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.
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.
The crops were mostly in along the interstate highway during a Saturday trip to the state capitol. It seems a shame to grow corn and soybeans on so many acres, yet that’s what Iowa farmers do. A few were tiling their fields, another unneeded intervention designed to marginally increase land outputs. Next year, they will do it all again.
At home, the major land preparations are finished on my 0.62 acre. I mulched the leaves from deciduous trees and let the mealy textured product fall where it might to put minerals back in the soil. I suppose it could be bagged and put into compost, yet decided against it. Whatever else I get done in tearing down the garden this year is not urgent.
When I returned from Des Moines, the two main seed catalogues had arrived by U.S. Postal Service. Between now and January I will plan the 2026 garden and place big orders for seeds. The basics are known — tomatoes, hot peppers, cruciferous vegetables, squash, celery, fennel, and cucumbers — of course, garlic has been planted. It’s the variations in genetics and extras that are most interesting this season. I’m of a mood to try new things.
Our family does not celebrate Thanksgiving. The way our child put it, there is too much bad information around what it represents. They have a friends gathering around that time, and the two of us are deciding how we will spend the day which was drilled into us as custom since youngest memory. If we are home, there will be a special meal of wild rice, a butternut squash, Russet potatoes, baked beans, and a freezer full of vegetables. Plans are not settled and if we are not home, everything will remain good until we are.
There is a caesura in home life activities as work shifts indoors for winter.
In addition to taking care of health and surviving, there are three main activities planned for colder months. The daily work block for writing is my first priority. I continue to want to finish the second book before spring. Next is what I will call the “Big Sort.” That means going through all the boxed belongings to gain visibility of what is available for the autobiography as well as for living our life in Big Grove. Some downsizing to clear clutter seems appropriate. Maybe next spring there will be a yard sale. Finally, on warmer days which seem more frequent during this time of global warming, I want to go through the garage and make a better organized work space. I have a start at it, but come spring I want a place ready to make stuff. If I can complete these projects, that would be enough for one winter.
2025 has been a positive year despite the politics. As we turn toward winter, a lot remains to make this a better life. I am working toward that end.
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.
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.
After moon rise and before sunrise on the state park trail.
Like with many Americans, a lot is on my mind these days. Not enough for a full post, yet the flotsam and jetsam of living a life in the Republican dominated United States.
The No Kings rally was fun, yet it is over. It was good to catch up with people I know. By studying the terrain in advance, I think I did a better job capturing photographs. It is important to live engaged lives and mass organizing events like this, combined with a modicum of thoughtful photographic work make it easy.
After much study of my October activity, I determined the thousands of views of this blog originating in China are likely a Bot or Bots scraping me to train artificial intelligence.The views are neither human activity, nor do they necessarily originate in China, whose “Great Firewall” blocks WordPress. Combine that with posting my high school class reunion photos the same month, and I received more October views than I did in the five previous years combined. I don’t feel good about it because the rate is not sustainable. Once the Bots have their way with me, I will be jettisoned like an empty chewing gum wrapper.
I planted garlic last week, so the garden is done except for the gleaning. For some reason, it took a lot more energy this year. I truly needed Sunday as a day of rest as in I took four naps during daylight hours. I feel more rested now, and pulled out the manuscript of my autobiography.
I reread the chapters last written and they stand up okay. I decided to write through my work at the transportation and logistics firm I called home for 25 years to clear space for topics I find more interesting: things like cooking, gardening, political activism, and such. I’ve been toying with ending the second volume after becoming an empty nester, yet reconsidered. I’ll write all the way to the end and see the word count. In any case, due to some unforeseen expenses, I’m not as liquid as I’d like and don’t have the money to publish volume two or any volume. It is possible I will push through the draft of the entire story by end of year. I changed while writing it and that means a rewrite of a couple of big sections. I do want to publish the rest. At the same time, I expect to start drafts of the entire story to which I will add on a continuing basis as I find new material and gain new insights. It will become a never ending story.
An advertisement circulates that the only AI people over 40 use is ChatGPT. Okay. I don’t pretend to know a lot about AI, and my experience with ChatGPT began in earnest only last week. I accept that AI can be a reasonable part of life, although I don’t understand the bigger picture. Larry Ellison of Oracle is one oligarch who talks like he gets it.
“I think it’s very, very clear: AI is a much bigger deal than the Industrial Revolution, electricity, and everything that’s come before,” Ellison said in a video conversation with former UK prime Minister Tony Blair.
“We will soon have not only artificial intelligence but also — much sooner than anticipated —artificial general intelligence and then, in the not-too-distant future, artificial superintelligence.” (Oracle’s Larry Ellison on AI: ‘Most Important Discovery in Human History’, Cloud Wars, Feb 25, 2025).
Bigger than electricity? We mere mortals must live our lives and depend upon basic science that produces electricity. How shall we adapt to AI? Who will change our flat tire on a long stretch of deserted Iowa highway?
This recent statement is tainted by my memory of Ellison from when I attended OpenWorld in 2006. He was onstage with a penguin to announce Oracle’s full support for Red Hat Linux. In other words, he was co-opting the open source software and branding Oracle’s support. What a prick. Well, the penguin was interesting, if concerned about being in a room full of people.
What did I learn last week? I asked, “What are best practices for using ChatGPT in writing?” The answer was long and confirmed my natural impulses on how to use it. To a degree, AI is all about what I’m thinking. It cautioned me to use ethical and transparent practices:
Disclose AI assistance when appropriate (especially in journalism or academia).
Don’t claim AI-generated content as wholly your own if it’s substantial.
Always fact-check: AI can make confident errors.
I found ChatGPT is an uninspired writer. The assignments I entered returned something wooden and definitely not mine. Its editing skills were positive for short paragraphs. I expect to spend time determining how I might use it. When I get stumped on how to word something I’ll paste the paragraph into the dialogue box and see what comes back. I have yet to use something the machine sent back without further editing. It will become one more tool among many in the writer’s workshop.
The machine helped improve the structure of my daily life. Through five iterations, I wrote daily work plans. The culmination was a template to use on writing days. Even without a daily plan, I have ideas on what to do to forget my worries and work on things in my personal life that need it. ChatGPT brought everything into sharp focus and I’m the better for it.
My morning wake up regimen began after a visit to a podiatrist for plantar fasciitis. By the end of last week, the machine and I added exercises to address not only plantar fasciitis, but balance, upper body strength, and my core. The process was much quicker than looking through websites or books on my shelf. After a few days, I’m feeling positive results. In a few months, I will take another look at the regimen.
In my quest to become a better photographer, I asked the machine to help me with a plan to capture half a dozen shots of the No Kings rally on Oct. 18. It proposed a series of different types of shots and refined it when I uploaded a map of the site with a description of the topography. It even gave me specific places to stand to get the shots. When doing an amateur photo shoot, we have to be alert for developments as they happen. Having a plan makes the experience better and hopefully produces better photographs.
There is a balance between using ChatGPT and Google search. The search engine incorporates AI, although I find it a bit annoying. Spare me the machine-generated narrative and just give me the facts. It won’t take long to determine which method to use for different types of queries.
Because of the internet we have AI in Big Grove Township. As we spend more time at home in retirement, managing daily affairs keeps us engaged and that’s good for our longevity. Like many people, I seek to spend less time online. ChatGPT is not really helping yet I want to use it. There in a nutshell is humanity.
Artificial intelligence is everywhere on the internet. The most common encounter I have is in responses to queries on Google search. It is annoying, yet that feeling might be my failure to adapt to modernity. Time will tell.
In an article posted at the National Library of Medicine, author Michael Cheng-Tek Tai wrote, “Artificial intelligence, known by some as the industrial revolution 4.0, is going to change not only the way we do things, how we relate to others, but also what we know about ourselves.” Like it or not, AI is already affecting me in those ways.
Earlier this month I got a free account with ChatGPT and began querying. Thursday, I typed in the dialogue box, “I received a number of responses to queries in October. In about 100-150 words, please analyze and describe them.” Following is the response I received.
In October, your responses showed a thoughtful, organized approach to learning and productivity. You explored practical topics such as meal planning, time management, and writing effectiveness, often asking for customized, actionable outputs like recipes, essays, or PDFs you could use on your mobile device. Your questions balanced curiosity and precision — for instance, refining a vegetarian enchilada recipe to fit available ingredients or requesting productivity adjustments for specific times of day. You also engaged with public affairs by seeking factual background on Dr. James Zogby, reflecting intellectual breadth. Overall, your October queries reveal a pattern of reflective self-improvement, efficiency-minded planning, and attention to detail across both creative and analytical pursuits.
I don’t often receive such positive responses to questions in real life. Of course the machine is giving back what I gave. I recall Dale Carnegie’s reminder, “Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” Since I got my account, the machine never mentioned my name, although it remembers stuff about me better than I do. The machine is quite seductive.
Once I start something, I am quick to adapt, and I don’t reject AI out of hand. I find uses for the technology even though I remain generally skeptical about machine responses to my queries. Substantial impacts in my life, less than two weeks in are:
Instead of providing detailed sources for its work, the machine presents a returned narrative with a few links. The Zogby query is a good example. It gave me significant things to know about him. I know each one of those to be true from studying his work. It won’t always be the case, so a new dimension of query returns using AI is evaluating the quality of the information. The seductive tone of responses might have me overlooking this important aspect.
It can help with writing. AI is limited to what is currently available on public sources on the internet. That means I can’t usefully ask it to write long essays for me. What I can do is when I’m stumped about how to word something, type a draft sentence or two into the dialogue box and ask the machine to edit it. Without asking, it produced multiple examples of better ways to word something. If I continue to use it like this, it will be a time saver. I am confident AI won’t get it right for how I write. It will make me think about language in a constructive manner.
I’m four days in using AI to help plan a more productive day. With its”Balanced Day Plan,” I immediately eliminated a background concern that there is too much to do and not enough time in which to do it. I am fond of the saying an air traffic controller can only land one airplane at a time. So it is with tasks I have before me. AI finds a way to get it all into a day. If it can’t, it tells me. This serves as a stress reliever, helping me focus on the task at hand, and I do a better job with it. For example, I need to drink more water to stay hydrated. The balanced day plan actually schedules it, resulting in me drinking more water. This pursuit is just getting started and my best hope for AI lies herein.
There are plenty of tools to use ingredients on hand to make dinner. A most formidable one is my years of cooking experience, especially since when I lived in South Georgia 25 years ago. Because ChatGPT is interactive, a thread about vegetarian enchiladas can go back and forth, resolving issues, until I have something usable. Each cook has different approaches to doing that work, and using AI to help with cooking may be a short-duration fad. It does have capabilities to use if we ask the right questions.
Next step is to just use it. If I discover anything more, I will be sure to post about it.
On Oct. 1, the machine at ChatGPT told me I had used my allowance of queries for my free account. It was fine. It offered me a lesser quality query until my account reset. I logged out instead and quickly found other things to do.
After re-reading my post about using AI, which includes an essay I asked the machine to write, I decided it was a good call to refrain from using ChatGPT in my autobiography. The main issue is it relies on what is available on the internet on a given topic. Because my autobiography is being written from journals, photographs, memories and other in-real-life documentation, such information is not available for the machine to read. It will produce a present-biased, internet-derived account about whatever I ask about my life. That is not what I want in this project.
While it did a reasonable job drafting something from the contents of this blog, it only knows me that way and that is a deficiency that cannot be easily corrected. For example, I asked the machine to write a brief autobiography of me. It’s response tells the story: “I couldn’t find enough reliable public information to write a full, detailed 1,000-word biography of Paul Deaton of Iowa.” This was despite my essay of that name, which lives on this blog and is my most popular post since I began in 2007. Either the machine is lazy, or it has programming that discourages this type of query. This discovery of the limits of ChatGPT is of value.
What can I use ChatGPT or another AI program to do? I see three applications based on asking these questions of the machine.
Give me ideas in how to use ChatGPT as diarist. I have been journaling since 1974 and the evolution of styles and content is striking. They developed over time. Naturally the machine wants to talk about events in my journal all day so it can learn as much as possible about me. I won’t do that, yet the occasional query can help me find direction in that kind of writing. It also made these suggestions for how to use the machine: “The key is deciding whether you want me to be: An analyst (finding themes and patterns); A recorder (storing entries); An editor (shaping them into narratives); or A mirror (asking questions back).” Even though I am alone when journaling, I don’t need a machine partner with which to interact.
What are some ideas for vegetarian and vegan enchiladas? Using ChatGPT to determine what to cook and eat seems solid. I entered on-hand ingredients and the machine suggested a specific recipe that used them. It provided grouping of ideas by flavor-type, such as hearty and savory, bright and fresh, protein-rich, toppings and finishing touches. So often, my ideas are pulling out a familiar cookbook and paging through it. AI could be an alternate way of figuring out what’s for dinner. There is value in that.
What are some ways to balance household work for today? I also entered tasks for the day. Personal productivity is important and the machine gave me useful ideas on how to structure my day. Because we are creatures of habit, we need to break out of what we do to improve how much we get done in a day. AI did not hesitate to tell me I scheduled too much to do, suggesting tasks that could be done tomorrow. It also changed how certain tasks were scheduled in the day, for example, moving cooking to the afternoon and spreading meal prep throughout the day. Going forward, I expect to use AI to help restructure how I spend my time. It may get to the point where I’m satisfied with how my new daily schedule is going. If so, then I will step away from AI for a while. I do know I was productive but exhausted by mid afternoon the first day I tried using an AI planner. This despite more scheduled rest and recovery time throughout the day.
It seems important we get AI out of our system. Like with everything, moderation of use seems essential.
Cooking collards with onion, jalapeno pepper and garlic.
News this week was that Substacker Bari Weiss will be taking The Free Press to CBS, where she’ll become editor-in-chief of the news division. Ana Marie Cox had comments about this:
If the Free Press leave Substack, it would be an enormous hit to the platform. Their 10 percent vig generates $1 million a year, representing roughly 2.5% of Substack’s total annual revenue (estimated around $40–45 million).
As a reminder: Substack has never turned a profit, and yet it’s still valued at $1 billion based on VC rounds. I’ve argued before in this newsletter that Substack cannot make money if it stays true to its promise of being a home for independent journalists wanting to preserve their voices. It’s a high-minded and laudable goal—one I’ve been seduced by myself, and one that has drawn many writers I deeply respect—but the business pressures don’t align with that vision.
Sooner or later the gravitational pull of investors will drag the platform toward something else entirely: the “YouTube of newsletters,” with all the churn, AI slop, engagement bait, and radicalization that implies.
Losing The Free Press wouldn’t just be a big financial hit; it would accelerate the enshittification. (The Freed Press, by Ana Marie Cox on Buttondown).
In that context, I remain 75 percent sure I will move my public writing to Substack beginning in January 2026.
My issues with WordPress are two.
The main contractor through whom I got my WordPress blog printed went out of business. Replacement services are much more expensive. With Substack I get an email every time I post, so there would be hard copy backup by printing it out. Not ideal or fancy, yet it would work. I am old school and know how to operate a three ring binder.
Secondly, I get way more views on Substack than WordPress. This is a major factor behind my move. Partly, they track them differently and one viewer can make multiple “views” on a single post while reading it. Even with that, the numbers are too great to ignore. After all, the reason we write in public is to be read.
Yes I have read Cox’s multiple issues with Substack, including all about the Nazi sh*t there. I can live with that, I think. If I can’t, I’ll do something else. I looked at Buttondown, Cox’s current home, as an option. I am not famous with a large following as she is. I need the density of people I know on Substack. I have three months to get ready.
Changes will be coming for pauldeaton.com. I don’t want to lose the domain, so I plan to take the current content private and reassign the domain to one of the spare blogs I keep in the background and put that in public. I still need a place to post letters to the editor and cross post written work I do for other sites. Substack does not seem like that kind of place. While I have the paper archive, I use the blogs I’ve taken private to search easily. I have hidden posts from multiple platforms loaded on WordPress going back to 2007. That site will always be a resource.
My view of this may change once I finish my autobiography. If my eyesight deteriorates, that would be a factor and I would likely stop writing in public. Moving to Substack appears to have more rewards than risk. Now I need to get the rest of the way there. This week’s news did not help.
Journey Home 
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