What I’m Doing Now

Updated January 14, 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.
• 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. I’m also 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 emphasizing using 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 a FujiFilm Instax Mini Link 3 photo printer.
• After I lost several files on iCloud I’ve subscribed to a paid DropBox account. I am fairly certain that the data loss was a syncing failure, and inclined to blame the local WiFi (which I do not control) at least as much as Apple.
• The new Kobo Remote for turning pages is fabulous. I can place the Kobo on a stand close enough to easily read it, and turn pages with the remote.

Current Media

• My Apple Music playlists, local and streaming, have been understandably corrupted by me playing music for Mom on my devices. I tried using an Apple Music family account but it was not even marginally functional. To compensate, I won’t be using “smart” lists except those derived from metadata I provide. This means extensive curation on my part.
• As I curate, I am finding additional “missing ” tracks I ripped from media or licensed from Apple.
• I will continue to rely on physical media for the music and video I most value.

Reading

• I am 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 check the current research.

• 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.

• Hat tip to John Gruber for posting a link to Nikita Prokopov’ critique of Tahoe’s menu icons: It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons
• See also the earlier post by Jim Nielsen: Icons in Menus Everywhere — Send Help.

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 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.

You can see previous Now pages, AKA Then pages.

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