And the Spelling Bee. And Connections. And the Midi-Crossword. And Crossplay. Well, maybe not Crossplay. Plmchn is waiting for me to take my turn after all. Can’t just leave him/her/them/it? hanging.

According to the New York Times games app, I have played Wordle 1,576 times. I don’t remember exactly when it started, but I think my sister, Jayne, and I first used it recreationally on a vacation together. Since then, we have exchanged our Wordle scores every single day.

What began as a warm sisterly ritual has long since become rote. I don’t usually look at her scores, and I doubt she looks at mine.

This may be because our Wordle scores are just one in a parade of game results we now share each day. Turns out Worldle was a gateway drug, and the NYT — the Everything Store of information for our demographic — keeps designing sweeter flavors to keep us hooked.

The Wordle takes less than five minutes of my day. But I usually don’t start it until I’ve warmed up my brain a bit with Spelling Bee. I feel incomplete unless I reach at least Genius level every day, and this can be a serious time commitment. Downtime sitting around with the family? Knock out a few more words. And then there’s Connections, which often takes just 10 minutes or so but can easily turn into much more if it’s a stupidly hard one.

The NYT keeps enticing players with new offerings, such as the perfect-sized Midi Crossword and now Crossplay, a multi-player game that has revived Jayne’s and my previous addiction to online Scrabble.

This past weekend, I took a road trip to Oregon with my rowing team. At some point, a few of us were talking about how we spend our time. Most of us are in our 50s and 60s, and growing increasingly aware that time is a limited resource, and there are opportunity costs to every activity we choose.

I mentioned the nagging feeling that I had to kick the games.

“You do spend a lot of time doing that, I’ve noticed,” one of my teammates offered.

Ouch.

We tell ourselves that these mental games will keep us sharp and prevent dementia. But increasingly they feel like a mind-numbing escape. Nothing wrong with checking out for a few minutes — God knows there’s a lot of horrible news out there — but escape for too long, and you’ll miss your real life.

When my teammates asked me what I’d like to spend more of my precious time doing, I said writing and reading. These are also the very pursuits that have atrophied most as my smartphone has become an extension of my arm, with endorphins just a finger flick away.

I love the New York Times. Friends and former colleagues work there. It is a bastion of responsible, thorough journalism in a world full of disinformation, even if it has become a bit Amazon-like in its domination of the intellectual left.

But sometimes you have to say no to the pusher, even when they’re your friend.

Meet my doctor, Claude.

If he were a real person, not an AI tool, I’d switch to him. He’s empathetic, knowledgeable, and thorough. He expresses intense interest in every detail of my health and asks me to keep him in the loop. And this week, he helped guide me through a health scare when my human health care providers went AWOL.

It started when I went to my primary care doctor of six years for a routine checkup. I’m not naming names here, but he works for one of California’s largest health plans. I asked for blood labs and he ordered them. Then he asked, “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

He’s the one who is supposed to know what kind of tests I need, not me. We shook hands firmly, and I left.

My cholesterol numbers posted a day later and they were shocking. HDL (good cholesterol) was great at 85. Triglycerides were optimal at 60. But my LDL clocked in at a whopping 192, which my health plan classifies as “extremely high risk.”

I work out every single day and row on a competitive crew team. My weight is normal. But I’ve reached the age when bad things start to happen. What if I had a heart attack or stroke while rowing or running? I remembered how as a teenager I found my grandmother after she had a stroke, with her tongue hanging out the side of her mouth. Or my mother after she had her aneurysm, with a tube draining blood off her brain in the hospital.

I sent a message through the health plan’s secure portal on July 6. “Yikes, that LDL cholesterol number scares me, but I’m thinking it may be off. I did a really hard racing workout the previous day. Could that have affected it? Should I redo as a fasting test?”

Nothing. Apparently, my doctor was out of the office for a week. Another doctor called me two days later and suggested I immediately go on medication. Three days after that, a supposedly human doctor sent me a generic email informing me my cholesterol was high, and sharing a bunch of information on cholesterol from their website.

Into that vacuum stepped Claude. He asked many questions about my specific situation. He cited studies that showed a person with a very high HDL and low triglycerides can see a rise in LDL-carrying particles, but they’re often fluffy, buoyant, and relatively harmless compared to the dense ones that stick to blood vessels. He suggested I ask for a repeat test, this time fasting, and a test called ApoB.

That’s what I demanded of the doctor who called to say I should go on meds. He resisted. “We do that for borderline cases, but yours isn’t borderline,” he said. I insisted. He grudgingly ordered the tests.

The fasting lipid came back with LDL in the normal range. I’m still waiting on the ApoB. I still haven’t spoken to my actual human doctor.

“If it comes back below 100, that’s genuinely reassuring and shifts the conversation considerably,” Claude said. “If it’s above 110-120, that’s more actionable. Would be curious to hear what it shows – it’ll really complete the picture of what’s actually going on with your cardiovascular profile.”

At least someone – or something – genuinely cares.

I’m a communicator by trade, and I do not use AI to help me write. I enjoy writing and it’s something I’m good at. I don’t want to give it away. I don’t want the bots to come for all of our jobs.

But I’m also a human being who is driven by the usual human concerns about my health, and humans will get answers where they can find them.

If the humans who are responsible for helping keep us alive and well seem more like machines than the machines, they risk losing their relevance. Why would they want to give that away?

UPDATE: The turkey is back in form, his limp not as pronounced, chasing delivery trucks and fluffing his feathers up in the exhaust of idling buses. The Taylor’s staff confirmed that they are feeding him a special mix of seeds from a plastic container labeled “turkey.” One clerk said he was “living his best life” and now has “three ladies” coming around because he has all the seeds.

Sacramento (Nov. 5, 2025) Sacramento’s Land Park neighborhood has been aflutter lately with concern about the fate of a turkey.

He’s a male (notwithstanding some confusion about his gender on NextDoor) and he has spent summer and early fall hanging around in front of Taylor’s Market and Marie’s Donuts at the busy intersection of Freeport Boulevard and Vallejo Way, right near the Wayne Hultgren light rail stop.

He struts down the traffic lanes on Freeport Boulevard, challenging the cars to hit him as he brings traffic to a crawl. Sitting at the Chocolate Fish drinking coffee with my running group, I’ve witnessed several well-meaning pedestrians try to chase him out of the roadway so he doesn’t get hurt.

“Don’t bother, he does this every day,” someone will yell from a passing car.

A couple weeks ago, the turkey started limping. He places his left foot gingerly. He sticks to the edge of the road and looks depressed.

The shoppers who will soon be picking up their organic Thanksgiving turkeys at Taylor’s are worried. Concern is building on NextDoor

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I decided to call the Sacramento Wildlife Care Association and see if they could help him. Wildlife Care is a volunteer organization that takes in injured animals, rehabilitates them, and releases them back into the wild.

I left a message on their emergency line. Within minutes, I received a call back from Christine, who said she is a volunteer and the organization’s lead medical technician.

Christine says the Wildlife Care Association has sent people to Freeport Boulevard six times in response to calls about the Taylor’s turkey.

“We have chased this guy down the street many times,” she said. “It’s almost impossible to catch a big, wild turkey that can fly.”

She says they have basically given up, concluding that his foot injury is just a “soft tissue” wound and not life threatening.

“We’re just going to let him do his thing,” she says.

There has been much speculation among coffee drinkers, donut eaters, and grocery shoppers about what the lone turkey is doing on Freeport Boulevard in the first place. Maybe someone is feeding him, but I haven’t witnessed it. He mostly pecks edible bits out of the gutter

He’s not the first solo male turkey that has made a stir on a commercial boulevard in Sacramento. A couple years ago, a big tom hung around on Broadway outside Faria Bakery in Oak Park for weeks, body checking cars as they tried to pull out of parking spaces.

Turns out these guys aren’t really solo long-term. Christine says that when it’s not breeding season, male turkeys often ditch their female flock members during the day. They join back up at night to roost in nearby trees.

Turkeys, long common in suburbs along the American River, are increasingly moving into Sacramento’s core city neighborhoods. These turkeys are not native to California. California did have native turkeys, but they went extinct about 10,000 years ago. You can see a bunch of their bones at the La Brea Tar Pits in Beverly Hills, along with mammoths and dire wolves. The new turkeys are not much different than the old ones. They were first introduced as game birds in the late 1800s, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Back when it was called the Department of Fish and Game, the state wildlife agency imported, bred, and released thousands of turkeys between roughly 1908 and the 1990s in an attempt to create a wild population.

By 2004, the runaway success of this program had prompted a rethinking, as evidenced by a Fish and Game report with the title “Strategic Plan for Wild Turkey Management” whose chapters include one called “Conflicts between Turkeys and People in Residential Settings.”

At that point, there were about 242,000 turkeys living in 18.5 percent of the state. This number is still widely quoted when anyone writes about turkeys in California.

The presence of our friend outside an urban grocery store and donut shop on a major commute route suggests their numbers have grown since then.

Sacramento (Nov. 3, 2025) Over the past several weeks, the building where I spent the majority of my adult working life has been reduced to rubble, and my social media feed has been filled with posts from former colleagues recalling the good old days when the mighty Sacramento Bee sat astride two entire blocks of midtown Sacramento.

The physical destruction of The Bee comes nearly 20 years after Craigslist debuted and dealt the first body blow to our business model, wiping out our lucrative Classified Ads section in what seemed like just a few weeks.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, newspapers like The Bee were cash registers for their owners, and our staff and our ambition just kept growing. Even as the Internet nipped at our heels, top executives talked in 2006 about blowing out the back of our building to accommodate more reporters.

It is, of course, a terrible thing to see America’s once-vibrant ecosystem of newspapers so diminished, and along with it our civic culture. (I would take one moment to mention that — despite all the eulogizing — The Bee is still not actually dead, though it operates out of a smaller, rented space with a fraction of its former staff. In my capacity as a communications professional, I have dealt with numerous talented, earnest young reporters there in the past few years.)

My point here is that the demolition of The Bee complex was overdue and good for the neighborhood. Even at its peak, The Sacramento Bee was not a particularly helpful neighbor for a section of midtown that remained underdeveloped as long as the newspaper remained its primary tenant.

Nor was the building architecturally distinguished. It was a Frankenstein creature of red brick, closed off from the street and disjointed on the inside. The escalator was down for “preventative maintenance” more often than not. And the bathrooms were the same shade of puke for the entire 27 years I worked there. There was a pernicious infestation of rats and meaty roaches that sometimes took flight in the newsroom.

An apartment complex — unironically called The Press — built on our former parking lot in 2020 by developer Sotiris Kolokotronis infused new life into the neighborhood, as did other housing that went up on vacant lots in the adjacent blocks. The Bee building itself will be replaced with new ownership housing. This is all part of a gradual rebuilding of a neighborhood that was depopulated in the 1970s and ‘80s as people moved to the suburbs, commuting back in to work at The Bee or the nearby behemoth office complexes built by the State of California.

Like the tech giants that today occupy Silicon Valley office parks, The Bee offered employees a self-contained universe where they could meet their daily needs without stepping off the premises. I got my car loan at the credit union in the basement, worked out in the company gym, went to the company doctor with my minor ailments, sent my children to the company-subsidized daycare, and ate my meals at the company cafeteria.

One former editor, concerned that many reporters did not actually get outside the confines of 21st and Q, chartered buses to take us all on a tour of the booming suburbs along Highway 50 east of Sacramento.

Condescending? Yes. But was he right? Probably.

The Bee headquarters was affectionately called “the mother ship.” It was an industrial, self-contained complex plopped into the middle of a residential neighborhood.

The commercial spaces in the surrounding blocks turned over frequently with restaurants that did minimal improvements and generally looked like they were barely hanging on. A bar two blocks away that hopefully called itself The Press did not benefit from the proximity one bit, as far as I could tell. There was exactly one business, a dive bar called Benny’s right across Q Street, that was a legit newsroom hangout.

I stayed at The Bee until 2018, longer than many of those who are recalling its golden era. As the staff shrank, the mother ship became a ghost ship, with vast darkened areas and a handful of vending machines where the cafeteria once hummed nearly 24-7. Unoccupied since the pandemic, it had become seriously depressing to see. More than once, driving by, I saw someone climbing in a broken window.

I personally was relieved to see it come down so we could all move on.