Notes from Maine - 2025/05/11

My sister called me out last week. I mentioned to her that I ran my last “Notes from Maine” through AI in order to check the spelling and grammar. 

She replied, “AI vetted this? Hope your well.”

I thought she had made a mistake, saying “your” instead of “you’re.” But she was calling out my mistake at the end of the essay. In the last few years of these Notes I’ve said, “Hope you’re well,” one hundred sixty-four times and not one single “your” instead of “you’re.” So now, the first time that I ran my essay through AI for a final check, I made that mistake. In truth, I add the sign-off when I put the essay into the mailer, because I never put the closing on my blog (ikehamill.com). So I guess we can’t formally blame AI—the mistake was mine alone. People say that AI text is easy to spot because it uses so many EM dashes (like the long dash I used in the last sentence), but I use a lot of EM dashes too, and I’m almost certain that I’m a real person. I picked up the habit from Stephen King, who uses them for mid-sentence interruptions or in place of a colon or even a semi-colon at times. 

I keep getting distracted by the sight of Lilly and Maybelle through the window. They’re out in the pasture this morning. Birds follow the horses around as they graze. Lilly has to splay her front legs wide in order to reach the grass. Every few seconds she stops grazing so she can chase a bird. Maybelle is a wonderful mom. She always keeps an eye on Lilly but lets her get farther away as Lilly starts to exercise a little independence. Maybelle is never bothered when Lilly decides to gallop, buck, and kick her way by. When it rains, Maybelle stays close to the barn so Lilly can stand under the shelter when she wants a break from the weather. 

It’s Mother’s Day here in the US. I gave Maybelle a carrot since I knew that Lilly hasn’t had the chance to go shopping for her mom. When I was a kid, we used to go to Robertson’s, which was a five-and-dime about three-quarters of a mile from where we lived. I guess my father took us there the first time. Us kids would get little blown-glass animals and give them to Mom. She still has a collection. At home we had wrapping paper, bows, and such. I remember picking out a little white box that had a mat of cotton in it. Originally the box must have contained jewelry, but I used it to wrap the glass animal. It seemed that we had an endless supply of those boxes because the next year I repeated the process. I’m just now coming to the conclusion that we must have been re-using the same boxes year after year. I guess we didn’t do that forever, because at some point someone cut a hole in the bottom of one of those jewelry boxes so they could stick their finger through the bottom. With some red marker on the cotton, you could hold out your hand and open the box, surprising someone with what appeared to be a severed finger inside.

This year, I sent mom a little glass gecko. For the card, I said, “I got this at Robertson’s.”

“No you didn’t,” she said on the phone. “Robertson’s is gone. But Bill’s is still there.”

I guess Robertson’s became Bill’s ACE Hardware at some point in the past fifty years.

I was just looking through the window again. Today is beautiful—the first good day we’ve had in a week. So much rain this week. It was really incredible. Friday night I kept waking up, thinking I was drowning. The rain was pouring off the roof and splashing into a puddle right below my window. It was like living under a waterfall. Lilly is asleep in the pasture. She wore herself out chasing birds around and nibbling grass. When she sleeps, she flops down on her side and doesn’t wake up for anything. She knows that her mom is keeping an eye on her—keeping her safe. Lilly is about seven weeks old. At her age, her sister’s spots were starting to darken. Lilly still has milk-chocolate spots. I wonder if she’s going to end up lighter. It’s hard to say. Lilly’s fur is still puffy and new. She hasn’t shed out to a summer coat yet. When she sheds the new coat might be darker. 

I just ran this letter through Google “Gemini 2.0 Flash” to see what it said. It caught the your/you’re issue that I quoted above. It gave me a note about reviewing the comma placement on a sentence that doesn’t have a comma (AI has some room to grow before it’s really useful, I suppose). It also told me that a sentence was missing a “has” that it definitely had. 

I gave Google feedback on the feedback and it said, “Thank you for pointing out my mistakes! I am still under development and learning to be more accurate. I appreciate your attention to detail!”

I just posted all of that (including the notes about Google) into ChatGPT and it only had issues with my use of straight versus curly quotation marks. Actually, both AIs hated my use of “Us kids,” but that’s a style choice. 

Happy Mother’s Day if you celebrate today. 

Hope you’re well,

Ike