So far, I’ve mostly enjoyed living in the information age. One big upside is the ability to find out information on obscure parts I need when repairing things. At the moment, I’m putting a new pull rope on my line trimmer and the mechanism needs a little clip to hold it all together. Turns out it’s called a circlip 9X1, and a local power tool company just down the road has not one but four of them in stock. I even have the part number.

I’m playing with AI. It’s fun, and useful. For the last several weeks, I’ve used AI to check this blog for “grammar, spelling, and usage.” It’s great at catching spelling errors, and is liberal with the use of commas. It has an odd affinity for the em dash, however, the sort of pause that I let a comma handle. After review, I’m presented with edited copy and a list of changes. I accept or reject the proposed changes, and we’re off. It’s a nice backup.

We all like a story, and that’s why we make up so many of them. And we particularly like stories that make sense of seemingly inexplicable things. The big one for me, recently, was how did a county like Kerr, with a river running through it, manage to miss what happened to another county, Hays, which experienced a catastrophic flood in 2015 with its river? The latter, Hays, installed a warning system. The former, Kerr, didn’t.