Arne Svingen, forøvrig en av favorittforfatterene til eldstemann, løfter noen gode poeng i sin ytring på NRK.no. Det skal godt gjøres for meg å løse noen av utfordringene, men jeg kan bidra med et knippe anbefalinger som kanskje kan bidra til å navigere jungelen av litteratur for de yngre.

Lesing for barna er minst like viktig som egen lesing. I hjemme vårt har vi lest for barna siden de var veldig små, og jeg har bygget en god liste med bøker og serier jeg synes utmerker seg og som jeg gjerne kan anbefale videre.

Jeg lenker til bøkene i norske nettbutikker, men de fleste kan fint lånes på biblioteket. Å bygge en samling bøker hjemme er noe jeg har stor tro på at inspirerer til mer lesing, men det må ikke bli en barriere for å skaffe bøker til lesing. Lån på biblioteket, av andre, og bruk bursdager og jul til å ønske dere bøker til barna, er en god løsning.

Jeg synes det er vanskelig å klassifisere mange av bøkene i alderskategorier, fordi barn ofte er veldig forskjellige når det kommer til modenhet, leseferdigheter, hva de liker, og mange 13-åringer vil jeg tro (som vår) kan kose seg med bøker for de yngre barna, fordi det er gode, morsomme og trygge historier.

Denne listen blir mer som et utdrag enn en komplett liste. Det er enormt mye der ute, men her er et sted å starte.

Detektivbyrå nr 2 av Jørn Lier Horst og Hans Jørgen Sandnes

Jørn Lier Horst og Hans Jørgen Sandnes produserer detektivhistorier så blekket spruter. Det har blitt en enorm samling fengende og spennende historier som kan leses for eller av barn fra de er ganske små.

Oppdagerklubben av Bobbie Pears

En god serie fantasifulle skapninger og verdener. Har vært til glede for barna fra de var 4-5 og fremdeles for yngstemann på snart 10.

Alba og Finito av Lars Mæhle

Nyere serie om Alba og hunden hennes Finito som løser mysterier. 10-åringen synes fremdeles disse er artige.

Musse og Helium av Camilla Brinck

Her må du stålsette deg litt, da det er mange bøker og det føles til tider som det går i ring. Men barna fenges og det er en både spennende historie og fokus på gode verdier. Stå i det, så får barna en fin introduksjon til fantasy og eventyrsjangeren gjennom disse to musene og vennene deres.

Gutta i Trehuset av Andry Griffiths og Terry Denton

Her er det også en god stabel bøker for barna å fordype seg i. Kombinasjonen av morsomme tegninger, bisarre historier og fantasi-uten-grenser har gjort det til en sikker vinner for gutta mine. Eldstemann på 13 plukker dem fremdeles opp innimellom.

Bokfabrikken Arne Svingen

Kronikkforfatteren har også vært en bokfabrikk i mange år noe som har resultert i en rekke gode bøker både for de yngre og ungdom.

Spesielt etter 10-årsalderen har eldstemann fått opp øyene for universene til Svingen, kanskje aller mest de selvstående bøkene. Kan nevne Snitch, Unike Edgar, Bror, Cash Money

Familien Von Humbug av Karen Margrete Kilane og Hans Jørgen Sandnes

Nyere serie om Lucy og bestefaren. Lucy oppdager hun egentlig er del av en mystisk og til tider dysfunksjonell herskapsfamilie, von Humbug. Hun møter bestefaren sin og sammen oppdager hun familiehistorien sin, drar på elleville eventyr.

Blinkskudd for yngstemann fra 8-årsalderen.

Donald Pocket

Ikke undervurder verdien av Donald-pocket, følelsen av å krype under et teppe eller dyna med en pocket mens høststormen banker på vinduet, eller i teltet en varm sommerkveld. Egne minner med Donald-pocket i hendene er mange, og våre barn kan gjerne få oppleve det samme. Erfaringen min er at historiene fremdeles slår veldig godt an.

Kjøp samlinger på Finn.no. Hender du kommer over en banankasse med pockets for håndfull mynter. Hjelper godt med å fylle opp nevnte bokhylle med leseinspirasjon.

Dette er i hvertfall en start. Diskuterer gjerne barn, lesing og barnebøker, så hører gjerne fra deg. Send meg også gjerne dine boktips til barna!

Just to be incredibly explicit, I am in no way shape or form interested in J as anything past a friend. Because we hang out a lot and we do stupid things together, a lot of people think that we are in a relationship. This isn’t necessarily great for me because both I don’t want her partner to feel worried at all or any kind of fear regarding that, but also because lot of single people might rule me out because it seems I’m in a relationship. But I think it’s honestly a really sweet thing, on how our platonic friendship and love for each other. Is that meaningful. I feel like if strangers don’t think that opposite sex friendships might potentially be relationships, their is work to be done lol. Something about being so comfortable with someone else and not worrying about being perceived in certain ways is a really comforting thought.

I remember when I was a child seeing a show on television with someone using a pottery wheel. It was so cool to see a lump of reddish brown clay spinning around, and being manipulated into a vase, or a bowl, or whatever. It was like magic to me. I always thought I might like to try it.

It was pretty exciting when the person shaping the clay would add too much water or make a part of the outer edge too thin. The entire project would suddenly go into speed wobble. There was really no saving or fixing it when that happened. It would fold up, and flop around wildly. Inertia would destroy it. The only thing they could do was pick up the pieces, mash them all together, and start over.

That is what my posts are like. I start off with an idea, and then I lose control of it. It goes into a speed wobble, fold ups, and pieces of it fly. Instead of starting over, I scoop the entire mess up, mash all the pieces together, and then post it. Maybe I should have started over. Put more work into it. Instead, I put the mess into the kiln. It comes out looking like a lump of clay that has some remnants of when someone had tried to turn it into a vase, and failed. Part of it smooth, part of a hand print, and what might have been the upper rim mostly squeezed together like a sneering mouth. What the fuck is that? Oh, that's when I tried to make a vase. I have to get ready for work.

You have a product that sees plants: a grow camera, a controller, a garden app, a greenhouse dashboard. You want it to say something useful about plant health. The obvious path is to train your own vision model, which means collecting labelled images, standing up training infrastructure, and then owning the much harder second job forever – knowing when your model is wrong. Most teams do not want that job. They want an answer they can trust and a JSON response they can build on.

That is what a plant health diagnosis API is for. You POST an image, you get a structured result back, and the hard part is somebody else's problem: the model, the calibration, the honesty about being unsure.

What a good response actually contains

The point of an API, versus a chatbot that writes a paragraph, is that the answer is structured and machine-readable. A single image goes in. What comes back is a compact object your code can branch on – not prose you have to parse. Illustratively:

{
  "schema_version": "3.1.0",
  "results": [
    {
      "is_healthy": false,
      "health_confidence": 0.10,
      "growth_stage": "flowering",
      "growth_stage_confidence": 0.9,
      "conditions": [
        {
          "class_id": "powdery_mildew",
          "display_name": "Powdery Mildew",
          "confidence": 0.95,
          "coarse_group": "fungal_disease"
        }
      ],
      "reliability_score": 0.98,
      "bbox": { "x0": 0, "y0": 0, "x1": 1, "y1": 1, "normalized": true }
    }
  ]
}

Check the live docs for the full schema, but the shape is the point. Every field is something your integration can act on: the condition (class_id) and its confidence, the clinical family it belongs to (coarse_group), a reliability_score for that result, its growth_stage, and a bbox for each plant when more than one is in frame.

Why not just call a general vision model

You can hand a plant photo to a general-purpose vision model and get a fluent answer. Two things go wrong at scale.

It over-calls, confidently. A general model produces a confident-looking answer whether or not it has any basis for the call, and it has no idea when it is wrong. Wire that into automation and you will act on your worst inputs, because the confidence number means the least exactly when the photo is hardest.

It is prose, not data, and it is not cheap. You pay per call for a paragraph you then have to parse, normalize, and second-guess. A purpose-built diagnosis API returns fixed fields in a few milliseconds, at a cost that survives running on every frame or every upload.

The value is not “an AI looked at your plant.” It is a calibrated, structured answer you can put a threshold on.

The fields that make it safe to automate

Two fields in that response exist specifically so you can automate without getting burned.

The reliability signal is separate from confidence. Confidence is how hard the model leaned; reliability estimates how much to trust this answer on this specific image. Gate your automation on reliability, not raw confidence, and low-quality photos stop triggering actions. That distinction is the whole reason the field exists.

The family. Every condition comes back with its clinical family, its coarse_group. When two conditions genuinely cannot be separated from a photo, that family is what your logic acts on: alert, log, or ask for a better photo, rather than commit to a coin-flip between two exact names. An honest “it's in this group” is more automatable than a precise guess.

Where it drops in

Because the answer is structured JSON, it goes wherever your stack already is. It runs as a step in a Home Assistant automation or a Node-RED flow, behind a camera that fires on motion or on a schedule, or inside your own app's upload path. There is a worked Home Assistant plant-monitoring walkthrough if you want a concrete integration to copy.

The audience this fits: hardware makers who want plant-health detection on the box without building an ML team, app developers who want a diagnosis feature without owning a model, and AgTech integrators who want one detection layer that speaks JSON across their platform.

Honest about scope

A diagnosis API is only as good as its honesty about what it covers. PlantLab's live model today diagnoses 30 conditions in cannabis, with tomato in development and further crops on a public roadmap – and a crop is never called “live” in the API before a real model does the work. If your product needs a crop that is still on the roadmap, that is a straight answer you can plan around, not a silent wrong result. The reasoning behind building one crop at a time is in A Plant Lab, One Crop at a Time.

Try it

There is a free tier, so you can send a real image and read a real response before writing a line of integration code. Grab a key and the schema at plantlab.ai – one image in, structured JSON out, in about 18 milliseconds.

An AI plant health check is easy to build and easy to trust too much. Point a phone at a plant, and half a dozen apps will name a disease in a second, with a confidence percentage that looks reassuring. The naming is the easy part. Knowing when the answer is wrong, and admitting it out loud, is the part almost nobody ships. So here are the five questions that separate a real diagnosis from a confident guess, and how to take the photo so the check holds up.

Why a photo diagnosis is harder than it looks

The problems worth catching are the ones that look alike. A plant that is short of one nutrient can look almost identical to one short of a different nutrient. Several pests leave nearly the same speckling on a leaf before the real damage shows. Light stress can mimic both. On a clear textbook photo of a single leaf, any decent model gets it right. On the crowded, backlit, dirt-splashed photo a grower actually takes, the same model has to choose between three things that look the same – and that is where most tools quietly fall apart.

So the accuracy number on the box is not the number that matters. What matters is accuracy on the hard cases, on the photos you take, and whether the tool knows the difference.

The confidence trap: confident is not the same as correct

Here is the single most useful thing to understand about any AI plant health checker.

Confidence is how hard the model leaned. Accuracy is how often it is right when it leans that hard. They are not the same number. Hand a general-purpose AI a plant photo and it will produce a confident-looking percentage whether or not it has any basis for the call. On an easy photo the two line up. On a hard one they can point in opposite directions – a “90% confident” that is wrong more often than a coin flip.

A well-calibrated tool is one where the confidence tracks reality: when it says 90%, it is right about nine times in ten; when it says 40%, it hedges because it genuinely is not sure. A poorly calibrated tool prints a high number every time, because a high number feels better and nobody checks. The gap between those two matters the moment you act on the answer – especially if you wire it into anything automated, where you will end up acting on the worst photos, the ones where the number means the least.

Five questions to ask any AI plant health check

You do not need to see inside the model to judge it. You can judge it from its behavior, with five questions.

1. Does it ever say “I'm not sure”? A tool that always returns a confident single answer is not being confident, it is guessing with good posture. Over-calling, naming a condition it cannot actually distinguish, is the most common failure of consumer plant apps, because a definite answer feels more useful than an honest hedge. Watch for whether it ever hedges at all.

2. Does the confidence track reality? Test it. Give it an obviously healthy plant and an obviously sick one. A calibrated tool is near-certain on both. Then give it a genuinely ambiguous photo – a faint early spot, a lookalike. If the number stays pinned near 100%, the confidence is decoration. If it drops, the tool is being honest.

3. When it is unsure, does it tell you what it is unsure between? The honest answer to a hard photo is often not the most specific one. “A magnesium-group deficiency” or “a sap-sucking pest” is more useful than a confident coin-flip between two exact names, because you can act on the family while you rule out the specifics. A tool that only ever commits to one exact label is hiding its uncertainty from you.

4. Does it work on the photo you actually take? Try the tool on a whole-plant shot, not a tight macro of the damage. Diagnosis is comparative – which leaves are affected, old growth or new, the pattern between the veins or across them, how the rest of the plant looks. Crop all that away and even a good model is guessing. If a tool demands a perfect single-leaf studio shot to work, it will not survive your grow room or your garden.

5. Is it honest about what it covers? Every model has a scope – which plants, which conditions, what it was never built to see. A tool that claims to diagnose anything, on any plant, at high confidence, is telling you it does not know its own limits. Ask what it does not do. The answer tells you whether to trust the answers it does give.

How to photograph a plant so the check holds up

The fastest way to get a wrong answer is a bad photo, and the instinct that produces bad photos is a strong one: when a leaf looks wrong, you zoom in on the damage. That throws away the context the diagnosis depends on. A few habits that measurably change the answer:

• Shoot the whole plant, then the affected area. The damage is already in the wide shot, and the wide shot carries the comparison the model needs.
• Do not overexpose. Brighten a photo past the point where the bright areas wash out, and a sick plant can read as healthy – the worst kind of wrong answer, a confident all-clear on a plant that needs help.
• Get reasonably close and steady, but do not obsess over sharpness. Mild blur is survivable; a good tool loses confidence gracefully when the image is poor, rather than inventing a crisp wrong answer.

We measured these effects and wrote them up in a companion post on how to photograph plants for diagnosis – the framing findings hold regardless of what you grow.

Where PlantLab fits

PlantLab is an AI plant health diagnosis lab. It was built around the five questions above, because the reason it exists is that a general-purpose chatbot once looked at a plant, said the wrong thing with total confidence, and cost real time.

Concretely, on the plant-neutral side of what those questions ask for: every diagnosis carries a calibrated reliability signal – a second number that estimates how much to trust this specific answer on this specific image, not just how hard the model leaned. When two conditions genuinely cannot be separated in a photo, PlantLab returns the family rather than a confident coin-flip. It reads the whole plant, not a lone cropped leaf. And it is honest about scope: the live model today covers 30 conditions in cannabis, with tomato and further crops on a clearly-labelled public roadmap, where a label only ever means what it says and no crop is called “live” before a real model does the work. You can read why it is built one crop at a time in A Plant Lab, One Crop at a Time, and what is coming next in I'm Building Tomato Diagnosis Next.

For people building on top of it rather than tapping a phone screen, the same answer comes back as structured JSON: the diagnosis, the family, the reliability signal, the growth stage, per-plant bounding boxes. That is why it drops into Home Assistant and other automation without anyone having to train a model themselves.

The takeaway

An AI plant health check is worth exactly as much as its honesty. A tool that always sounds sure is easy to build and easy to be burned by. A tool that tells you when it is not sure, tells you what it is unsure between, and works on the messy photo you actually took – that is the one you can act on. Judge every plant app by those five questions, take the wide shot, and trust the number that is willing to be low.

You can run a free plant health check at plantlab.ai – answer in about 18 milliseconds, calibrated reliability included, no account required to try it.

I starten av september dro vi til Helsinki for en langhelg med fokus på god mat og drikke, og lave skuldre.

Jeg visste veldig lite om Helsinki før avreise, men hadde med en svoger som hadde gjort en del research på forhånd og påtatt seg booking av et par spisesteder i forkant. Det er alltid min regel nummer #1 på reise: Ferdig booket middag, og gjerne lunsj, på forhånd. Det er lite som ødelegger ferieidyllen som å skulle finne en spiseplass når blodsukkeret er i bunn.

Helsinki var en overraskende behagelig by. Gatene opplevdes trygge, de var rene og ryddige, og jeg tror vi kunne telle på én hånd de spisestedene vi ikke synes det fristet å sette seg ned på. Mange andre storbyer synes jeg ofte har i overkant mange kebabhjørner og mer eller mindre tomme, lugubre spiseplasser.

Oppsummert etter langhelgen kan jeg fortelle dette:

Finner stresser ikke. De utøver ikke vold eller bråker unødvendig.

De er skandinaver, så de er ikke overdrevet imøtekommende eller har noen overdreven påtatt interesse i “how you are doing?”, men de er høflige og hyggelige. Midt i blinken for oss andre skandinaver med andre ord.

Jeg tror knapt vi hørte en sirene, og så hele fire politi mens vi var der. I Oslo eller København går det vel knapt fem minutter mellom en sirene skriker seg gjennom gatene. Jeg har ikke sjekket volds- eller ulykkesstatistikken, om det skiller nevneverdig mellom byene, eller om vi bare var heldige og traff på årets roligste helg.

Uansett. Helsinki anbefales varmt. 10 av 10. Under følger en liste over ting vi så og plasser vi besøkte, som jeg kan anbefale du også stikker innom om du skal så i lende.

Retro Enoteca

Hjemmelaget pasta. Både med og uten gluten! Helt vanvittig pasta-opplevelse.

🌐 https://retroenoteca.fi/en/

Grön

Kulinarisk høydepunkt. To Michelin-stjerner, men jeg tror plassen hadde vært helt utrolig også uten.

🌐 https://www.restaurantgron.com/

Löyly

Morgenbadstu fra 9-11 i helgene var en skikkelig god start på dagen. Nydelig beliggenhet og fire forskjellige badstuer å veksle på. Prøv røyk-saunaen! Adgang til å hoppe rett i det baltiske hav for nedkjøling. Kan også anbefale pause med noe godt i glasset rundt peisen midt i lokalet.

🌐 https://www.loylyhelsinki.fi/en

Ateneum Art Gallery

Godt valg for litt kulturelt påfyll. Mye fint, både av mer klassisk og nyere kunst.

🌐 https://ateneum.fi/en/

Konsolinet, Kamppi

Er du gamer, spesielt på konsoll? Da må du ta turen innom her. Eneste gangen jeg satt mine føtter innenfor shopping-kategorien på denne turen. Haugevis av både nye og gamle spill, konsoller og utstyr.

🌐 https://en.konsolinet.fi/

Trillby & Chadwick

Unik drink-bar. Helt spesielt sted, med en spennende historie. Drakk drink av et bittelite badekar. Middels på smak. Maks på opplevelse. Masse gode drinker, både med og uten alkohol.

🌐 https://www.sonofapunch.com/restaurants/trillby-chadwick

Grapes Wine Bar

Nydelig liten vinbar med herlig atmosfære. De har ingen vinliste, de åpner noen flasker etter humør hver dag som gjør det til en plass som fint kan besøkes om igjen og om igjen.

🌐 https://www.grapewinebar.fi/?lang=en

Masse mer vi burde ha gjort og sett, men det tar også litt tid å ta det med ro. Så har vi noe til neste gang, for vi skal absolutt tilbake.

A YouTube description generator is usually the last tool I open on an upload day, not the first, and the order says something honest about how attention gets spent. By the time a video is cut, the thumbnail is picked, and the title has been rewritten once or twice, there isn't much focus left over for the box of text sitting underneath the video. The description gets whatever attention survives everything that came before it.

This piece uses AllyHub's AI YouTube description generator as its running example, mainly because it fits that gap. It hands over a workable first draft at the point where your own attention for writing has already run thin. The channel's voice still has to come from you.

Why a YouTube description generator ends up last on the list

Editing gets the freshest attention because it happens first, while the footage still feels interesting and the choices still feel creative. The thumbnail gets the next wave, since a weak thumbnail visibly costs views and that's an easy thing to care about in the moment. The description sits after both of those, competing for whatever focus is left once the video already feels finished in every way that shows up on screen. It's tempting to treat it as clerical work, a formality between finishing and publishing, rather than a piece of writing that also has a job to do.

The gap between finishing a video and writing about it

A video feels done the moment the edit is locked and the thumbnail is chosen. Writing a description is a different kind of task entirely. It asks you to step back and explain, in plain sentences, what the video is and why someone unfamiliar with it should watch. That's a writing problem, not an editing problem, and it draws on a different kind of attention than the one you've been running on for the last stretch of the session. Most creators solve it the same way: paste in a line or two, drop in a link, move on. Nobody plans to skip this step. It just tends to be the one finished with whatever is left over.

What happens when attention runs out

A rushed description has a recognizable shape once you notice it. It often opens by restating the video title, which tells a viewer nothing they didn't already know. It buries the one sentence that explains the video somewhere in the middle, if that sentence exists at all. It skips timestamps, because timestamps take a few more minutes to write out by hand. None of this happens because a creator stopped caring about the video. It happens because the writing energy that would go into a clear description was already spent earlier in the session, on the parts of the process that feel more visibly creative.

What a description still needs, even a rushed one

A workable description doesn't need to be long to do its job. It needs one plain sentence, early, that says what the video covers, in words a stranger would use, not the shorthand a creator uses to describe it to themself. It benefits from a shape a viewer can scan quickly: a short opening line, then whatever links, timestamps, or credits belong underneath. And it deserves roughly the same care a title gets, because a description written with no thought behind it tends to read as exactly what it is, something finished after the attention for the day was already gone.

Where a tool helps, and where it still doesn't

A generator is genuinely useful for one narrow part of this problem: producing a first draft when you have none, structured well enough that you end up editing instead of starting from an empty box. That's a real use, worth relying on for exactly that. What a generator can't do is confirm that the draft matches the finished video, that the tone sounds like the channel, or that a claim sitting in the description is still true after the edit changed. That part still needs a short read-through by the person who made the video, every time, because a generic draft published unread isn't really an improvement over a rushed one. It just moves the rushing from writing to reviewing.

A few questions worth asking before you hit publish

Is the description finished, or just present?

Those are two different states, and it's worth telling them apart before publishing. Present means there's text sitting in the box, filling the space where a description is supposed to go. Finished means someone read it back against the video once, at whatever level of attention that check deserves. Most rushed descriptions are present, not finished, and the gap between the two usually doesn't show up until later, when a line written early turns out not to match what the video became by the time it was actually cut.

What would make this step stop feeling like an afterthought?

Probably not more willpower saved for the end of a long editing session. That supply runs out for a reason, and it runs out in roughly the same place most days. More realistically, it means treating the description as its own short task with its own moment, even a few minutes taken earlier in the process, or a draft generated ahead of time so the read-through is the only thing left once attention is thin. The description doesn't need to go first. It just needs to stop defaulting to last, every single time.

Earlier today I replaced my cat paw industrial with a death moth. I need to change balls, but I'm happy overall. I'd like to find some 3mm rhinestones, but I might get stuck with the 5mm since I sized up from 16g to 14g. I prefer the look of a 16g, but I read a few articles that concern me about migration.

I've had mine for several years now, but when the sadist of a piercer decided to shove a 14g into a two week old irritated piercing without my permission, and shattered the cartilage in my outer ear, let's just say I have concerns. I do have the correct ears for such a piercing, but the guy seriously fucked up. He has no business piercing people. I cannot accurately express how much that hurt. He lied and told me it was because it wasn't healed, then shoved it through the other hole. No taper either. That hurt even worse.

Anyway, that sent me down a rabbit hole of looking at my jewelry. I have a lot of jewelry. I've given away quite a lot, but there were many years where my adornments really meant something to me. I also design and make jewelry, so...

It wouldn't be that big of a deal, except I know that by this time next year, I will likely have much less space. Many of my pieces are made for a specific outfit that I may no longer wear. Others I may melt down and reset. Others I just like but am unlikely to wear.

I need to get real with myself and just give most of it away to someone who might treasure it. I might like certain jewelry, but that doesn't mean current me is going to choose to wear it. I realize I'm pretty predictable and basic in my adornment these days, and I like it that way.

I tend to wear silver toned jewelry. I prefer platinum, rhodium, and titanium, but I also wear sterling and stainless, as well as a few white gold pieces. I keep some yellow gold of each style just in case the outfit demands it.

My industrial is elegant and dainty because I don't enjoy changing it. I keep a range of Celtic styled cuffs. I have three lobe piercings on each ear that I prefer specific threaders, huggers, or studs for. I have flatback studs in every possible color and size. I also have several conch cuffs, but my ear tends to get annoyed with them.

I've gotten pretty particular with my necklace wearing, though I have many. That may change in the future, but it, too, stays pretty simple these days. A dainty chain and specific pendant makes me pretty happy. I can wear chokers or collars, but I find them really annoying unless I weigh about twenty pounds less than I currently do.

Bracelets are easy. I wear specific locked on cuffs almost always. My favorite have the twelve astrology constellations etched into them. They're so pretty. I have all sets in silver and gold. Same goes for anklets. If I'm wearing one it's usually a cuff, bells, or special. I keep considering welding a dainty chain on, but it's not very practical, and stockings would no longer look correct.

Rings...I once wore many rings, but it just feels over-gilded to me now. I have specific rings I wear now, but rarely more than one or two per hand. I don't wear toe rings. Anything else tends to be the same item.

Everything I wear tends to be the same items. So I'm thinking I should really just give it all away. However, much of it is memories, special occasions, and gifts. I don't know. It's a very strange feeling. Much of it, I think I should probably take it apart and add it to my supply hoard.

I froze up and got rid of nothing. There's always next time.

(Not proofread.)

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

I did not sleep great last night, but I managed to get up, get dressed, and try to do something with the day.

I went back to pottery to practice throwing a few more things. I still don’t love any of them, but I think I got really good practice and ideas for some new things. I also reached out to my crush! It was a very low stakes text, but I think it’s a start. I don’t want to fixate on this for very long because I want to enjoy the process of whatever happens. What is meant for me will not pass me by – I truly, firmly believe that.

Maybe tomorrow I will try to throw a few more things. I can’t make too many new things at once because I will run out of room on my shelf.

I can’t believe I haven’t heard anything yet. Not that I have a say in the timeline. Without an update, I am forced to stay on unemployed.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office with no set return date. I will get back to you when the time is right.

Today was weird but also kind of good. I am still reeling in from the feeling of loss. First my dog, and now my job. It feels like a fever dream kind of summer.

I helped my mom for a few hours, then pottery for a couple hours to glaze a piece. I am so excited to see some of my new glazed items, and also so ready to make some new ones soon! I went back home for a little bit, then headed back out again for a workout class. A hard workout class. I immediately started feeling sore. I wonder if it was genuinely hard or if I made it hard to try to get some of my internalized energy out. I then went back to pottery and tried throwing a couple things. They turned out alright but not great. I am going to trim them and see how they look bone dry before bisque firing and then decide whether I want to keep them or not.

No update yet… man, this is getting really frustrating.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office with no set return date. I will get back to you when the time is right.

Chapter 1: The Quiet Place Where Gifts Get Buried

You can sit at the edge of your bed at the end of a long day and know, deep down, that there is more in you than what you are using. Maybe you have had that feeling after work, after the house goes quiet, or after another week slips by without touching the thing you keep telling yourself you will get to someday. You may not even know exactly what to call it. You just know there is something God placed in you that has not fully come alive yet. That is why the faith lesson about using what God gave you matters so much, and why the deeper Christian encouragement about purpose and faithfulness belongs beside it. This is not about becoming famous, impressive, or better than somebody else. It is about refusing to let fear make your decisions for you.

Jesus spoke directly into this kind of struggle in Matthew 25 when He told the parable of the talents. A master entrusted different amounts to three servants. One received five talents, another two, and another one. The first two put what they had been given to work. The third servant buried his. What strikes me is that Jesus did not make the story about who received the most. He made it about what each person did with what had been placed in his hands. That changes the question. Instead of asking, “Why did they get more than me?” you begin asking, “What am I doing with what I have?”

That question can get uncomfortable because sometimes the answer is not that we lack ability. Sometimes we are simply afraid. You might know exactly what that feels like. You have an idea written in a notebook, but you never take the first step. You know you should make the phone call, submit the application, start the project, learn the skill, encourage the person, or speak up about something that matters, but you keep finding one more reason to wait. On the surface, it looks like caution. Underneath, it may be fear of failing, being embarrassed, wasting time, or finding out that you are not as good as you hoped.

The servant who buried his talent was not empty-handed. He had been trusted with something. That is important. His problem was not that he had nothing to offer. His problem was that fear convinced him the safest choice was to hide what he had. That same fear still works on people now. It tells you that if your gift is not large enough, polished enough, profitable enough, or noticed enough, maybe it is better not to use it at all. Jesus tells a very different story. Faithfulness is not measured by whether your gift looks impressive next to someone else’s. Faithfulness is measured by whether you are willing to use what God entrusted to you.

Think about an ordinary Monday morning. You are driving to work, already tired, already thinking about the bills, the meetings, the family responsibilities, and everything waiting on you. In that kind of life, purpose can sound like a luxury. But maybe your gift is not waiting for some future stage. Maybe it is already sitting in the passenger seat with you. Maybe it is the way you lead people fairly, solve problems calmly, listen when somebody is struggling, or keep your word when it would be easier not to. We sometimes imagine that using our gifts for God must look dramatic. Jesus keeps bringing us back to faithfulness in what has actually been placed in front of us.

That means you do not have to wait for a perfect opportunity before your life begins to matter. You can begin with what is already in your hands. You can take the ability you have, the influence you have, the time you have, and the opportunity in front of you and offer it back to God through the way you use it. That is where this becomes personal. Your talent is God’s gift to you, but what you do with it becomes your response to Him.

And maybe the first step is not a huge one. Maybe it is simply refusing to bury it one more day.

Chapter 2: When Comparison Starts Stealing Your Courage

You can feel perfectly content with your life until you look at somebody else’s. One minute, you are grateful for what you have. The next minute, you see somebody succeeding in the area where you have been struggling, and suddenly your own progress feels small. Maybe it happens while you are scrolling on your phone before bed. Someone announces a promotion, launches a business, publishes a book, grows a ministry, buys a house, or seems to be stepping into the exact kind of life you have been praying for. Nothing about your circumstances changed in those thirty seconds, but the way you see them did.

That is one of the quiet dangers of comparison. It can make you disrespect something God gave you simply because it looks different from what He gave somebody else. The servant with two talents could have spent the entire story staring at the servant with five. He could have decided that his portion was too small to matter. He could have buried his gift out of disappointment instead of fear. But he did not. He worked with what he had, and Jesus showed that his faithfulness mattered just as much.

That is a lesson worth carrying into real life because comparison rarely announces itself as a spiritual problem. It sounds practical. You tell yourself that you are just being realistic. You notice that somebody else has more experience, more money, more connections, or more natural ability, and you begin shrinking your own expectations. You stop practicing. You stop trying. You stop offering what you can do because someone else can do it better. Before long, you are not simply admiring another person’s gift. You are using their gift as an excuse to neglect your own.

Imagine a parent sitting at the kitchen table after everyone has gone to bed. The house is quiet except for the refrigerator humming in the background. There is a stack of bills nearby, a half-finished cup of coffee, and a notebook with an idea that has been sitting there for months. Maybe the idea is to return to school, start a small business, write something meaningful, or learn a skill that could change the family’s future. The parent looks at people online who seem ten years ahead and thinks, “What is the point? I am already too far behind.”

That thought feels reasonable when you are tired. It is also exactly the kind of thought that can keep a gift buried. Jesus never said that faithfulness would always feel impressive. Sometimes faithfulness looks like studying after the kids are asleep. Sometimes it looks like practicing when nobody is watching. Sometimes it looks like serving one person well instead of wishing you had influence over thousands. Sometimes it looks like doing the next right thing when your progress feels painfully slow.

God does not need you to duplicate somebody else’s path. He is not asking you to become a copy of the person you admire. He is asking whether you will trust Him enough to develop what He placed in you.

That requires humility in two directions. You need enough humility to admit that you still have room to grow, but you also need enough humility to stop insulting what God gave you. Calling your gift worthless because it is smaller than someone else’s is not humility. It is another form of comparison. Real humility says, “This is what I have. It may not be everything, but I will use it well.”

That shift changes the way you walk into ordinary situations. You stop asking whether people are impressed and start asking whether you are being faithful. You stop measuring your beginning against somebody else’s middle. You stop needing your work to look important before you decide it matters.

And that is where courage begins to return. Not because you suddenly feel more talented, but because you stop treating another person’s life as the measuring stick for your own. Your responsibility is not to outshine somebody else. Your responsibility is to stop hiding what God trusted you with and start using it faithfully where you are.

Chapter 3: Give God Something He Can Use

There are moments when the next step is much smaller than the life you imagine. You may be standing in the kitchen before sunrise, waiting for the coffee to finish, thinking about something you know you have been avoiding. Maybe it is a conversation you need to have. Maybe it is a skill you keep saying you will develop. Maybe it is work you feel called to begin, even though nobody is asking you to do it and nobody may notice when you start. The temptation is to wait for a clearer sign, more confidence, or a better season. But sometimes the faithful thing is simply to begin with what is already in your hands.

That is what the first two servants did in Jesus’ parable. They did not know everything that would happen with what they had been given. They did not receive a promise that every effort would be easy or that every decision would succeed. They simply acted. They took responsibility for what had been entrusted to them. That is the part of the lesson that can change the way you live. Faith is not only believing that God gave you something. Faith is being willing to use it.

There is a difference between waiting on God and hiding behind waiting. Sometimes God truly asks us to be still. But sometimes we call it waiting when we are really afraid to move. We pray for clarity while ignoring the step that is already clear. We ask God to show us the whole road when He may only be asking us to take the next ten feet.

Think about someone caring for an aging parent while trying to keep a job, manage a household, and hold themselves together. That person may not feel gifted. They may feel exhausted. But patience, steadiness, compassion, and the ability to keep showing up are gifts too. Not every talent produces applause. Some gifts are used in hospital rooms, quiet houses, difficult phone calls, and ordinary acts of love that almost nobody else sees. God sees them.

That matters because we often connect purpose with visibility. We assume that if something is truly important, it should become bigger, louder, or more public. Jesus did not teach that. He praised faithfulness. Some of the most meaningful things you ever do may never become impressive to the world. They may happen in a conversation where you encourage someone not to give up. They may happen when you choose honesty at work even though dishonesty would benefit you. They may happen when you teach your child something that stays with them for the rest of their life. They may happen when you keep serving after the excitement is gone.

Your gift does not become valuable when people notice it. It was valuable when God entrusted it to you. What matters now is whether you will take it seriously enough to develop it and use it. That may mean practicing, learning, becoming more disciplined, or finally taking responsibility for an area where you know you can grow. You do not have to worship your talent, and you do not have to hide behind it. You can simply treat it like something entrusted to you rather than something you own only for yourself.

You also have to hold it loosely enough to let God decide where it is useful. Sometimes the gift you thought would take you in one direction ends up serving people in another. Sometimes a disappointment redirects you. Sometimes a closed door forces you to develop an ability you would never have noticed otherwise. Faithfulness means you keep offering what you have to God without demanding that He make your life look the way you planned.

And when fear comes back, because it probably will, remember the lesson Jesus gave us. The servant who buried his talent was ruled by fear. The faithful servants moved anyway. That does not mean you will never fail. It means failure does not get to become your master. You can learn, adjust, start again, and keep moving. God can work with honesty, humility, and a willing heart. What is difficult to use is something we refuse to uncover.

Maybe you have buried part of yourself for a long time. Maybe disappointment convinced you that your chance had passed. Maybe criticism made you quiet. Maybe life became so heavy that survival took all the energy you had, and the gifts you once cared about moved into the background. If that is where you are, you do not need to condemn yourself. You can simply begin again. Open the notebook you stopped writing in. Make the call you have been avoiding. Take the class. Encourage the person in front of you. Practice the skill you keep wishing were stronger. Serve where you are instead of waiting for a bigger stage.

You do not have to know that every step will become something big. Faithfulness itself matters. Your talent is God’s gift to you, and what you do with it becomes your gift back to Him. That is the quiet beauty of Jesus’ lesson. At the end of the story, the praise was not for being famous, powerful, or better than someone else. It was for being faithful.

That is something you can choose today. Use what God gave you. Grow it. Share it. Let it serve someone. Let it become part of the good you leave behind. Do not bury it.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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Theres something thats been irritating me, and before you start the “everything irritates you from what im seeing,” yes, everything irritates me and that has nothing to do with you, you’re here to read, and thats it. anyways, its not important. it isnt that serious either. nobody is going to lose sleep over it, not even me. nothing is going to collapse, not even me. and the world will continue as it is, perfectly fine, even me. but i still hate it. i dont even know why it bothers me this much in the first place. its one of those, you know. incredibly minor things that should pass through your mind, then disappear like every other useless piece of information we collect throughout the day, like the way you watched a couple argue while scrolling. yes, thats all you do humans, scroll that, scroll this, scrolling here, scrolling there. shut the fuck up. thats not what im irritated about but now thats something im irritated about again. irritating irritate thats all what im saying. anyhow. whatever was bothering me still sits. in the back of my head, i noticed it and i got annoyed again then i had the remarkable thought of, why the fuck am i still thinking about this? great question. yet i still have no answer to that. its not even worth. speaking about or explaining. if i told you exactly what it is, you’d read it and think, “thats it?” yeah, thats it. thats the entire problem. nothing else. still, as how ridiculous it is, ill continue. because theres something irritating about people doing the obvious things badly and then acting as though nobody is supposed to notice. im not asking for perfection. im barely asking for competence. theres a considerable gap between those two things, and somehow people. god, people. keep finding the space underneath both. and yes, i understand how dramatic that sounds, but ill still sit here and talk about something that doesnt matter while sounding like i just uncovered whatever, uncovered something. im just annoyed. sometimes something is just annoying. there doesnt have to be some big reason behind it, and i dont need to sit here wondering what it says about me or where it came from. i think its just stupid, and it annoys me. thats all about it. and yet, ive now spent enough time talking about it that ive made it important by accident. which is, unfortunate. because it really doesnt matter. i could have stopped after the first sentence. and i could have just said “this thing annoys me” and moved on with my life like a normal person but no. instead, i wrote about it. then i decided to explain why it doesnt matter then i explained why im annoyed despite it not mattering then i explained why explaining it is stupid. at this point. ive built a small monument to something i claim is dumb. and me sitting here. giving it attention is irritating itself. so great. congrats to that thing. you managed to waste my time without even being interesting. id say ill never think about it again but that would be another lie. and ive already given this enough dignity for one morning.

Anyway, it doesnt matter, i just wanted to make that very clear. for the ninth time. you read all of this for something that doesnt matter either, so i guess you fit right in.

Sincerely, this was completely, unnecessary. Not irritated, clearly.