Categories
Living in Society

Pesto Pasta Bowl with a Dash of Artificial Intelligence

Ingredients for a pesto pasta bowl.

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.

Pesto Pasta Bowl, Jan. 5, 2026.
Categories
Living in Society

It’s the Oil

The president is not good at starting on time. One might say he is undisciplined.

At his inaugural ball, President Donald J. Trump said that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.” What planet is he living on? I understand his rationale of peace through strength. In the case of Venezuela it is as bogus as a three dollar bill. The weekend operations escalated war-like behavior, not peace-making. If peace is what he wants, Trump is going in the opposite direction.

According to the Military Times, U.S. military operations are surging under Trump. He has overseen at least 626 air strikes, compared with 555 for President Joe Biden during all four years of his term. Military operations occurred in eight countries listed in the article. Donald Trump is not a peacemaker.

I viewed the entire press conference about weekend operations in Venezuela. It was hard to stomach all the misrepresentations and lies — the self-aggrandizement — yet it yielded a couple of things.

As many of us believed, the invasion and kidnapping of the Venezuelan president was about taking the country’s oil. Some in the United States have been lusting after it for decades. Trump confirmed this during the presser. How U.S. oil companies would proceed is sketchy at best.

The Cedar Rapids Gazette reported on Sunday:

“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump said at a Mar-a-Lago news conference where he boasted that this “extremely successful operation should serve as warning to anyone who would threaten American sovereignty or endanger American lives.” (Cedar Rapids Gazette front page, Jan. 4, 2026).

Not so fast! Shortly after Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as Venezuela’s new president she pushed back on Trump. “We are determined to be free,” she said, according to the New York Times. “What is being done to Venezuela is a barbarity.”

“We had already warned that an aggression was underway under false excuses and false pretenses, and that the masks had fallen off, revealing only one objective: regime change in Venezuela,” she said. “This regime change would also allow for the seizure of our energy, mineral and natural resources. This is the true objective, and the world and the international community must know it.” (New York Times, Jan. 3, 2026).

What should happen next is Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio and General Dan Caine — and probably others — are removed from office. The only remaining question is how that gets done.

On Sunday, Jan. 4, Veterans For Peace was part of an anti-war demonstration in Iowa City. Here are some photographs I took.

No War.
We The People.
No War. No billionaires above the law.
Ed Flaherty of Veterans For Peace speaking at the anti-war demonstration on Jan. 4, 2026.
Categories
Creative Life

Photos from the Week

Moon between two trees in early morning.

A few photos from the first days of the year. The moon shots were one night when I couldn’t sleep so I went on a very early trail walk before sunrise.

Before sunrise.
Before sunrise on the state park trail.
Moon setting in early morning.
On the state park trail.
Moon setting in early morning.
Sunrise on the state park trail.
Categories
Home Life

The Sun Will Rise Again

Trail Walking on Jan. 1, 2026.

With holiday season schedule deviations, I have a difficult time remembering what day it is. My spouse will be away at least for a week, and that makes daily life even more detached from society’s time line. I know I need to get to work and am doing so, despite the weekend. It’s Saturday, by the way. I knew that.

There are tasks and projects demanding my time on the third day of the new year. I spent this week reviewing them. Some got pitched, some moved up in priority, and others were declared finished. Importantly, I decided to continue this blog for another year. The other firm goal is to finish the rest of my autobiography in the first half of the year. What else?

  • I need to take care of me first because without personal health and a positive frame of mind it is difficult to get anything done in society.
  • Life’s too short to be bitchy, so I plan to strive for positive interaction with my fellow humans. I will express the occasional curse word, though.
  • I already wrote about continuing my reading program. I’m setting a new goal of finishing one book per week with the hope of beating it.
  • Exercising and being outdoors continues to be a high priority. Trail walking and gardening are the two main ways this manifests.
  • I want to live a simple life by reducing the amount of time spent on things other than friends and family, writing, and food production.

I wrote about using artificial intelligence in regular life here. The projects currently in queue are related to household operations, food production in the garden and kitchen, and living better. If a computer can help me be better with any of those, I’m willing to listen. The machines don’t really know me yet they give perspectives I hadn’t previously considered. At this point, the service is free. I experimented with giving ai a writing assignment. Mother of Mercy! It doesn’t know what in Hades it is doing there. That wasn’t a poem it wrote! It was a bowl of word salad and the bowl has a hole in it.

Our home has four functional places where I work indoors: Garage, lower level storage, kitchen, and my book room with a writing table. Each has goals for 2026. I mentioned the writing goals above. Here are the rest:

  • In the garage my work is primarily projects in one corner and garden prep in another. I am working on rebuilding a cabinet damaged in a move. I need to dispose of a lot of unused stuff to make room for the garlic harvest in July. When one project finishes, another immediately steps into place. I fix a lot of stuff on my workbench.
  • The main goal for lower level storage is to reduce the number of things stored. Our child is using part of the space after their apartment building caught fire last year. The rest of it is the parents who have way too much stuff. Creating open space here is a goal heading for reality, not a dream.
  • The kitchen must produce meals every day. In that constant activity I’m developing new dishes. One category is those we liked until one of us became vegan. The latest experiment is taking a casserole we made for many years and replacing the eggs and cheese with something else to make it vegan. It will require at least two trial runs before it goes into the meal rotation. This is not a quick fix project because taste and nutrition are both important. Another category is called “use stuff up.” An example of this is I got quite a few pounds of quinoa at a very low price. Figuring out what to do with it was delayed, but now I would like to get things going. I discovered a little goes a long way because of the expansion while cooking. I have three dozen quinoa disks in the freezer waiting for an application.

If we don’t have goals, we won’t accomplish much. These are my beginnings.

Categories
Living in Society

Yay! It’s 2026

My annual applesauce cake fresh from the oven. Served with home made apple butter..

Whatever you do, Katie bar the gate! Don’t let 2025 back in no matter what!

I mean, seriously! Republicans could screw up the simplest things and did, in spades. Social Security was cruising along with its usual issues and along came Trump and DOGE, then Bam!

The Social Security Administration — the sprawling federal agency that delivers retirement, disability and survivor benefits to 74 million Americans — began the second Trump administration with a hostile takeover.

It ends the year in turmoil. A diminished workforce has struggled to respond to up to 6 million pending cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions in its field offices — record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers, according to internal agency documents and dozens of interviews.

Long-strained customer services at Social Security have become worse by many key measures since President Donald Trump began his second term, agency data and interviews show, as thousands of employees were fired or quit and hasty policy changes and reassignments left inexperienced staff to handle the aftermath. (How Social Security has gotten worse under Trump, Dec. 30, 2025, Washington Post).

So many people depend on Social Security the problems seem unlikely to continue forever. Citizens will demand better before it gets too late. At least that is the hope.

Late last year I contacted the U.S. Institute of Peace seeking a speaker for our Armistice Day event in Iowa City. They were in terrible disarray because the president wanted to eliminate the organization. We had to find someone else, but Bam!

Next thing you know the courts ruled he couldn’t close it, yet still, he plastered his name on the building.

There are other examples but you get my point. If the worm is turning on the Trump Administration, like many believe it is, we need to be ready to step up and do what we can to run Republicans out of the U.S. Capitol. For me, that means getting my physical condition back to where it needs to be, conserving resources, and then getting involved in the rapidly approaching midterm elections.

Our world is changing and all hands will be needed on deck. I have seven words for today: The day we took our country back. Fit reason to celebrate the new year.

Categories
Living in Society

New Year’s Eve

Moon rise on New Year’s Eve.

I got restless the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. My spouse was away for the holiday so I called the shop about 1:10 p.m. and asked how late their oil change service lane would be open. I left immediately for the small city to our north. They were closing early because of the holiday yet got me in. The engine oil could have easily gone another 1,000 miles yet I needed to do something to get out of the house. Being among people was my best choice.

I arrived with time to spare, drove my vehicle into the service lane, and left them the keys. In the waiting room, I read on my mobile device and in the book I brought. Time passed quickly before the technician came out to brief me and then lead me to the cashier. I wished him a Happy New Year.

While paying my bill I suggested to the young cashier she be careful if out driving late that night. She said she was staying home, which made me think of our child in another state who was also staying in. I wished the cashier a Happy New Year and she reciprocated. When I finished at the shop, I drove to the nearby hardware store.

I didn’t really need anything, yet wood shims had been on my list for a month. About eight employees gathered around the checkout counter chatting, with myself and one other being the only customers. It was a slow business day, one of them said. One helped me find the shims and I wished her a Happy New Year. Same greeting for the cashier. Both seemed surprised I would say that, yet returned the greeting. What has happened to us as a society? These common courtesies used to be easy, natural, and quite normal.

Next stop was a nearby grocer. I don’t usually frequent this one yet I wanted to get celebratory snacks to ring in the new year. They didn’t have what I wanted so I improvised. I wished the stocker a Happy New Year. At the checkout was a man about my age, although shorter and wearing a name tag. He looked like he was carrying a heavy emotional load so I wished him Happy New Year. He didn’t smile or return the greeting. While heading toward home, I hoped I did something positive for him.

After my repast I went out for a walk around the neighborhood. The ambient temperature was above 40 degrees so I didn’t wear a coat. I don’t usually walk in the neighborhood, preferring the state park trail. Houses had outdoor colored lights for the holidays. Human activity was minimal. The moon rose over the house.

Was I lonely or simply alone. Probably a bit of both as I finished my walk and headed indoors toward the light. Of the New Year’s Eves I experienced, this one was not bad. There is hope for the future and I survived to live another year. That’s saying something.

Categories
Living in Society

2025 in Review

Artificial intelligence rendering from my photo of a woodpile.

2025 has been a crappy year in some ways and a good year in others. On the crappy side, our president is undoing much of the good that has been in place since World War II. He and his collaborators in Iowa are changing society in a way that will have long-term negative effects. On the good side, I stepped back from society to get my own house in order so I can contribute effectively to driving Republicans out of power. The latter outweighs the former in importance.

I don’t know what happened to me during the coronavirus pandemic. I was diagnosed with diabetes mid-2019 and have been treating it by controlling diet. It is working. Things went well before and during the early part of the pandemic, but as I retired from paid work and stayed home more, maintaining my health became a challenge. In 2024, I tested positive for COVID-19 and literally felt like I was going to die. In 2025, I began to turn my health around. I started logging my meals, exercise, and weight on My Fitness Pal. My weight reduced by 12.2 percent and BMI went from 36.8 to 32.3 during the year. During a recent visit to the clinic my practitioner told me to keep doing what I am doing, so I will.

I wrote already about my writing. All I have to add on the last day of the year is I feel more confident than ever as a writer. 2026 should be a good year.

Mine is a world of ideas and reading is essential. I wrote about The Great Sort, which was the first major review of books I collected beginning when I was a grader. In the last year, I donated more than a thousand to Goodwill and the local public library used book sale. There is at least another thousand to go. The important thing about this year’s project is not the downsizing. It is development of a new way to acquire and read books.

Notably, a substantial percent of the 71 books I read this year were checked out from the public library. That was huge, and according to library data, I saved $821 by doing so. How do I get ideas for which books to read? I get newsletters from several large publishers yet a main part of it is by querying the library’s new arrivals on its website. There was more related to reading happening in 2025.

I have been on social media since about 2007. One of the uses is to find new ideas and books I should read. The contribution social media makes is I get real people’s ideas about what to read in the context of their social media account. It is a more solid recommendation than if I knew little about the referrer. Part of this is I take chances on authors with limited distribution of their work. It has been a positive experience.

The best thing about acquiring books to read this year began during the pandemic. The Haunted Bookshop is one of the few remaining used bookstores in the county. Its proprietor, Nialle Sylvan, has changed how I select books and helped improve the quality of writing I have been reading. During the pandemic, the shop’s business plummeted. I felt badly about the situation and asked her to pick $50 worth of books and I’d buy them. That worked out well enough that this year I gave her more information about what I was reading. The last batch of books she picked for me has been so engaging I had to put some of them down because I didn’t want the experience of reading an author to ever end. The writing was so good! That is rare. Long story short is if you can find a bookseller like Nialle Sylvan count yourself lucky.

I want to talk about menu planning in our household in 2025. We do it now, mostly a week in advance. This takes the stress out of daily questions about what’s for dinner. It created an environment where I could focus on developing new dishes, something for which I have ample creative energy. Who knew planning meals could be such a benefit?

In the entry box I asked, “When did I make my first message on ChatGPT?” The machine, which prefers pronouns you/it, didn’t know. More precisely, it replied, “I don’t have access to the exact timestamp of your very first message, but I do have a reliable estimate.” It was in late May this year, according to the machine’s best estimates. Sounds earlier than I thought, but what do I know. That’s why I asked.

I am figuring out how to use artificial intelligence effectively. The reason I use the words “artificial intelligence” is what I am learning on ChatGPT is applicable everywhere ai is used in my world. This includes Google, my bank account, this blog, and a host of other applications. They are not all the same artificial intelligence, but the kernel of getting information I need is a similar process in any of them. It is a helper, although I don’t usually mention I use it in the Twitch chat I frequent because millennials and Gen-Z folk are skeptical of ChatGPT specifically and ai in general. As content creators, there may be concerns about ai taking over the space and putting them out of business. The energy use is a concern as well.

People ask, “What about the energy artificial intelligence uses?” Hannah Ritchie, who I think is brilliant, posted the following around the time I started using ChatGPT:

My sense is that a lot of climate-conscious people feel guilty about using ChatGPT. In fact it goes further: I think many people judge others for using it, because of the perceived environmental impact.

If I’m being honest, for a while I also felt a bit guilty about using AI. The common rule-of-thumb is that ChatGPT uses 10 times as much energy as a Google search [I think this is probably now too high, but more on that later]. How, then, do I justify the far more energy-hungry option? Maybe I should limit myself to only using LLMs when I would really benefit from the more in-depth answer.

But after looking at the data on individual use of LLMs, I have stopped worrying about it and I think you should too. (Email from Hannah Ritchie on May 6, 2025).

For the time being, I will restrain myself by not mentioning ChatGPT on Twitch. That is, unless the chat is about ai, which it was yesterday. In those cases, I drop Ritchie’s name with a quote. Bread on the water.

Things I use ai for are related to living in the real world. How should I organize my workshop tools? How should I manage a photoshoot of a political rally? How can I improve my exercise regimen? Please explain this piece of legislation so I can understand it. Here is my schedule for starting garden seedlings, how can it be improved? How do I solve the problem of binders in a casserole that lacks eggs and cheese? Why does cornstarch get such a bad rap? The machine is quick, its access to information is broad. It uses the same language to answer that I used in my queries. I am convinced the machine has read the work of Dale Carnegie.

I asked about data privacy and the machine gave me good tips about how to use not only their service, but would apply to my internet traffic generally. Things like speak in generalities, be mindful of what you put out there, and how to use controls built into the app to minimize how much of me is out there. So far so good with this tool. I plan to continue.

The good in 2025 definitely outweighed the bad. Republicans are not going to go away, so I need to be ready for the 2026 Midterms. This cycle, I will likely use my new ai helper to be a more effective canvasser.

Categories
Creative Life

Toward New Reading

Chart of 2025 books read by month from Goodreads.

I decided to call 2025 finished with 71 books read. I set my goal at a book per week and exceeded it. Yay!

Goodreads is great for me because it provides satisfaction when I finish each book and rate it. Likewise, I refer to the historical information often. The above chart came via email last week and tells a story about which I hadn’t thought. June through August is the busiest time in the garden. Likewise September through November are taken up with kitchen work processing the harvest. Seems natural I would read fewer books during those six months. The seasonality just never occurred to me.

I post each book I finish on Goodreads and at the Read Recently page of this blog if interested. I also keep a spreadsheet.

Book reading appears to be a lost art in American society. I understand people are busy taking in information from the large number of sources that exploded after Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. The web was popularized through the adaptation of web browsers in the mid-1990s. We bought our first home computer and logged in via dial-up on April 21, 1996. After that, it was Katie bar the gate with many more words than could be read by a single human. I think even artificial intelligence machines have trouble getting through all of it. All that said, I sort of understand it, yet believe individuals reading books is an important kind of experience that rewards us in tangible ways.

Online apps are not for everyone, yet if you are on Goodreads, I’d love to see what you are reading. Find me here and join my community!

Categories
Reviews

Book Review: Packinghouse Daughter

Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir by Cheri Register is a book I wouldn’t have found except for patronizing an excellent local used bookstore. They have a deal where you set an amount of money to spend, tell them your interests, and they locate books that match. I have yet to be disappointed by their choices. One of the interests I presented was in memoirs written by female authors. They likely didn’t know the story of Wilson & Company was connected to me in multiple ways.

My father worked in a hog processing facility with a kill floor and everything else mentioned in this book through to the fertilizer processing tanks. He died in a plant accident in 1969. I worked there too, for two summers while at university. I even crawled into one of the large processing tanks to help a millwright fix it, learning about lockout/tagout for the first time. The first part of the book resonates completely with my experience, even though Register was older than I am. It is useful to know this history of Wilson & Company in Albert Lea, Minnesota exists.

Register claims hesitancy about writing the memoir about Albert Lea because it was her father who worked at Wilson’s and experienced many of the issues she mentions. I don’t know who can better tell this story than such a daughter whose father worked there and was invested in the job and packing plant employee community. She did the research and the narrative is better for it. She could have gone easier on herself. Register died March 7, 2018.

I was struck by the description of people moving from farms to the city to work in meat packing. This was true of my family where my maternal great grandparents left central Illinois to live in Davenport in retirement. Four or five of their daughters worked in a defense plant making coats during World War II. My maternal grandmother did, and also worked a stint at the Oscar Mayer hog processing plant where Father and I worked. That cohort is now buried in local cemeteries. This part of the book also resonates with my experience.

An exodus from farming and rural areas continues today as agriculture has grown larger and requires fewer workers because of computer automation and changes in operations. Those who relocate, for lack of a better term, are not choosing meatpacking as a profession — or even as a job. With consolidation in the meatpacking industry and increased automation, there are simply fewer positions available. It is hard, dirty work as well. As a result, the job-driven movement from rural areas to cities no longer exists in the same way it did in Albert Lea during the period covered by this book.

I found Register’s narrative deeply resonated with my experiences. It is must reading for anyone interested in the specific history of Wilson & Company or in meat packing culture. With changes in the industry happening post-WWII era, that culture would disappear without books like this.

Categories
Writing

End of Year Snow Melt

Lake Macbride on Dec. 26, 2025.

Ambient temperatures in the 40s have been melting snow and ice, leaving a dead landscape. No spring hope. No winter cover. Except for the lake, it’s just dead. It’s a good time to turn indoors to my writing.

I have three chapters remaining to draft in part two of my autobiography. In the story, I just concluded leaving paid work during the coronavirus pandemic. If the pandemic did one thing right, it made a clean break between the workplace and me, forcing me to live on a fixed income. The final chapters write quickly because they are so recent. Today I created three of them, and next I write about the coronavirus pandemic plus two other chapters with working titles of “Beginning of the end,” and “New beginnings.” It shouldn’t take long to finish the first draft. Then begins the process of going through the whole book for the first major rewrite. I expect there will be three or four of those before I’m ready to publish.

After the book is ready for publication, I don’t know. I’ve been focusing on this work so long, I hadn’t given much thought about what’s next. I want to revise the first book to clean up a few things identified by friends during the post-publication period. I also must see if there is continuity without repetition. Next year I should be able to declare everything finished.

The biggest predictable issue in our lives is Social Security doing nothing to avoid running out of money beginning as early as late 2032. Benefits will be cut automatically by 24 percent across the board if nothing is done to prevent going over this cliff. If anything, Republicans in charge of the federal government are going the wrong way. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the Social Security Fairness Act, accelerated Social Security insolvency alongside well-known demographic challenges to its structure. An answer to the question “How do I make up for this loss in benefits?” needs finding. Counting on the Congress to do something is not an answer.

What that says is I have to return to paid work. I have no regrets about how my working life proceeded and ended.

Physiologically I am changing. I know this because I adopted a new morning exercise regimen and my conditioning schedule is outpacing the ability of my soft tissues to recover and adapt. After a good couple of weeks on the new regimen, my shoulders started to hurt. This is self-diagnosed as inflammation, not a chronic problem. I believe I’m right about that. I have to take it easy for a while to let my body catch up with my ambition. Apparently I am no longer young.

In the meanwhile, it’s nose to the grindstone with the book. If I can finish the first draft this year, that leaves me plenty of time to publish a final text in the first half of 2026. That would clear the deck for returning to the workforce, something I am loathe to do, yet may needs do.