in the county seat.
On the way in, I stopped at the used book store to see if they had certain titles by John McPhee whose Draft No. 4 I just finished. They had a McPhee reader with parts of the essays I sought for five bucks. A while ago, I had asked them if they had a copy of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I gave my copy to our child and wanted a replacement. When they said they didn’t have it, I procured it elsewhere. On Friday, they had been unexpectedly holding a copy for me. I declined it in person, yet on the way home, reconsidered it. Surely I could find a home for it. I emailed I would buy it if they still had it.
The other stop was at the grocer. It is conveniently located on Highway One which leads to our home near the lake. It has long been a stop when I have something to do in the county seat. I like the wholesale club better, yet they don’t have the granularity of item selection a home cook needs to run a kitchen. This produce section is particularly loaded with organic fruit and vegetables, all in a single location with non-organic. Too, when I fill my cart, the total is usually less than $100. At the wholesale club it can be double or triple that with less items overall.
I won’t be lording my new government employee status over too many people. The small bit of income will easily find a home in our budget. In fact, even though the general election is not until November, the money is already spent.
After struggling to get the fork into a pile of grass clippings, I gave up for the day. Everything was frozen solid, even after a few days with ambient temperatures well above freezing. Highs in the 40s and 50s are forecast the rest of the week. Maybe I will accomplish my goal of clearing one plot this week to use as temporary storage. Not that day, though.
I am in the garden way early this year, so there is time for preseason work. I seeded the first indoor trays last Saturday and by Tuesday some of the varieties already had leaves. I hope they all germinate by this Saturday when I prepare the next tray of seedlings. Warming pad space is at a premium the next eight weeks.
When we moved to Big Grove Township there were scrub grasses and a lone mulberry tree on the vacant lot we purchased. The tree appeared to have been planted by a bird’s droppings while it perched on a surveyor’s re-bar marker. The ground had a high clay content which suggested the farmer who made his farm into a subdivision had removed the topsoil before selling plats.
From that clay I built soil in a garden that now occupies one fourth of the 0.62 acres we own. When I started, the first plots were small with a large grass border around them. Today I can’t get the mower between the plots to cut foxtail grasses and other weeds that grow there. I got big after working on a vegetable farm for eight years, bringing home the skills and techniques I learned there. After years of expansion, it seems time to bring order to what I do. This is likely why I am outdoors in the garden the second week of February.
We did not set out to build habitat when we moved here. The decision to site the house closer to the north property line — as opposed to in the center — mattered more than I knew. Placement of the foundation determined what remained open, how wind would move, where trees should be planted. We were thinking of how to build additions when finances permitted. Now, a deer path runs the length of the lot on the south side of our home. When winds come from the west, there is a corridor on the north side where it sweeps through the fruit orchard, and into the back yard. Over the years wind has taken a toll on the many trees we planted here. We never built an addition, nor even a deck.
The abundance of wildlife remains mostly unseen. There have been birds of all kinds, opossums, foxes, and after many years of waiting for trees to grow, there are squirrels. There are too many deer, although by developing a path from their space in a nearby woods to an large apple orchard to the west, they mostly leave me alone.
As I contemplate today’s schedule I plan more time in the garden. Maybe the dead vegetation will have loosened enough to move it. Maybe not. In either case, there is plenty of time for preseason garden work.
Markers for kale, collards and chard in a tray of soil blocks on Feb. 7, 2026.
The first day’s seeding session went quickly and well. I bought soil mix and garden seeds last fall, and cleared the table I use indoors — with a heating pad and grow light — last month. Experience pays as I was able to find and put together everything else in a couple of hours on Saturday morning, producing two trays of 50 soil blocks each. Mostly, I planted cruciferous vegetables.
We’ve been saving plastic yogurt tubs and today I drilled holes in a dozen of them for an indoor herb garden. It will be a new experiment. If successful, it will have been worth trying. Bread on the water.
I’ve been looking at photographs from previous gardens and was inspired by this one to grow leeks again. We returned to leek-potato soup in the kitchen and prefer our own leeks over store bought because we understand all the inputs. I ordered a bundle of leek starts from a new to me seed company.
Garden produce in 2008.
When it is cold outdoors, I put kitchen scraps in a 5-gallon bucket in the garage until it warms and I can dump them in the composter. Because of the cold, the composter is not doing much work and is two thirds full of kitchen waste. The other garden waste composter has hardly anything in it. When I make my indoor herb garden, I won’t use garden compost in the soil mix because it hasn’t decomposed enough and therefore might be stinky.
Part of apple sorting is putting low grade ones in a pile for wildlife. By spring they will be gone. (Update: when I took the compost out on Feb. 7, 2026, they were all gone.
This year seems different in that the pace of everything from the garden to finishing my book to politics is swift and deliberate. As long as I remember who I am, I’m okay with that.
This January I’m thankful to have gotten back into the writing groove so quickly. I finished the first draft of my book and am a third finished with the first major edit. The narrative and language keeps getting stronger. If I did nothing else, that would be an accomplishment.
I managed to get outdoors for my 30-minute walk every day but one. In past years I struggled to get exercise during winter but I remedied that. Among other things I remedied was sleepless nights. After using artificial intelligence to generate some ideas, I developed my own process to fall asleep and stay asleep until it is time to get up. I’ve now been getting seven to eight hours of sleep each night.
Reading seven books this month was in line with my plans. February should be another good month, especially if it stays cold.
Friday I attended a visitation for a friend’s spouse. The older I get, the more I feel a sense of loss regardless of how long or how well I knew the deceased. Luckily several other people I knew were there and we were able to talk about more than a few common things. We could go on living.
The current schedule is to start the first garden seeds indoors on Feb. 7. The year is rushing toward us with unrelenting fury. A lot remains to be done before spring’s promise arrives.
Although 2025 was an “on year” for apples — all five trees bore fruit — I skipped making apple butter because there were more than three dozen pints in the pantry. I need more uses for the thick, sweet, and tasty condiment than spreading on toasted bread and muffins, dolloping on applesauce cake, and spooning it on pancakes. It turns out there are more preparations I hadn’t thought about.
As a vegetarian household, using apple butter in meat cooking, while popular elsewhere, is not viable. That isn’t the end of the discussion. One must change their way of thinking about apple butter. It is good as a spread, yet can be considered as a fruit-based sweetener, thick apple concentrate, or a spiced apple paste. These considerations open a whole new world. It could be used as a replacement for honey, molasses, or applesauce without much recipe variation. Following are some ideas to try.
The first thing I did was to dish up a serving of plain Greek yogurt and swirl two tablespoons of aronia berry apple butter into it. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before, yet after trying it, apple butter will be a recurring breakfast menu item to pair with yogurt.
We already use applesauce as an egg replacement in baking. Our corn muffins, or any other muffins serve as a useful home for it to replace an egg. The texture is always moist, firm and tasty. I will just substitue apple butter and use a bit less.
Using it on grilled cheese sandwiches hadn’t occurred to me. It might pair well with the sharp cheddar cheese I use to make them. I make about one grilled cheese sandwich per month, and next time I will spread some apple butter on it to discover the flavor.
We are not big cake eaters or bakers. We do have a recipe for a spice cake. Next time we make it, we will try substituting apple butter for the oil. Based on the experience with applesauce cake and muffins, I bet it will be moist and delicious, as well as change the spice profile.
I found a recipe for a barbecue sauce or ketchup that includes apple butter, tomato paste, vinegar, onion and garlic powder, and spices. There is nothing to lose by making a batch and trying it.
There was a recipe for a salad dressing made from one tablespoon each of apple butter, extra virgin olive oil, vinegar and mustard. Simple. The way we like our recipes.
Substituting apple butter for the sweetened, condensed oat milk I use when making steel cut oats is a possibility. The spices will add a variation in flavor. I make this dish about twice per month and will try it next time.
The next “on year” for apples is forecast for 2027. Hopefully I will use most of the apple butter in the pantry by then and make new.
It was four degrees Fahrenheit and snowy this morning so I’m posting some garden images from 2008 as a reminder of what spring and summer can be. These are part of my larger A Life of Photos project. I did the initial sort of my digital images from 2008 last week. Posts like this one are part of the work product of that project.
First spring flowers.Apple trees blossomed in 2008.Lilacs are a perennial favorite.Potatoes pop through the soil early.When all the apple trees bloom, summer and fall is apple abundance.Summer harvest in 2008.Bowl of home grown apples. Japanese beetles massing on an apple.Apple blossom buds.Farmstead from the state park trail in 2008.
I’ve written about hot sauce so many times. It is ironic that the two other main people in my family have an aversion to capsaicin. Here I am again, though, writing about my enamored state regarding all things hot peppers.
Slowly, over a matter of years, I developed hot pepper food products I use. When I make a lot of fluid pepper sauce, I typically water bath can it, mindful of how much acid goes into each batch. This year’s repeated food products are:
Ground cayenne pepper to fill an existing spice jar. I kept the extras whole for future use.
Legacy hot pepper seasoning. Dried peppers and other spices mixed together and stored in large canning jars after the stove-side receptacles are filled. This is made with everything hot and few that aren’t. Also includes a large batch of Emeril Lagasse’s Essence.
I still keep a bottle of Frank’s RedHot in the refrigerator. It has a distinctive taste which I seek from time-to-time.
By now, the fresh peppers are gone. I found freezing them whole or halved was not the best option. This year hot pepper paste is doing journeyman’s kitchen duty. Making it used all remaining hot peppers. Hot pepper paste is a gardener’s friend.
Growing and using hot peppers is a never-ending journey. One I hope continues as long as I live.
We can’t help but be appalled by the news story about a young man who died of a drug overdose after his interaction with ChatGPT about his dosage.
ChatGPT started coaching Sam on how to take drugs, recover from them and plan further binges. It gave him specific doses of illegal substances, and in one chat, it wrote, “Hell yes—let’s go full trippy mode.” (A Calif. teen trusted ChatGPT for drug advice. He died from an overdose, Lester Black and Stephen Council, SFGate, Jan. 5, 2026).
What’s that got to do with me asking the same artificial intelligence portal for advice about fixing dinner? More than a little.
I’m a beginning user of ChatGPT. When I asked the machine how I could get more protein in a simple pesto pasta dinner, I didn’t think twice about its recommendation of a half cup of cannellini beans, a serving of green beans, white miso and nutritional yeast. All four were on hand and I grew the green beans myself. I made the dish. After dinner I reported a bitter taste to the meal, which I attributed to the nutritional yeast. AI was in robust agreement and added, “That’s what experienced chefs do. Figure out what causes taste.” Stop stroking me, I thought to myself.
Earlier in my less than a year interaction with the machine, it asked me, “Do you prefer this tone?” It meant tone of voice in our interactions. After I asked what pronouns the machine preferred (you/it), this seemed like a natural follow up. I said okay and have had that tone in front of me ever since. I like it because it generates a fake phraseology which helps me remember ai is not my friend but a machine. In reading the article, Sam did not appear to have such division in his experience.
OpenAI, the parent of ChatGPT, uses what’s called a “large language model” to work its magic. Basically, it is a machine learning model that can comprehend and generate human language. Okay, that’s what the machine does. Here is the rub:
Steven Adler, a former OpenAI safety researcher, said that even now, years into the AI boom, the large language models behind chatbots are still “weird and alien” to the people who make them. Unlike coding an app, building a LLM “is much more like growing a biological entity,” Adler said. “You can prod it and shove it with a stick to like, move it in certain directions, but you can’t ever be — at least not yet — you can’t be like, ‘Oh, this is the reason why it broke.’” (A Calif. teen trusted ChatGPT for drug advice. He died from an overdose, Lester Black and Stephen Council, SFGate, Jan. 5, 2026).
Are we getting into a Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home scenario? Here is the plot, in case you missed it. Or maybe the HAL 9000 as in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is concerning the makers of artificial intelligence have it going, but can’t control it. In Sam’s case, ai told him it couldn’t talk about drug use at first. Eventually Sam won the machine over to his personal detriment.
I can fix my pesto pasta bowl so it is less bitter next time. Once a young man’s life is gone, there is no next chance to improve. I predict ai will become very popular because it took the machine four seconds to generate a meal change that would add more protein yet fall in the domain of Italian cuisine. It knew about the issues with nutritional yeast, yet recommended it anyway. In before-ai life, I would be paging through cookbooks for an hour to get the same result. Maybe we should throw on the brakes… and I don’t mean the mechanical devices used on the first Model-T Fords.
In a society where humans have less and less in-person contact, it seems normal we would seek out a machine that speaks to us in a tone of voice we recognize and accept. What is not normal is the suspension of skepticism about the machine’s interaction with us. I learned to watch out or you’ll get a bitter pasta bowl.
When gleaning the garden I picked a number of green cayenne peppers. Not wanting to mix them with the red ones, I ground them into a fine powder and have been using it in lieu of hot sauce on Mexican-style dishes. It is an unexpected treat.
While making tacos on our Taco Tuesday, I used the last of the fresh kale from the refrigerator. We almost made it to 2026. Now we turn to the freezer for leafy green vegetables. There is plenty for household use.
We make tofu stir fry on rice as a main course. I have been experimenting with pureed garlic. It is made with extra virgin olive oil and garden garlic. In stir fry, it mixes with the water used as a cooking medium and forms a tasty sauce. I will be pureeing more garlic as we use up the initial batches.
It’s almost time for another pot of barley-lentil vegetable soup. I will raid the freezer for ingredients, including grated zucchini and summer squash, diced celery, prepared pumpkin, and collards. A warm bowl of soup is appreciated this time of year.
I cleaned off my writing table because I spilled a giant cup of coffee on it. The damage was minimal but the drop cloth that protects it got wet and is draped over the car to dry. I found a bottle of furniture cleaner and treated the surface. Nothing says you are ready for what’s next like a clean writing surface.
Journey Home 
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