Kelly’s alarm goes off at 4:45am every Saturday morning.

The leaves are trying to change in Garden Canyon on Fort Huachuca

Every week she says she’s going to turn it off. Then the next Saturday, we’re up at 4:45 again. It’s a good thing we don’t like sleep or anything. 🙃

Since it was Halloween, of course we had some last minute running around to do. But we also used it as an excuse to stop out at Garden Canyon to see if any of the leaves had gotten colorful yet. That part was a bit disappointing, but was happy that at least the streams were all running nicely. Also, living in southeast Arizona, we’ll still have colorful leaves in December and January.

My mini-break from Social Media

I finally decided to do something to fight the habit of the mindless scroll. It hasn’t been easy, but I did manage to steal back some time. The main beneficiary so far has been my reading habits. I finished one book, and am about halfway through a novel on my Kindle.

The book I read was called Slow AI, and was written by who is here on Substack. I liked the ideas, as it’s not anti-AI, but offers some good guidelines about when not to use it, when it’s okay to use it, and some questions to ask yourself about how you’re using it.

I actually ordered the paperback version to give to one of our teens who just got in trouble at school for using AI to complete his homework. It wasn’t an accusation, he actually admitted to doing it. If he’s going to use AI, I at least want him to read this book first, so that maybe he uses it right and still learns something along the way.

After I finish the novel, I have a real hardcover book for myself next on my list.

I was supposed to carve my pumpkin this afternoon (everyone else did theirs Thursday night). I never got motivated, so mine was the only uncarved jack-o-lantern out on the front wall this evening.

Fortunately the rest of them were really good!

So what did I do instead of carving my pumpkin?

I grabbed my big camera and walked over to the little park near our house to take pictures of birds … a few were cooperative. 😎

I just got back inside because it was too cold and there were not enough kids.

lol, and as predicted I have already eaten quite a bit of chocolate. 🙃

Not sure what’s in store for the rest of the evening, perhaps some “bad” Karaoke (if anybody else like me, who likes to sing but really can’t, wants to make this a weekly sharing tradition, let me know in the comments).

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I think that about wraps things up for today’s post. BTW, this is a new format I’m going to try, where Todd’s Notebook functions essentially as an online journal. I want to be able to look back in a year or two and have a record of what I was doing, and what I was thinking. I’m probably going to publish these posts quasi-daily … every day that I have something worth saying, but I won’t feel guilty if I skip a day or three every now and then.

Til Next time,

p.s. How was Your day?

Witches’ Hats, Slow AI, and Bad Karaoke