by Kathy Brasby | Jul 20, 2026 | Family, Humor, Stories
Approving the frog farm should have been enough, but finding metal salad forks in my freezer clinched it for this year. Once again, cousins camp would be a learning opportunity. For me.
Ten grandkids, ages sixteen to three, gathered for a few days of fun while I facilitated and fed them.
My eleven acres provided a rich environment for exploring and digging.
I had gathered a gallon jar full of buttons to use for crafts. (Well, my sister found the jar at an estate sale, and the prior owner must have spent a lifetime saving buttons.)
“That’s a ka-jillion buttons,” I said, turning the jar from side to side.
Math Boy, who is twelve, smiled. “Ka-jillion is a complete number. You can’t have a ka-jillion and one.”
Learned something.
We painted rocks on day three, to be followed by the button craft and then building miniature gardens.
The ka-jillion button craft paled next to finding a water tank and adding water, rocks, and sponges, then lovingly pouring in caught frogs. Voila! A frog farm.
We never dipped into the ka-jillion buttons.
While throwing together a meal, I discovered metal forks nestled atop the ice cubes.
The fifteen-year-old explained that when someone lays icy forks on the counter beside regular forks, placing your forearm on the forks feels like you’ve laid it on a grill. No actual burning involved. How cool is that?
The fourteen-year-old provided the forearm and then howled. “It feels like that!”
I’m sure that trick will be a hit at my next birthday party.
The best story of the week came when some of the kids accompanied me and my dog for a stroll beside a local canal. Scout likes to dive in for a swim, but the kids were skeptical that he would jump in the water.
“He does it as often as he can,” I assured them.
“Does he drown very often?” one asked.
So at cousins camp this year, I learned about icy forks. How to assemble a frog farm.
And that my dog has nine lives.
by Kathy Brasby | Jul 2, 2026 | Humor, Stories
I enjoyed the dream of living on a hobby farm. Until the Day of the Cat.
On the Day of the Cat, a glorious spring morning, I was milking a goat in a sealed room (meaning we kept our barn cats out). Our four-year-old daughter climbed onto the big feed box at the wall and looked behind it.
“Mom, there’s a cat back there.”
I froze.
How had a cat gotten in?
I was afraid to ask, but did. “Is it dead or alive?”
She studied the gap between the box and the wall. “Dead. Can I pick it up?”
“NO!” Yuck.
My husband was typically the designated handler of all things gross. Dead things. Spiders the size of a child's fist. Mysterious smells. He is a man of courage and strong stomach. But he was forty miles away at his job. I was home alone.
Well, just me and a curious preschooler who was already angling for new ways to interact with the deceased.
“Leave it alone,” I added because I could see the wheels turning behind her eyes. She huffed and crossed her arms, but stayed put, feet dangling, watching me.
I drew a long breath, avoiding any mental images of what a dead cat smashed against the wall might look like.
Believing strongly in the principle that it’s better to face the horror than let it hang over your head all day, I finished my morning barn routine s-l-o-w-l-y and squared my shoulders.
It was time.
I gathered my supplies like someone preparing for battle.
✅ Hand sanitizer
✅ Thick trash bags
✅ Face mask
Back into the milking room I marched with my daughter right on my heels. She wouldn’t miss this for the world.
Paint dries faster than I moved into the room. I leaned over the feed box and looked down the gap.
There, tattered and soiled, lay…
… a purple and white stuffed cat toy.
I stared at it for a long moment.
“You said it was dead,” I said to my daughter.
“Well, it’s not alive.”
So ended the Day of the Cat. Minus, as it turned out, any actual cat.
by Kathy Brasby | Jun 16, 2026 | Stories
In my May newsletter, I shared information about Meta (Facebook/Instagram) hauling in your partner-shared information. Starting June 9, 2026 and rolling out to users through much of July, Meta pulled the rug out from under our feet.
Here’s what is still accurate from the May 5 article: Meta pulls information like a black hole pulls in light.
The settings I suggested in May to manage or disconnect future activity are gone like a browser tab you forgot to bookmark. Meta has updated its policy.
Now Meta offers one setting: “Activity from other businesses” and they will use it to personalize your feed and AI responses. Of course, they promise no new data is being collected. They’ll just use what they already have.
Here’s what you can do, if you want:
🔒 Open your Facebook account (be sure you're logged in) and click on your photo in the upper right-hand corner. (I'm using a browser window. You may have to adjust if you're trying this in the phone app.)
🔒 Choose Settings & Privacy from the dropdown menu. Then Settings.
🔒 Go to Accounts Center.
🔒 Select Your Information and Permissions > Activity from other businesses. (Note: The previous "Your Activity Off Meta Technologies" option is being phased out.)
🔒 Here you can review and clear previous activity if desired, and toggle Activity from other businesses off to limit future use of this data for ads, your Feed, and AI responses.
Because Meta is still rolling out this new policy, you may not see the new settings yet. US customers should all be updated by July.
Business can still report your online web visits to Meta. This setting just tells Meta not to act on the information and, of course, Meta won’t because it values our privacy. Indeed. Our shopping information is very valuable to Meta.
As a friend said recently, “This is the price of free.”
by Kathy Brasby | Jun 16, 2026 | Family, Humor, Stories
We’d traveled an hour and a half for a tasty lunch with our cousin. Going straight home was not an option.
My sister and I had made this trip, and you’re probably thinking we folded in some shopping afterward.
Not exactly.
“Could we go to this estate sale?” she asked, pointing to a tiny map on her phone.
It was only thirty minutes away. Not on our way home, but, hey, the sun was shining and we’d just finished this great meal and conversation with our cousin. Why not?
That question gets me into trouble a lot.
But away we went.
“What are you looking for?”
“An anvil.”
I never expected rare pottery or collector figurines. But an anvil?
As we drove (I put her behind the wheel of my car), I wondered what an anvil would do to the trunk. Would it punch through the floor of the trunk and bounce behind us on the highway like an escaped rabbit?
“Can we even lift an anvil?” I asked.
Minor details. She shrugged. “Somebody will help us.”
The anvil sold a half hour before we got there. She was sad. I was suddenly grateful for the extended conversation about future travel plans with our cousin that delayed us for a half hour.
So my sister went on the hunt for other treasures. She’s an artist. She sees things differently.
And we stumbled onto a room, books cascading from wall to wall. All free.
I didn’t need to go further. I started plucking books and stacking them. I am a writer and a reader. This was close to a perfect afternoon.
My sister started searching through the piles of books, too. She’s an artist who doesn’t do much pleasure reading, so I guessed she must have taken up a new hobby.
We left with as many books as we could pile from fingertips to bottom of chin.
“Wow, you must have found some interesting books,” I said.
“Yep,” she said. “I need some nice-looking books for the decor in my Airbnb.”
by Kathy Brasby | May 31, 2026 | Stories
In the last newsletter, I told you about Facebook’s incursion into our privacy.
Well, Google has just launched a new incursion into your hard drive. Many use Chrome as their primary internet browser. Now Chrome (Google’s browser) is installing a 4 GB file onto hard drives, hogging up a chunk of space.
Google defends this because the file, weights.bin, supports Gemini Nano, Google’s AI which powers features like page summaries, smart paste, scam detection, tab organization, and the special “Help me write” option.
Did you give permission for this? Probably you did if you did not read the initial permission document. I mean, who does? I’ve wondered if I’m signing away my firstborn when I agree, but do I read it? Nope.
So this is largely on us. But this new file is causing a lot of uproar on the internet because Google installed it without notice. And if you delete it, Google will quietly re-install.
Do You Want It?
It isn’t malware or spyware.
You’ll need to decide if your disk space matters more than Google’s AI features.
If you’re OK with Chrome’s AI features and you have plenty of hard drive space, you can move on to my next article.
But if Google’s process bugs you, I have some suggestions.
First Try This
First, identify your hard drive free space. You’ll want to know that to be sure that weights.bin has been deleted.
Then try this (on both a Mac and Windows):
- Open Google Chrome.
- Click the three dots in the top right corner.
- Click Settings.
- On the left side, click System.
- Find On-device AI and turn the switch off. (You may have to search for this inside Chrome. This setting may not yet appear on all Mac versions of Chrome.)
This often makes Chrome delete the big file by itself. Close Chrome completely, reopen it, and check if your storage space increased.
Notice I said often because this doesn’t always work. If your storage space has not changed, then you’ll need to go deeper. If you’re ready to dive in, here are more instructions:
On a Windows Computer
- Close Chrome completely (check Task Manager if needed: right-click the taskbar, click Task Manager, end any Chrome tasks).
- Press the Windows key + R on your keyboard.
- Cut/paste or type the line below into the window. Then press Return:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data
4. Look for a folder named OptGuideOnDeviceModel
5. Right-click that folder and choose Delete.
On a Mac Computer
- Quit Chrome.
- Open Finder.
- In the top menu, click Go, then click Go to Folder.
- Cut/paste or type the line below into the Go to Folder window. Then press Return:
~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/
5. Look for a folder named OptGuideOnDeviceModel
6. Drag that folder to the Trash, then empty the Trash.
Or Switch Browsers
Or you can uninstall Chrome and switch to another browser.
I use Firefox. Other safe browsers are Brave, Vivaldi, LibreWolf and Tor. Some (like Tor, for example) are harder to install but lock down your internet browsing.
Let me know if you have another browser that is focused on privacy. There might be a future article about that.
by Kathy Brasby | May 2, 2026 | Stories
Facebook pulls information like a black hole pulls in light.
Last month, I was considering trading vehicles and got a quote on my car from Carvana. When I lifted the lid on the settings I’m going to give you, Carvana was already reaping my Facebook information. I never mentioned Carvana on Facebook — or vice versa, for that matter.
It was like opening a trunk and getting pelted with black bats.
Facebook tracks our activity on other websites and apps — even when we’re not on Facebook (like my Carvana story illustrates). If that bothers you, you can stop it in your account settings by clearing previous off-Meta activity and disconnecting future tracking.
Here’s how to do it in six steps:
- Open your Facebook account (be sure you’re logged in) and click on your photo in the upper right-hand corner. (I’m using a browser window. You may have to adjust if you’re trying this in a phone app.)
- Choose Settings & Privacy from the dropdown menu. Then Settings.
- Go to Accounts Center.
- Select Your Information and Permissions > Your Activity Off Meta Technologies.
- Choose Clear Previous Activity. (If you want shivers up your back, view the previous activity first — you’ll see what companies are hanging onto your account like leeches.)
- Choose Manage Future Activity > Disconnect Future Activity.
I’m not on other social media much, so I don’t know the process for other platforms. If you do, email me — I’ll consider it for a future newsletter.
