
These are weekly reflections (or weeknotes) on what I did, what I want to remember, and why and how I did it for this week. I stole this idea from lots of folks, but seeing the examples from Phil Gyford and Tracy Durnell finally put me over the edge.
Eventually I will settle into a format.
Worth noting
- Took the week off work from the day job, more or less.
- I was pretty busy last month, and one thing that suffered was my walking. I feel so much better when I do it. But this week, I walked about 2 and a half miles five days. My calves notice the weeks I did not do this.
- Hung the crown molding in the kitchen. Other than some painting, I’m almost done with the kitchen renovation that won’t end. Also, I hate trim carpentry – the angles mess me up, and I always end up needing to buy more to replace the stuff I messed up.
- Went to the neighborhood tree burning. I wrote about it on my new blog here.
- Made a pot of black-eyed peas for New Years day – followed this recipe I shared a few years back, sans the collard greens.
- On New Years Eve, we had a half-assed charcuterie for supper while watching the ball drop in Times Square.
I’m a business, man.
- Rewrote the landing page for LISB, my weekly newsletter.
- Moved the new blog to hughlh.com, which is an old url I have had for ages. The new blog is powered by micro.blog.
- Began the process of changing registrars for hughhollowell.org, which is phase one of changing the email address for LISB back to my own, rather than a buttondown email.
- Began the process of changing business bank accounts, in an effort to make bookkeeping so much easier this year.
- Wrote and sent the first essay of 2025 to people on the membership team.
- Migrated hughhollowell.org email to Outlook, to create a sort of “firewall” between work emails.
- Started publishing weeknotes. š
Reading
Reread P.D. James Original Sin. I love Adam Dalgleish.
Started My Mississippi by Willie Morris, a Christmas gift from Renee.
The back story
I’ve been blogging on one site or another since December of 2003. Here’s a screen capture of my first, non-illustrious post.

But over time, blogging became less fun, more polished. It ceased being snapshots into my life and more like an advice column or essay series. My voice shifted to a more professional register.
Meanwhile, my pithy, funny, and short writing ended up on Social Media. I like Social Media – it’s given me a lot – but it’s not good for me or my mental health. So I spent the cheese days (what my friend Abby calls the time around the holidays when we are all wandering around confused as to what day it is, full of cheese) moving things around.
End result:
A new blog – It’s the minimum viable blog, stripped down to the bare essentials. Heck, my first blog (see above) didn’t even have post titles. Just posts, and occasional pictures. I have an “about this blog” page that goes into much more detail about how I intend to use the site. I intend to post here at least daily. It’s easier to start over than to fix the old site.
I spent a lot of time figuring out how to share those posts on the most common social media sites, so folks who are still there can still read things if they want. I’m still not happy about the end result – but I’m working on it. (This is a strategy that the Indie web folks call POSSE – Post Own Site first, Syndicate Elsewhere. I write on territory I own, then I share it where my readers hang out.)
Began the revamping of the newsletter – This is the 10th year of my weekly newsletter, and I’ve done so many things wrong with it if I intended it to be a business (which is what it has become) but I’m still publishing, so that’s something. February 20 will mark the 10th anniversary of my first email to a couple dozen folks. I intend to have a “relaunch” of sorts on the 24th of February to mark the occasion.
This week, I spent a lot of time rewriting the landing page. I use Buttondown as my Email Service Provider, which I like a lot, but its built-in landing page is aesthetically – how do you say it? – awful. I need to do a whole site overhaul, but WordPress is overpowered for that, and anything else is way too complicated to learn for this one project.