Technology in 2046

July 16, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s a piece of technology you’re convinced will exist in 20 years?
View all responses

I’m not convinced anything will exist in twenty years. In fact, I truly doubt I will exist in twenty years, so it won’t matter to me what, if any, technology will exist at that time. Chances are, technology will progress as it always has, with artificial intelligence becoming more and more prevalent and changing human lives in ways we can’t even imagine. Of course we can’t imagine — the changes will be coming from non-human intelligence, something so alien that it certainly doesn’t care about anything human. Any pretense at human emotion emanating from those ones and zeros will be just that — pretense.

Besides, we have no idea, really, when and if a cosmic catastrophe will happen. Over the billions of years the earth has existed, there have been many such events, events that seem to have changed the earth’s environment almost overnight. We all know of such events — the dinosaur extinction and the wooly mammoth extinction, to name two. The prevalence of flood myths, of the world standing still, of night becoming day all seem to reference other extinction events.

The truth is, despite all our vaunted science expertise, we really don’t have that much knowledge about how the sun — or any other cosmic body — affected the earth over those billions of years. Our human history is such a tiny fraction of the earth’s history. We live in a rather temperate and stable time, when we think the way the world is today is the way it always was and always will be. What else explains the prevalence of mobile home parks being set up in tornado alleys, towns being constructed on flood plains, and people building cabins in fire zones? When terrible things happen to people in these areas, it’s always a shock, though it shouldn’t be. What is, wasn’t always. A dry flood plain today wasn’t always dry, and it’s still subject to rare and not-so-rare floods.

And if the cosmos weren’t enough of an inimical neighborhood, we have the political situation, too. Here in this country, it used to be the goals were the same, the differences in political parties were due to differences in the means of achieving those goals. Now the goals are so widely divergent they hardly seem to be describing the same country. Most people want us to remain a constitutional republic, but a growing vocal and volatile group wants to tear the whole thing down, get rid of the constitution, the government, the entire criminal justice system, and let chaos and poverty take over. (Which I don’t understand. What do these people think is going to happen to them when they have destroyed this country? They will be living here, too. Or are they so stupid as to they think they will be the ones running things? Or so brainwashed as to believe the country will suddenly become a utopia with no crime and Kumbaya everywhere?)

Some people believe we’re headed toward a civil war. Others think we’re heading toward a world war, complete with nuclear weapons going off everywhere.

I don’t want to believe either of those scenarios, just as I don’t want to believe in a major cosmic event, but what I’ve learned during my many years is that the world does not run on my beliefs. If it did run on my beliefs, we would be living in a utopia because everyone would be spending a lot of time at home, working in a garden, reading, or writing rather tame blogs without a lot of emotion, and certainly no rage or outrage. Just kindness and smiles for everyone — well, almost everyone.

Still, let’s assume there are no major upheavals, civil or cosmic, and in twenty years, the world is more or less continuing on the same road to total technology as it is today. I still wouldn’t have an answer to the question because I’m not convinced of much of anything, though I’m pretty sure technology will have outpaced my need for it. To be honest, it already has.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in being me, history/myth, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , , , , . 6 Comments »

Halfway Through the Year

July 2, 2026 — Pat Bertram

Noon today marks the halfway point of the year. Although I noted the date and time on my calendar, it doesn’t really mean anything to me — it’s the days themselves that count since all I can control is what I do today. A year (or even half of a year) is rather an abstract, too long of a time to be able to live it as a whole. So why did I write it on my calendar? As a blog topic, of course. I’m always looking for things to write about since I’m still on my daily blogging kick. 183 days in a row as of today. That’s more than I’ve done the past few years, though it’s not out of the ordinary for me. Once I blogged daily for more than three years straight. Funny that — to do such a thing every day for so long, and then just . . . stop. Eventually, I’ll stop this streak, too, but not today.

As for the year passing — I’m more concerned with the summer. Hot. Dry. Windy at times. So not my most fun time of year! To be honest, neither is winter, but then, that’s still a ways away. And besides, as I noted above, all I can control is what I do today.

Today, I’m trying not to worry about the way this country seems to be heading. Trying not to worry about what the heat is doing to my yard. Trying not to worry about . . . well, about anything. That seems as good a half-year resolution as any, I suppose — trying not to worry. Of course, if I made it an official half-year resolution, then I’d have to worry about whether or not I’m worrying, so perhaps it’s better just to be. Take what comes.

What came today was a discovery that my “Archives: All Posts” page on this blog now only shows a few months. I’m trying to get with the WordPress people to see what happened, but so far, I’ve had only a brief, uninformative contact with something called my “AI Assistant.” It finally had enough of me and referred me to a human. So, I’m waiting for an email that might or might not come from a real person.

I doubt I need the entire blog archive — I mean, who wants to sort through 3,866 posts (3,867 after today) to find a title that catches their interest (I certainly wouldn’t!) — so I might just get rid of the “All Posts” designation and let the code do what it wants. I considered replacing the archives with a “best of” designation, but then, I’d have to go through all of those posts to see if any are worth highlighting. So, no.

What else came today was a lovely pair of daylilies! They brightened my day. I hope they brighten yours, too.

Happy halfway day!

[Update: I did get an email, and apparently, the server has to generate all the codes at once and with so many, it runs out of memory part way through. The email gave me an alternative way of posting the archives, which, if nothing else, shows me how many times I posted each of the past 225 months.]

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, internet, life. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Hope

June 30, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I don’t really pay attention to generation labels. I mean, I know what a couple of the names are, but I haven’t a clue as to where they fall in the age spectrum (my age spectrum, specifically), or what, if anything, any of those groups want. I also don’t know what the ethos of each group is, assuming there is such a thing. I can see certain characteristics, such as people having grown up using phones as a child, or their feeling a sense of doom or lack of hope for the future, but not everyone in any particular generation is the same. For example, while there could be a lot of clownishly-dressed protestors in a particular generation, there could also be what used to be called “clean cut” people trying to create a different life for themselves.

To be honest, I don’t have a lot of contact with the youngest generations, and when I do, they are generally respectful. I’m also aware that a whole lot of younger people follow the socialist party line of “billionaires bad, trillionaires worse.” But then again, so do a lot of people of all ages. Too many people are totally ignorant about how money is made and how wealth is created. Wealth is not a single pie of limited size, as they seem to presume. Every wealth creator (people who own businesses and who work at them) adds to the size of the pie, which benefits everyone. And even if those wealth creators were taxed out of existence, not much, if any, of that money will end up in the hands of those ignorant folk. There are too many grifters out there already standing in line with their hands out.

I also know that a lot of younger generations are unpatriotic; apparently many see the country as a hellhole with no redeeming characteristics. But then, so do a lot of the older generations. Outrage seems to be the name of their game, and algorithms only feed their insularity. Others are simply apathetic.

Lately, though, I’ve been seeing a different side of those young folks. Two young men started “Relay for America,” a run to carry the flag from the Pacific Coast to Washington DC — keeping that flag moving day and night, without stopping. Over 250 official relay runners have signed up, and others join them along the route. Each mile is dedicated to a veteran. Their hope is to unite America with this show of patriotism and community.

Another couple of young men (one who has entirely too much energy and soles of leather since he runs barefoot) started a running club called Unify America. They travel to various places, run with a flag, hoping to spread their message of love and joy and patriotism.

Recently, the second group joined the first for part of the relay. Symbolic, that.

This show of patriotism, fitness, and solidarity gives me hope. Perhaps the communist ideals creeping through the country are not a foregone conclusion. Perhaps there is a spiritual, maybe even a political, balance at play.

Another thing that gives me hope is the rise of independent journalism. Young people with phones and cameras and a steadfast desire to tell the truth are a perfect foil for the propaganda of the alphabet press. Instead of sitting in air-conditioned studios parroting the approved stories, those young journalists are out there, standing on their own two shod feet, showing what the established press doesn’t want us to see.

Even if they’re not out gathering their own stories, there is a growing group of conservative podcasters who try to dispel the lies that are so often peddled by far-left extremists, especially those of a similar age, and to tell the truth as they live it.

It’s good to know that these young men and women are out there. They bring hope to world. And to me.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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On My Soapbox

June 23, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I was going to write about the history behind what is happening today, going all the way back to Alexander Hamilton’s economic system of tariffs, domestic manufacturing, and sovereignty, but then changed my mind because I’m not sure it’s a good idea to get on my soapbox in today’s political climate. Still, Hamilton’s system is worth a mention because it is what made American great, what created wealth in this country, what developed an unprecedented middle class who kept the money they earned without it being taxed away. (Tariffs were always supposed to be the way the United States government supported itself, not taking from its citizens.) This Hamilton system (what is left of it) is the very system that that globalists want destroyed. For over one hundred years, their mission has been to gut the USA middle class, leaving only high earners who make the money and a political class that takes the money and gives what it doesn’t keep to low earners. It’s why manufacturing was sent overseas — the globalists convinced the political hacks that people wanted cheap goods more than they wanted jobs, and so the middle class dwindled. (You can’t have a one world government if one country is wealthy while others are mired in chaos, so since they couldn’t raise the entire world to the USA standards, they decided to lower the USA to third world standards.)

It’s been hard watching this destruction my whole life. And no, it’s not a democrat vs. republican thing — it’s a combined political class that bought into the corruption, thinking that having all countries run by a so-called “world-based order” was a good thing. (The globalists kept their power by playing one country against the other politically, where the Hamilton system was about creating working relationships with other countries by trading as equals.) Many political hacks have kept their own power through several degrowth cycles, though I wonder if they ever see their end — the end, of course, is rule by an international elite that makes the political class in each country obsolete. I also wonder if they are as ignorant as they seem — too many of them seem to think wealth simply exists. They don’t seem to see that wealth needs to be created. Hamilton knew this. You’d think that people who have been running this country for decades would know the truth. Unless they do know and their naïveté is part of the game?

The huge influx of illegals into all the western countries was part of this degrowth — a way of crashing the economies of the western countries, leaving them un-sovereign and at the mercy of the globalists. (The one thing I didn’t realize until recently was that this gutting of the middle class by off-shoring manufacturing, energy dependency, and an acceptance of anti-white racism was aimed at European countries too. How else to explain the British allowing a quarter of a million girls to be groomed and trafficked and murderers set free because people in positions of power class didn’t want to be called racist.)

Because of what previous administrations in the USA allowed, without any real objection from voters until recently, we came very close to what those globalists envisioned — a chaotic USA that could be grabbed up by those who have been aiming for that very thing since before the Civil War. And no, it’s not the same people — the originators of the scheme are long dead, unless, as some people claim, those originators have cracked the code of longevity — but the system and its aims are the same.

Weirdly, in an age of overwhelming information, most of this information isn’t easily found anymore. I did my early studying with real paper books, and paper books are a lot harder to destroy than information on the internet. I went looking online for information about a couple of people — one I know is helping fund the “mostly peaceful” demonstrations in this country, and another I know was part of a grooming industry that involved all sorts of celebrities and powerful people, and almost no negative information about these “benevolent” folks exists. Apparently, they have whole swarms of internet drones who do nothing but scrub the internet, and if they can’t erase the information, they bury it under thousands of new posts that are liked and shared by their bots until it all but disappears. I don’t know why they bother — much of the information available on the internet is leftist leaning, anyway, and AI seems to downplay any mention of conservative values (such as more autonomy and less government).

I used to get upset with people for wearing blinders, but I’ve come to see it’s not them so much as the algorithms. They are never shown a point of view they might disagree with, and so one’s world view is constantly reinforced. Nothing that might challenge that view is ever shown, unless, of course, their outrage needs stoking.

I know this firsthand. I have two separate internet accounts, each using a different browser, and each feed is totally different. Apparently, one browser thinks I am a demonic democrat and the other a rabid republican, when in fact, I am neither. I am a student. A watcher. A pattern recognizer. Nothing more.

Oops. I guess I got on my soapbox anyway. Oh, well.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

Posted in history/myth, internet, life. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 6 Comments »

Talking to My Twenty-year-old Self

June 17, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What is something you wish you could tell your 20-year-old self?
View all responses

Hypothetical questions like this make me think — not about the question I’m supposed to blog about, but the mechanics of it.

Truly, assuming there was something I wished I could tell my twenty-year old self, how would that work?

At first, I thought of leaving a message somewhere for me to find when I reached this age, but then I realized that’s the reverse of the question. Besides, there’s nothing my twenty-year old self could say to me today that would make any difference. If there was something that was important enough for that younger version of me to want forwarded into the future, it’s already been done. First, there is a little thing called a memory. Second, even if I don’t recall the important thing itself, it would be written in my very life — everything that ever happened to me stemmed from the thoughts of that year (and every year) so any message would be redundant.

As for the logistics of getting a message back to that younger self — reverse email? But email hadn’t been invented back then. That twenty-year old self would have to wait several more decades to receive the message, and by then, she’d be almost as old as I am now. If not that, then what? Time travel? Okay, so assume I went back in time, how would I ever convince that person I was her? I’m sure she’d think I was a relation, perhaps a great-aunt or some such because I did at one time bear a distinct resemblance to my mother.

I remember when I was young not ever actually thinking that old people were forever old, but I somehow presumed it. I knew people grew older, but it just seemed to me, in that accepting way of youth, that they were old, and had always been, just as I was young, and would always be. It makes sense, I suppose — when you’re young, you can see the changes in yourself as you graduate to a new grade every year, but the older folks always looked the same. I don’t know when it struck me that old folks had once been young, that they’d lived a whole life before getting old, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen until later in my twenties or even in my thirties. (I knew people aged, of course, but old age seemed so alien to my young self that I never made the connection.)

So there my young self would be, seeing this old woman, and no way would my twenty-year old self ever believe that I was this old. Oddly, I doubt that my current self would even recognize that young self. Odder still, now that I’m old, I feel as if I’ve always been old, as if I’d never been young. I mean, I know I was, but . . . who can remember that far back? Or care? It is easier just to accept what I am today and go with that feeling rather than give credence to a past.

Which means, I suppose, that even if I could go back and tell my twenty-year old self something, there’s nothing I would wish to tell her.

As for the photo accompanying this article, I realize it’s not my twenty-year old self, but nowadays, one young age is as remote as the other.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, culture, history/myth, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , . 6 Comments »

Dotting Eyes

June 12, 2026 — Pat Bertram

So, artificial intelligence is supposed to run the world in the future? Good luck with that!

This comment wasn’t planned, but it just hit me as I am writing — if AI, or at least Generative AI (or as I once accidentally called it: degenerative AI) learns from people, and half the population is, by definition of average intelligence or below, then how will it ever get smarter than humans? And oh, yes, while I’m on this topic, people say that you can tell what AI has written by the M-dashes. Those are the long dashes I use in my articles all the time — eight in this piece alone, by last count — and I guarantee nothing I write is touched by anything artificial. Well, the computer — my fingers do touch that — but as for help with writing? No. Absolutely not. The point of writing is . . . well, to write. Having a voice in a machine do my writing for me would completely defeat the purpose of connecting with my own inner voice and ultimately with other human voices — not vocal voices since obviously I can’t hear people who read my work, but voice as in a person’s unique way of phrasing, unique tone, unique point of view.

But “voice” brings me back to what I came here to say.

I was listening to a clip yesterday from one of the black conservatives I occasionally pay attention to. I started doing so in order to find out what they think about being used to shore up the left’s anti-voter ID stance, and they don’t like it. They know it’s not Jim Crow-2, since their parents went through the real thing and so they know the truth of it. And they don’t like being patronized as if they were too stupid to figure out how to get an ID or how to prove their citizenship. (To be honest, I think the people I listen to are more educated, more coherent, and richer than those treating them as if they needed their hands held.)

Anyway, somewhere along the line during this two-minute clip, I lost track of what the speaker was saying because I was stunned into immobility. I simply couldn’t believe how AI translated his speech to text. He used the phrase “dot your Is and cross your Ts,” and what appeared on the screen was “Dot your eyes and cross your teeth.”

Um. Yeah. It might be artificial but it sure isn’t intelligent!

“Dotting eyes” wouldn’t necessarily be an erroneous transcription if he were talking about art, since that tiny dot in the eye of a painted face is what makes the depicted creature — animal or human — seem alive. And some people are born with teeth that come in crooked, so I suppose in some cases, it’s possible for teeth to be crossed, though I can’t really picture it. (No surprise since I am not able to visualize anything — all I ever see when I close my eyes and mentally try to call up an image is . . . black.)

But still — dotting eyes and crossing teeth? I sure hope the AI systems that run weaponry are a lot smarter than that or we are all doomed.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

Loyal Subscribers

June 8, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
How do you build loyal subscribers?
View all responses

I find it interesting that most of these blog prompts have nothing to do with me, such as today’s prompt about building loyal subscribers. I have no idea how to build loyalty, have no idea if anyone has even subscribed to my blog. I do know a few friends get my blog by email, which isn’t really fair — they get to keep up with me on a daily basis, and I don’t know what’s going on with them. You’d think they’d be kind enough to reciprocate with their own blog, wouldn’t you? (I’m being facetious. If I want to know what’s going on with them, I could simply call, and I don’t, so who’s the one who isn’t being fair?)

Actually, according to WordPress, I do have some subscribers, and a few more have subscribed in the past few days, so thank you for subscribing!

As for building loyalty — apparently, somewhere along the line I have done so since I see many of the same names in comments and “likes,” but as I’ve mentioned before, I have no idea why anyone reads what I write, though I do appreciate everyone who does. It makes blogging seem so much less like throwing a tiny penlight out into the great darkness of the unknown and more like connecting with friends.

There are some people who have been with me almost from the beginning — starting from the time I wrote about writing, then tumbling into the whole morass of grief with me, and still showing up now that my posts range from stream of consciousness to gardening. Truly, hands across the nations! (Did I mention how grateful I am for you? Well, it bears repeating.)

I might not know how to purposely build a following, but I know how not to build subscribers by the millions — don’t be controversial. Almost all people who garner those sorts of numbers and that sort of loyalty do so by talking about things that gets people emotional, and I don’t want to do that. I know how a lot of my readers think, and I’d just as soon not get into discussions that either get my ire up or theirs. (And I don’t like to have to think of tactful ways of saying I disagree, so I don’t.)

Another way not to build loyal subscribers is to not show a bias because bias automatically gives people a connection to you. It’s almost impossible not to show a bias, and I’m sure mine shows occasionally, though my bias tends to be for irony and intelligence and truth-seeking rather than for any movement or ideology. And I have a definite bias against hypocrisy, emotion that passes as fact, and regimentation of thought. I spent most of my life around people who loved to force people to think their way, so I became adept at changing midstream partly to keep the peace and partly because I didn’t care enough either way to argue the point.

But then, can anyone tell if they are really bias-free? I’m not sure. It seems ingrained so that a biased person acts as if their bias is the truth rather than simply their way of seeing the truth. Case in point: one popular quasi news show has been bleeding viewers because a lot of people don’t like its far-left liberal slant, and all the journalists on the show profess to have no idea there is a slant — they thought they were being impartial.

Seems like a good idea for me to keep keeping away from controversial topics — that way I can keep my bias to myself. And I can keep the readers I have rather than trying to grow a larger subscriber’s list, which I don’t know how to do anyway.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, internet, photography, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 7 Comments »

Recommended Tags

June 5, 2026 — Pat Bertram

In yesterday’s blog post, I wrote about gardening being A Strange Avocation, and I explained the difference in the behavior of flowers between this year and previous years. The tags I used for the post are gardening, home, life, bees and flowers, bees in a garden, larkspur, lily trees, purple echinacea, purple echinacea turned pink, yarrow. All garden related and directly related to the article I posted.

WordPress, the platform that hosts this blog, has an AI tool that suggests various tags for posts. In case you don’t know, tags are words or phrases that bloggers use to help people find their articles. For example, broad tags such as “gardening,” don’t do much to drive people to a blog post since they are too general. If someone were to Google “gardening,” they’d get millions upon millions of hits, and the chance of their finding any particular article are close to nil. Specific tags are best, or so they say, because the chances of someone stumbling upon your immortal words are a lot better. (I was being facetious about the “immortal words,” making fun of the fact that so few of our blog posts say anything of importance, and yet, in the electronic age, everyone’s words, no matter how puerile, truly are immortal.)

You will never in a million years guess the words that the all-seeing, all-knowing AI suggested for that gardening post, so I’ll just list them for you: “Auto immune disease, breastfeeding, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s, IBD.” How is that even possible? I’ve gone over and over what I wrote yesterday, and I cannot see anything that could possibly have generated such a wildly inappropriate group of words.

I know artificial intelligence is supposed to be a great thing, and it might be for other people, but I’m not that impressed. From what I have seen, generative AI in particular is not any more intelligent than most humans seem to be. (I slipped and called it degenerative AI before I corrected myself, but I like that term!) It also has huge biases, especially political ones, which makes sense, I suppose, since the vast majority of news sources and sites like Wikipedia are liberal, and generative AI is only as smart as its input. It would be nice to be able to use Google’s AI generated summaries for a quick perusal of any given topic, but I can’t rely on its answers because it makes mistakes that I know are mistakes. It doesn’t always understand the question, either. I wanted to check out “immortal words” to make sure I wasn’t making up the phrase, and all the AI would tell me is what immortal meant. I also wanted a quick definition for “tags,” and what I got was a whole lot of information about where to buy paper tags with strings. (I’ve noticed more often that search engines seem to be geared to products first, so if I want to know the definition of something, and it happens to be the name of a musical group or a brand name or whatever, that is what shows up, not the more generic term that I was looking for.)

I suppose, in Pollyanna-style, I should be glad that I didn’t need the suggested tags. Glad I don’t know enough about those medical issues from a personal angle to write about them. But still . . . utterly bizarre.

Actually, I’m not one to talk about intelligence, artificial or otherwise. Earlier, I was doing a puzzle, and I needed an eight-letter word beginning with L for a flower. And all I could think of was lavender. Lavender? Really? When I’d spent hours in the morning clearing away larkspur? When I’ve written post after post mentioning larkspur?

Oh, well, such is life. My life, anyway.

PS: The recommended tags for this post are Project Life, Heidi Swapp, San Diego Comic Con, Becky Higgins, Studio Calico. I don’t even know what most of that is!

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, gardening, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , . 4 Comments »

Unlimited Budget

May 31, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
If you had an unlimited budget for 24 hours, what would you do?
View all responses

This blog prompt should have been a no brainer. Unfortunately, because I overthink everything, I have a hard time with hypothetical questions, this one most of all. For example, I started out wondering what it means by “budget.” To me (and to the dictionary), a budget is basically a financial plan that helps a person understand what money they have to spend every month, allocates a sufficient amount of income for fixed expenditures such as rent and utilities, and helps control spending to avoid going into debt. But that definition doesn’t fit the postulated scenario at all. I suppose I could make out a budget for an infinite amount of income for a day without actually spending anything, but it seems a waste to go through all that simply for one day’s worth of phony money.

So if the question isn’t about a budget as such, does it mean simply having an infinite amount of money to spend for one day? If so, how does the money appear? A credit card with no limit? If so, who pays the bill? Or does the money appear in my banking account? If so, how does the depositer know how much I will be spending?

Do I know ahead of time what day that “unlimited budget” will show up so I can plan how to use the largess? Or will it just appear one day, leaving me to wing it, and hoping I don’t get so overwrought by the stress of it all that I blow the whole deal?

And how does one spend the money? Go online and book airline trips and cruises for a future day? Will the travel plans still be available when the time comes, or will they have disappeared along with that “unlimited budget” day?

How would a credit card work anyway? The charges don’t always show up the same day as an order is placed, so if I were to buy a whole lot of stuff at a mall or online or wherever, there’s a chance that once the “unlimited budget” deal expired, I’d get stuck with a bill for things I would never have bought in the first place.

It would make sense to buy property or some other tangible asset, but I know for a fact, one cannot buy any property in a single day. Or maybe one can if one has that “unlimited budget” at one’s disposal. But still, I tend to think not. Realtors, lawyers, sellers, escrow folk and everyone else involved in a major sale don’t work on a moment’s notice.

I would think a good use of the budget would be to write checks to local non-profits, but would the money still be there when they cashed the checks? It doesn’t seem like it would be, and I have a hunch if I went to the bank and got trunk loads of cash to hand out to those groups, I would get into a whole lot of trouble. First of all, you can’t take out too much cash from a bank without dealing with a lot of paperwork. Second of all, unless the organizers were greedy and grabbed the cash for themselves, they’d certainly have questions about its legitimacy.

It all seems like too much headache.

In the end, I suppose I’d just buy what I normally buy on any given day, which is . . . not a single thing.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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Profound Advice

May 29, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s the most profound piece of advice you’ve been given? Did you take it?
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WordPress, the host of my blog, is starting to pull out all sorts of tricks to get us more involved, or so I imagine, since people tend not to like long-form blogging anymore, seeming to prefer the photos, quick clips, and brief comments posted on most social networking sites. Some of what WordPress is doing is fun — for example, I won a “streak freeze” badge, which if I’m reading it right, if I miss a day of blogging activity, it still counts as an active day. It won’t matter to me and my personal stats, though. If I miss a day, I’m honest enough to admit it, if only to myself, but so far this year, I’ve posted each day. (149 days in a row so far.)

Oddly, though WordPress does keep tabs of my posting “streak,” they’ve only been counting the past ten days for their new activity badge, so according to that I’m on a 10-day streak.

Another thing they are doing, besides the badges and different challenges, is listing the blogs I posted on a particular day. Supposedly, I’ve only posted five times on a May 29th, but they don’t seem to include the ten years prior to 2016 when I was blogging every day. If I really cared, of course, I could go back and find those posts for myself, but I don’t. Don’t care, I mean. The past is the past.

Still, I did check out a few of the previous May 29 posts that they listed, and I came across an interesting one that seems to fit today’s blog prompt. In the post, When You Have to Go, I mentioned all the different places I went when I had to “go” during my cross-country trip, and I found a bit of advice that I’d forgotten. I don’t even remember who told me, but it was profound to me, anyway. She suggested that when I was camping, I should take a quart yogurt container into the tent for late night emergencies. The container easily contours to fit, and the cover made it spill proof. I followed her advice, and it truly was miraculous! I keep a container in my house in case of plumbing problems, which has also been a boon.

Okay, so the advice wasn’t profound in the sense of emotional or philosophical depth, or of something with far-reaching significance, and I’m sure it wasn’t the most profound advice I’d ever been given (though I can’t think of any such advice offhand), and yet, when you have to go, there’s nothing more profound than a place (or a yogurt container) to find relief.

Incidentally, the photo attached to this post is one I took at the Kohler Design Center located in Kohler, Wisconsin. If you look closely, you will see that the sculpture, which took up an entire wall, was created from dozens of stacked toilets.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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