What I’m Doing Now

Updated April 19 2026

I am making slow but steady progress taking care of Mom’s estate, emptying her apartment, and getting myself moved. I don’t have much time or energy for anything else.

In Progress

• I am taking care of lots of personal tasks I have, of necessity, had to postpone for several years.
• I am catching up with vaccines.
• I have ordered glasses. I haven’t been able to read print, or use my laptop in a normal way since my glasses broke in 2019. I am so hopeful that I will be able to read print, and see birds.
• I had to order new shoes for walking around outside. After nine years on the floor of the closet the soles fell off my Merrells.

Technology

• I am creating a small private site for residents of the senior community where Mom lived, and from which I will be moving soon.
• Following the model of Brad Dowdy, I have created a page listing my current analog defaults for writing.
• I bought a new Lexar external SSD terabyte drive to back up my Mom’s data
• After firmly rejecting Obsidian in 2022, I am checking out NotePlan it’s included in my SetApp subscription. I used Apple’s Notes to track my Mom’s prescriptions and appointments starting in 2016. Now seems a good time to see if NotePlan will work for me, as I work my way through the MacSparky Robot Assistant Field Guide.

Reading

• I created a 2026 reading plan to re-read Tolkien’s The Hobbit followed by the LOTR trilogy. It’s been really hard to not read past the assigned chapters, and on bad days, I just keep reading. It helps.
• I was supposed to finish in August. I finished reading Return of the King last Sunday.
• I have re-read Tom Shippey’s Author of the Century, having finished re-reading his The Road to Middle Earth.
• Re-Reading LOTR was so much fun, and so beneficial to my well-being, I am planning to re-read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Middle English, starting in December.

Links

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

• Via The Guardian: Number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions increasing, study says
• David Sparks: Small Experiments Over Drastic Changes

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

You can see previous Now pages, AKA Then pages.

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