What I’m Doing Now
Updated August 8, 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
- Still blogging about technology at IT:, and Celtic and Medieval Studies at DigitalMedievalist.com. Sadly, the updating of late is mostly repairing link rot, and adjusting images.
- 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 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.