What I’m Doing Now

Updated August 17, 2025

I’ve been my Mom’s caregiver since 2017. Mom’s 100+. She broke her hip in 2020 and taking care of her has of necessity been my primary activity since then.

Projects

• My primary project since January of 2025 has been converting my sites from the bloat and Gutenberg annoyances of WordPress to static sites or to newer, simpler platforms than the current iterations of WordPress.
• I am slowly moving Something Pacific to Posthaven.com.
• I am in medis res regarding moving my last two WordPress.org sites digitalmedievalist.com and lisaspangenberg.com to Ghost. The sites are better than twenty yeas old, so there’s a lot of clean-up to do first.
• I’m watching Adam’s Neato CMS as a possible alternative for a site I’m currently hand-coding. I like Adam’s omg.lol project.
• I am auditing a Harvard Extension online course on The Jewish Bible: Its History As A Physical Artifact. It’s more of a class in codicology than religion.
• Increasingly I am unable to read printed books. I am making an exception for J. P. 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.

Technology

• I am learning to use Alfred on my Mac via the MacSparky Alfred Field Guide online class, and lots of reading and experimenting.

Current Media

• So far nothing I’ve read in 2025 has really stood out.
• I’m still working my way through various “productivity“ books as research for my own writing. I mostly hate them.
• I discovered Celtic traditional music largely through NPR in my very rural teens. For decades NPR aired a radio show called Thistle & Shamrock, curated and hosted by Fiona Ritchie. Thistle & Shamrock ended life as a current program in 2024, but the Soma FM Internet radio network hosts Fiona Ritchie’s Thistle Radio. I listen using the Vox apps for iOS and MacOS.,/li>

Current Obsessive Passions

• Stationery, still, particularly notebooks, fountain pens, and ink, and both woodcase and mechanical pencils.
• Bird watching: I have been on the losing side of a war against squirrels and chipmunks ever since The Management had foxes removed. All Winter we had native wild Turkeys visiting the patio; those too were removed.But there are Northern cardinals and Gray cat birds with nests, Ruby-throated hummingbirds, Black-capped chickadees, Gold finches, House finches, and Tufted titmice. I can hear but not see a host of Warblers, several Kinglets, Nuthatches, and and at least one pair of Barred owls.

Links

These are some of the thought-provoking things I’ve recently read on the Web.

The Stoic Legacy to the Renaissance This site contains the primary sources behind Professor Ben R. Schneider, Jr.’s argument in his book The Influence of Stoicism on William Shakespeare: His Background of Reading and How It Shaped His Portrayal of Characters (2015) The Edwin Mellen Press. The annotations in the form of subject indexes for the primary sources really helps tracking down allusions to Stoic writers in 16th and 17th century British literature.

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