The camp road (graded at last) is like a tunnel of intense new green. The weeks before and after summer solstice are the best, with stuff like hostas blowing up out of the ground almost overnight, waves of rhododendron and azalea, and light early and late. The dock will be installed next weekend because we are ordering a gangway with rails, the latest part of the plan to live here forever.

The blurb on the back of this book sent me right to the ordering page. It's middle school reading level and I'm sharing it with a 4th grader, but give me more robot first person narration please. Here's the blurb:

Before the Robot Uprising, Block the CleanerBot dutifully followed his programming as part of a hotel cleaning crew. No in the aftermath of the AI Apocalypse that annihilated the world, he tries to simply do his job, avoiding the dangerour SoldierBots who wage war on the last human survivors....But when Block finds a mysterious human infant, he's compelled to care for the girl and travel across the metal infested wastelands of America to a safe haven...Nova, a surly soldier becomes an unlikely ally...Together they face mortal danger from bands of scavengers, militaristic SoldierBots, Combat Mechs, and a cyborg Bounty Hunter that will stop at nothing to find Block and the child--an infant who might hold the key to humanity's future.

I was on the beautiful bridge this morning but I didn't want to haul my kayak down a steep slope to get it in. In this kayak I do better launching at a beach. I intend to reclaim the kayak this year. It's lightweight and I can easily get it on and off the car.

AI is something I don't understand. More precisely I don't understand how it radically differs from regular coding. I see that it has connectivity to big data sources and has speedy retrieval from them. AI apparently uses a lot of subsystems like machine learning, a tool that uses data and learning algorithms to improve over time. Most of the AI in use today, like internet searches, Siri, Alexa, and CHATGPT are doing specific tasks. General AI is is a theoretical form of AI where a machine would have an intelligencel equal to humans; it would be self-aware with a consciousness that would have the ability to solve problems, learn, and plan for the future. That does not exist yet, but smart people like Yuval Harari can see it coming and think it could change everything. For better? For worse? Who knows. Merging humans with systems like that could be the future of human evolution.

In our book club discussions at the library, I often wish we talked more about the craft of what we read, about how successful the author was at plot, character development, chronology, etc. Maybe I can suggest that the club read the Steve Almond book which is itself a thoughtful, totally non pedantic, entertaining read with a thousand examples from other books. Then maybe we would have the vocabulary to discuss more about the book than how it reminds us of some anecdote from our own lives. We spend more time associating about the book than talking about the book.

Emerson is in 4th grade and gets about 30 minutes in the library on Saturday afternoons, usually hanging at the desk and getting me to play a game. He likes graphic novels. I let him look at the first few pages of Good Talk after which he handed it back to me and said, "This is adult humor."

Things on my list: Walter Anderson Museum, English Tea Room, Baldwin & Co. Bookstore (so much to order for the library).
Surprises not on my list: Joan Evans and exchange of 30 year histories, Ohr Museum (oaks and Gehry pods).
Last JazzFest Friday rained out; choosing disappointment over wet misery and mud
They keep rebuilding on the Gulf Coast because it is so beautiful. Maybe they get 20 years out of it. Probably worth it.