What I’m Doing Now
Updated January 11, 2026
I’ve been my Mom’s caregiver since 2017. Mom’s 100+. She broke her hip in 2021 and taking care of her has of necessity been my primary activity since.
In Progress
- Site conversions from WordPress.
- Creating a small private site for residents of the senior community where I live.
- Still helping Mom getting rid of “stuff,” so Mom can enjoy giving things to people now.
Projects
2026 Changes.
- I will be more deliberate about logging birds in 2026. I will track “first”sightings for the year, and keep a rough daily count.
- I am working out the details of managing journaling this year. I am still using an app as well as paper, mostly because of the ease of including photos in the app. My analog journaling is more deliberate this year. I’m using a John Gamber-made hardcover journal (instead of one of the many Composition notebooks I’ve used since 2017), and have some specific prompts.
- I created a reading plan for 2026 to re-read Tolkien’s The Hobbit followed by the LOTR trilogy. This will be the first time in decades that I’ve read all four books in close succession.
- I am continuing to use the stationery I have, and re-homing what I don ’t enjoy or use.
- I posted a bit about Twelfth Night, Or What You Will
Technology
- I expect to finish the MacSparky Alfred Field Guide online class this week.
- I plan to start the MacSparky Apple Productivity Field Guide 2025 next week.
- I am having fun with an FujiFilm Instax Mini Link 3 photo printer.
- For the first time since iCloud was born, I have lost files saved to iCloud. Several Numbers spreadsheets I use disappeared completely from iCloud. They were not in either of the places iCloud stashes deleted files (they weren't deleted). They were simply gone. I don’t use iCloud as a backup, I use it to share files, and to sync between devices. I am positive this is a syncing failure, and inclined to blame the local WiFi (which I do not control) rather than Apple. I’ve subscribed to a paid DropBox account.
Current Media
- My Apple Music playlists, local and streaming, have been understandably corrupted by me playing music on my devices that Mom likes. I tried using an Apple Music family account but it was not even marginally functional. Going forward, I’m not using any “smart” lists except those derived from metadata I provide. I will be engaging in extensive curation.
- As I curate, I am finding additional “missing ” tracks I ripped from media or licensed from Apple.
- I continue to rely on physical media for the music and video I most value.
Reading
- I have been re-reading the previous three J. P. Mallory books before reading Mallory’s recently released The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting Their Story. Mallory is the only archaeologist I know of with a solid background in Celtic and other early I. E. languages.
I’m still reading the first, of the three In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and MythIt's very slow going because I keep following up a reference he made in this 1991 book, to see where the current research is.
- Michael D.C. Drout’s The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Creation (W. W.Norton: New York, December 2025. ISBN: 1324093889) was the last book I read in 2025, and the best. It’s one of the three best Tolkien discussions I’ve read, right up there with Tom Shippey’s books The Road to Middle-earth (2005 3rd edition) and Author of the Century.
Links
These are some of the thought-provoking things I’ve recently read on the Web.
The menu icons are really confusing if you’re visually disabled. I have no idea what most of them are meant to represent. I mostly rely on muscle-memory for keyboard shortcuts, which has made Tahoe easier to cope with, but I emphatically do not enjoy Tahoe.
My Now page was inspired by David Sparks’ Now page, itself inspired by Derek Sivers.
Previous Now pages, AKA then.
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