Notes

Notes for week ending 25-1-25

It was a short week, in the sense that Monday was a holiday.

On the other hand, since the inauguration on Monday, this week has been a hell of a year.

Of note:

Monday I turned off the news and reformatted my office somewhat. I intend to start making videos for YouTube, and needed the space to be different for that. More details on that coming soon!

I took a week off from the kitchen. I had a busy weekend with work and church obligations, so Monday I just puttered in my office and listened to music., then sat on the couch and read.

Preached at Safe Harbor Church Sunday night. Its always a pleasure to get asked to preach in another pulpit.

Subscribed to The Guardian news magazine. Trying to shift my news consumption.

It hit 14 degrees in my backyard on Tuesday night. Virtually all of Mississippi is USDA Zone 8. This means that our average coldest temperature over a 30 year period is between 10 and 20 degrees F. In other words, it is NORMAL for us to expect at least one day a year to experience temperatures between 10 and 20 degrees F. While I may not like it, this is not outside the range of what should be expected. I don’t like it though.

New Orleans got a huge snowstorm, but we were in a small snow-free hole.

Media consumption

Finished  The Queen City Detective Agency. It takes place in Meridian, about 100 miles from where I live, and I’m a sucker for fiction that takes place in Mississippi. It was… OK. It had a Black woman protagonist, and the author was a white man. I feel like she was almost a caricature.

I picked up The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler. I love Chandler, but somehow do not remember this one.

Because of the funk, I watched the last season of Vera on Britbox. I will miss this show.

Cooked

I had to work Thursday night, so I only cooked three nights this week.

Chili with Fritos. I think this is my platonic ideal of chili, meaning it is how my mom always made chili.

We had another French toast night. Renee is on a baking kick, which means we have a lot of bread around the house.

Chicken parmesan with spaghetti.

A business, man

I don’t think Micro.blog is going to work for what I need it for. I’m keeping it for now, but set up a blog on hughhollowell.com using the ghost blog platform. I’ve used ghost before, but not for just plain blogging. I’ll experiment with it for a while.

As I mentioned above, I have an idea for a video project, so I spent a lot of time trying to get things YouTube-ready.

It was an ugly week, and I’m ready to be shot of it.

Notes for week ending 25-1-18

Picture is of an adorable kitten - white and gray - sitting on a pile of towels with his head cocked slightly.

The kitten is Baby, who we are trying to find a home for. You can read about him here.

My week was largely dominated by a trip for the Day Job. (I’ll start writing about the Day Job as I get one last piece of the puzzle in place – perhaps in February). I was gone Tuesday through Thursday, which killed any hope of a routine or streak. I always tell myself I will have so much time to be productive when I’m on the road, but instead, I go into full on chaos-Muppet-mode and nothing happens and I always feel bad that I let such a time squander.

I have no idea how Maya Angelou wrote in those hotel rooms she rented for the purpose. My brain can’t handle the novelty of it.

Anyway. As I said in Monday’s newsletter, I need to give myself a break.

Worth remembering

Painted the kitchen walls on Sunday afternoon, and still need another coat in spots. This kitchen renovation is death by 1,000 cuts.

Wrote and sent two recommendation letters for a person I know trying to get into grad school. I love it when I’m asked to do that, especially because it generally means I played a part in their story.

Saturday (yesterday) I spent much of the day in Meridian for church related work, but still managed to swap out the light in our bathroom for the same lights I hung last week in the kitchen.

Because I am preaching at the MLK Day service at Safe Harbor Church Sunday night, in addition to my regular gig at Open Door Mennonite on Sunday morning, I wrote two sermons.

Reading

I spent a lot of time on the road and in hotels this week, so I got a lot of reading done.

Finished The Writing Life by Annie Dillard. So much I could say about this, but she’s just good for my soul. I’d read bits and bobs of this in various classes over the years, but this was my first time reading the whole thing, which is weird, because it’s less than 100 pages.

Finished My Mississippi by Willie Morris. It was his last book, and is primarily a memory or legacy project. It wasn’t finished – not really – but it reads like a love letter to the state. It has a section with a lot of stats that are now 25 years old, so that part doesn’t hold up, but I still loved it – probably mostly because I love the state in a similar way to the way Willie did.

Finished A Taste for Death by PD James. A double murder, in a church. I like much about this book, including that it opens on the murder (many of her books don’t) and the character development. Probably my last reread of James for a while.

Began The Queen City Detective Agency. It takes place in Meridian, about 100 miles from where I live, and I’m a sucker for fiction that takes place in Mississippi. It’s a bit weird right now (I just started), but I have hopes.

Cooked:

Because I was out of town for work from Tuesday on, I only cooked Monday night, and then only fixed chili dogs and tater tots, because I had zero spoons of energy. But Renee cooked chocolate chip cookies Monday night, and they were amazeballs.

I ate a lot of food on the road this week, some of it good, and some of it sad, but little of it memorable.

Writing & shipping

Wrote and published Monday’s newsletter. Relapse, habits, and being kind to yourself.

Wrote and published the 19th essay for Members – this one on the naming of things.

Two sermons as noted above.

Be kind to yourself this week.

Notes for week ending 25-1-11

It was cold this week (even the cats hid under the blankets), and I didn’t feel all that good, and I had a couple of big meetings at the day job that sucked all the oxygen out of everything. So, not much got done this week.

Worth noting

Installed flush lights in both the kitchen and the hallway at home. We used these, and it worked out perfectly. It was easy to do – the worst part being the climbing around in the attic and insulation and whatnot. BUT, it’s better to be in the attic when it’s 35 outside than when it’s 95 this august.

As I note Zuckerberg’s huge reversal on content curation that will make it much harder for LGBT folk to be safe on any of their sites, it seems the writing is on the wall that one day, I will not be able to ethically remain on their platforms. With that in mind, I went ahead and downloaded my entire Facebook history – photos, messages, posts, the whole lot. They actually make it really simple.

It was damned cold (for us) all week here, which made me pretty miserable. Yes, I’m trying to live a bit more seasonally, but it went from 76 one day to 25 the next, and I like to have cried right there. It should be back in the fifties during the day soon, which is how its supposed to be in January in Mississippi.

Pretty crippling migraine on Wednesday. Cold, grey, skies and crushing barometric pressures.

I’m a business, man!

Wrote (but have not yet sent) a monthly update to the members – the first draft of one, anyway.

More moving recurring payments from the old bank account to the new one. Every time I think I’m done, another one shows up I had forgotten about.

Feb 24 will be the 10-year anniversary of my newsletter. I’m working on a relaunch of sorts, and so have begun a super ambitious project with a bit more than a month to do it. Seems on-brand.

Wrote and sent my 18th weekly essay for my members. I love the rhythm of a weekly essay – almost like a columnist.

Read:

Started rereading A Taste For Death, by PD James. Another Dalgleish book. Cerebral mysteries are comfort food I come back to again and again, and when I’m particularly stressed (like now) or depressed, I reread favorites.

12 Week Year, by Brian P. Moran and Brian Lennington. It’s a business book I read after seeing it referenced by Dan Catt on his Quarternotes video. The concept intrigued me, especially as I am seeking to live more seasonally, and quarters are seasons, yes? But the book was miserably written, with everything out of sequence (for my brain, anyway) and it’s obviously written for salespeople – literally every example, bar one or two, is from the financial sales arena. I guess it might be helpful for them, but it wasn’t written for me. I finished it, but shouldn’t have. I kept hoping it would all come together in the next chapter, but alas, it did not.

Did not finish 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love. The first chapter was interesting, but it rapidly became obvious that this was for fiction writers, and a particular sort of fiction writer, and I am no sort of fiction writer. I got it for .99 on Kindle, so I’m not mad, but it wasn’t for me.

Cooked:

Pretty much regardless of how I feel, I cook. It’s one of those things that give my life shape and meaning. The routine of our life is such that I cook M-Th for supper, we eat out Friday and Sunday, and Saturday is catch as catch can.

Patty melts and tater tots.

French toast with bacon on the side for supper. Basically used this recipe, with Wonder Texas Toast leftover from the Patty melts. (YUM!)

Phoned it in, with frozen ravioli, a quick tomato sauce, garlic bread (using the leftover Texas Toast) and a bagged salad. It’s important to have plans for when you have a day with a massive headache and zero creativity.

Hamburger steak, rice with brown gravy, and green beans. Basically channeling my inner fifties housewife.

Sometimes, the best thing you can say about a week is that you survived it. This, my friends, was such a week.

Notes for week ending 25-1-4

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. 😉

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.