What I’m Doing Now

Updated September 21, 2026

In Progress

• I have emptied my Mom’s apartment, and am slowly wrapping up her estate.
• I have moved and have unpacked all the boxes.
• I have a home office now. I am shopping for a table type desk for the eventual iMac purchase.
• I have a window bird feeder that fills from the inside, that I hope to have installed before winter.

Technology

• I have updated my analog defaults for writing tools.
• I am sitting on my hands to avoid buying a new iMac now. I write; I don’t need the latest and greatest. I hope to pick up a current iMac as a refurb when the new iMac is released.
• I dropped my beautiful Project Red SE third generation iPhone on the floor of the garage, shattering the top of the screen. I will use it as long as I can, and hope to pick up an iPhone 17 as a refurb. It makes me very sad to see my red SE now.
• I have neighbors, including one who drums. I am so very happy to have Bose Ultra Quiet Comfort Bluetooth headphones.

Reading

• I have been firmly in comfort reading mode this year, re-reading favorite novels.
• Currently reading Phillip Freeman’s edition and translation of Boethius Consolation of Philosophy. Freeman’s How to Cope: An Ancient Guide to Enduring Hardship is part of Princeton University Press’s Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series. These are new editions, often excerpts, attractively bound in small hardcovers with facing-page translations.
• Also re-reading Chris Bailey’s Intentional: How to Finish What You Start, this time reading my own copy instead of the library’s. I think values journaling might be part of my formal journaling effort.
• I have a ginormous spreadsheet of books to read, almost none of which are fiction. Realizing how much reading The Hobbit and LOTR, and Tom Shippey’s two Tolkien books according to a plan helped my general funk and misery, I plan to do more scheduled reading, concentrating on my TBR list.
• That said, I plan to slowly re-read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Middle English as well as some secondary texts over the holidays. I’ll be using the Malcolm Andrew And Ronald Waldron Poems Of The Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight fifth edition as my central text, but Tolkien & Gordon or William Vantuono’s editions are all good.
• So far the best new-to-me books I have read this year are Amy Tan The Backyard Bird Chronicles and Clare Walker Leslie Keeping a Nature Journal. Both books are beautifully illustrated, and it’s especially worth buying the print versions.

My Now page was inspired by David Sparks’ Now page.

You can see previous Now pages, AKA Then pages.

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