Volunteer for Democracy #SundaySalon

Happy Sunday! Sunday Salon is hosted by Deb at ReaderBuzz. Check out her post and the links to see what other bloggers have been up to in the last week.

How’s the weather?

We are having an extraordinarily hot September. Every time that it looks like we might get a little cooler, the highs jump back up to the upper 90s. They are promising us a break on Monday with a week of highs in the 60s and 70s. At this point, that feels too good to be true!

What are you reading?

My book club met on Thursday for our annual book selection meeting. I published a post on Saturday with the books that we’ll be reading in the next 12 months, plus the ones that we considered, but didn’t make the final cut. We had a lot of great suggestions and a mix of fiction and nonfiction.

I started The Right Sort of Man by Allison Montclair, a mystery investigated by a pair of women who run a marriage bureau in 1940s London.

On the opposite end of the literary experience, I’m reading the nonfiction book, I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to do (Almost) Everything by Joanna Stern. Tech journalist Joanna Stern challenged herself to embrace all things AI and then wrote a book about the good, the bad, and the ugly. In the wake of recent worries in the news, this felt like a fun way to get a better understanding of the situation.

What are you watching?

I watched two different adaptations of one Agatha Christie novel featuring Miss Marple, Sleeping Murder. That was a fun experience!

What are you doing?

I took two booth shifts this weekend at our city’s largest festival of the year. I’m showing a friendly face for a political party that has better candidates in the upcoming election and better positions on the ballot questions in Missouri. This is a new activity for me, but I feel like a lot of us are going to need to do new things if we’re going to improve our country and our world.

Someone asked me recently, “What if the midterms are our last chance to save democracy?” I’m choosing some things to do in the next six weeks based on my answer to that question.

Comments

Volunteer for Democracy #SundaySalon — 1 Comment

Jackie on September 19, 2026 at 1:04 pm said:

I Am Not a Robot sounds like something I’d like.
Although I am retired, I worked in technology my entire career so I am something of a nerd. I have been an analyst as well, financial and projects.
I use AI a lot, I am building an itinerary with it. I find it fascinating the mistakes it makes, especially when it contradicts itself.
I am an obsessive researcher so I find having AI planning for me makes me less involved. But then I do take their information and double check it thoroughly. I am even mapping our their plans to ensure they are correct.
It also makes me feel less in control as I seem to absorb less.
P.S. my new term Slop Grenade – Pasting a massive AI-generated response into a chat or email where a human would write one sentence. It destroys the medium itself. Nobody writes essays in Slack. It’s only possible because of AI copy-paste.

It’s like calling someone and asking “What time is the meeting?” and they read you a 10-page analysis of calendar management best practices. You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document.

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