AI Truck? [Chef's Kiss]

Found this in the wild today.

AI, of course, abounds.

But the best part is the truck. In the video linked above, it's backing up.

Behold:

Anything Fun?

My sister came over yesterday so she could print some stuff for her teaching job, and afterward we chatted for a bit. We got to talking, of course, about the fact that most of my family is in Island Park at scout camp, finishing up staff week and preparing for scouts to come in a few weeks.

That talk included her asking what I'd been up to, and I went through the ordinary litany of weekend chores, which this weekend included fixing a leak in the sprinkler system, trimming and burning branches from a few trees, and weeding the raspberries.

She asked the question: So, are you doing anything for you, for fun?

Honestly, I didn't have an answer.

I realized I've turned into Dad. The chores were actually pretty entertaining.

As of now, I've got most of the raspberries done -- I'm running the sprinklers for an hour to give them some water and to soften the ground up where I've got a patch of thistles growing.

I can run the water because I fixed the sprinkler system leak -- it feeds a spigot we use in the garden for watering.

And while I don't have all the tree branches trimmed, I have cut up and torched all of the branches I've felled along with all the old raspberry canes Michelle yoinked out of the garden a few weeks ago.

I have been taking breaks, intermittently working on a lesson for Sunday School tomorrow, and watching a little YouTube and playing a few games. Altogether, a relaxing and productive weekend, which is always good.

Yes, it's work. But it's work I want to do, and work I regard as valuable, So it's relaxing and important to see it done.

A University of Idaho Connection in Idaho Falls

This week I've really enjoyed reading Connie B. Otteson's "Unsung Heroes and Settlers of Bonneville County, Idaho," a local history book published in 2005.

It was a lucky find at a local thrift store, where I've found a good number of local history books. Now around here, we don't have a lot of history at least for whitey, going back if we're lucky only about 150 years.

Today's reading started out with a familiar story of the city's Village Improvement Society (which still exists, I found out) and a drive to import hardwood trees from back east and plant them all over town, notably on the numbered streets and in a park that would come to be known as Kate Curley Park, after one of the VIS' prominent boosters who was really tired of dragging the hems of her dresses in mud and horse doots.

While the VIS imported the trees from Iowa and Illinois, they wanted to find a more local expert to help them arrange and plant things, particularly in the park.

They found Charles Huston Shattuck, late of the University of Idaho's College of Forestry, where he was dean, and where he'd laid the groundwork for the tree cover and landscaping at that campus, including the Shattuck Arboretum, which of course bears his name.

I went to the university of Idaho and spent some time wandering through the arboretum, as it was between my first residence hall (the building in the lower right corner of the photo above) and the campus. It was crisscrossed with trails. Honestly, I thought it was just a bit of forest that the campus had preserved, it looked so natural. Come to find out it was just a weedy patch of bare ground before Shattuck started his work on it.

As much as I don't want to live on the numbered streets in Idaho Falls, I do love that the VIS had the foresight to bring in hardwoods and take the effort to plant trees in what was otherwise a sandy, wind-blown desert. And I'm glad they found an expert who produced the prettiest university campus in the state to help with the effort.

We came close when I was a kid at living in a house kitty-corner to Kate Curley Park, but it never came to fruition. I don't know why. But it's certainly a pretty neighborhood.

FOOD

One of our weenie dogs might be just a tad motivated by food.

Greener Pastries

It pays to self-edit fast in our family group chat, because if you don't, they'll jump on ya.

To be honest, I'm not sure what greener pastries might be either. Maybe something for St. Patrick's Day?

Aw Shucks, Part 2

So I found "The Will Rogers Book" at a local thrift store and figured I'd give him a whirl. He's a name kind of on the edge of my realm of knowledge and I knew he was lauded as the cowboy philosopher.

As I read the mini biography in the book, I initially scoffed at the claim that he was a major movie star. Then it hit me -- major in the silent era, with much of his filming happening in the 1920s and 30s.

The more I read his story and his writing, the more it hit me: He'd fit right in the social media age. His quips are short enough for Twitter, his personality homey enough to feed the Boomers on Facebook and his slick embrace of the new and unusual enough to make the crypto bros look at him for maybe a few seconds. He might have even minted his own LassoCoin.

He even died relatively young, crashing with pilot Wiley Post in the newfangled airplane shortly after they landed in a lagoon near Barrow, Alaska, when they got lost in a storm and stopped to ask directions.

Or maybe not. That's most likely me looking at his cornball through a modern lens.

And he is a bit cornball, echoing some of the crackerbarrel philosophy anyone who read Sinclair Lewis' books would be familiar with. He might be a star today, but certainly with the older folk, though some of them might call him woke.

So the book was okay, if definitely sounding a hundred years old.

Aw, Shucks . . .

I'll bet if I posted this on social media, I'd get some attention from certain folks:

We might be the wealthiest nation that ever existed, we might dominate the world in lots of things and because we are richer than all our neighbors or that anybody else, that dont necessarily mean that we are happier or really better off. The difference between our rich and poor grows greater every year. Our distribution of wealth is getting more uneven all the time. We are always reading "How many men paid over a million dollar income tax," but we never read about "how many there are that are not eating regular."

I'm certain I'd be told by some that I'm some sort of commie or libtard or whatever other junk epithets fly around today.

Except this was said by Will Rogers, likely sometime in the 1920s when he was at the apex of his fame. And shucks and by golly how much his home-spun common sense wisdom we need today, except of course for this commie crapola.

Because he'd be chased off social media these days. Maybe he was scorned back then; I think our ability to scorn people whose thoughts and attitudes that differ from ours aren't any different now than they were a hundred years ago, except that every stupid opinion is amplified online.

Anyway, have fun cherry-picking. That's all we're good at these days.

Eight-Legged Elephants

I got a peek today of what adult Sunday School might be like come September when our teaching time is cut to 25 minutes -- and it came because I substituted in Primary.

Twenty-five minutes is not a lot of time to teach one of our Come Follow Me lessons. I knew that going in, but figured this audience -- a bunch of nine-year-olds -- deserved a good lesson without any fluff.

We discussed the major points of the lesson: God allowing Israel to have a king to maybe convince them through poor kingmanship that God was the better leader; our callings being from God; and God looking not on the outward appearance, but on the heart, in that twenty-five minutes.

The spirit was strong in that room, and I know the kids felt it. They participated. They asked questions and made meaningful comments. They got a buzz from the object lesson of optical illusions as a fill-in for God looking on the heart and couldn't believe this elephant had eight legs.

They paid attention, even the kid I'd pegged as being the one most likely to be distracted.

It's gonna work, folks. Because God is in charge.

My Parents Raised A Complainer, Not A Quitter

Summer.

I remember summers being fun. Well, there was work, of course. Dad was a bricklayer, and as teenagers it was expected we'd go to work with him.

Some mornings were easier than others. I recall, with some guilt, feigning sleep one morning in the bedroom I had at the back of the garage until I heard Dad's truck roar to life and disappear. Then my day began. Nothing was said when he got home, but I knew I'd done wrong. So days like that were rare.

I'm beginning to have days like that now. Just like Dad, I get the Sunday Scaries and don't want to go to work tomorrow.

But . . . 

I'm the only line of defense between our family and poverty. I don't say that in any way to complain; it's just how things are at the moment. Michelle has been offered a salaried job with a local nonprofit for about $40,000 a year, which isn't much compared to our needs, but it certainly would help us make a dent in things. I don't know as yet what decision she's made on the job, but will support her whichever direction she decides to go.

I have at least ten years until I can retire. I keep checking our retirement accounts to see how they're doing, and they're growing slow but steady, which is what you want to see in such accounts. Still, part of me wishes they were growing faster so I could retire faster, but I'm going to have to stick things out.

I often think the cure is time off work. But though I take a day off here and there -- not all that many of those -- it doesn't help. I feel like I need a good block of time, minimum two weeks, to get a reset. I'll get a little bit of a break for about seven weeks starting in August when the online teaching gig takes a breather. and while that's welcome it often doesn't feel like enough.

Yes, I did just whinge about this. It's a constant theme in my life.

More AI Stupidity

I promise. I thought this was the stupidest AI screw-up I was going to see this week.

Well, AI went and topped itself. Behold:

The irony of their statement at the bottom: "Sometimes the most interesting facts are the ones nobody ever thinks to check" leads me - slightly - to believe this has been posted in an ironic way, but there's so much of this folderol around I can't even tell anymore. Again, part of the cognitive overload we're all dealing with as AI spreads further.

It is true Missouri has eight letters in its name. It is also true that Missouri borders eight states. But you know there are people out there -- even US citizens -- who are going to think it borders Mississippi, or that Arkansas, Kentucky, Illinois, and Iowa look like that. Or that any of these states look like that. I *think* they got the shape of Missouri right, but other than that . . .