Some days the words just show up. You are practically vibrating as you sit down at the keyboard, coffee cup in hand. As your hands fly across the keyboard, your coffee grows cold, forgotten, as the words crawl across the page. Often when this happens, you have been carrying these words around with you in your head, playing with them as you put them first this way, and then another. Like pieces in a tile puzzle, you decide how they should go, how you make the picture printed on the tiles make sense.
By the time the words are on the page, they are old friends that have played in dozens of ways, having begun as thoughts you wrestled with, played with, gotten to know. Writing in those cases is merely transcribing. When I have days like that, writing is sheer joy.
It is a truism that we tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in a week, and underestimate what we can account in a year.
I think we also discount what we have already done. I can, at any given time, feel like I have accomplished absolutely nothing over the last year, despite that obviously not being true.
So I have recently begun the practice of what are called in tech circles, weeknotes. They take various forms, depending on who is doing them, but at a minimum, they are notes about your week. (Duh, as we said when we were kids).
What it looks like for me is an Evernote window I keep open all week, where I jot things I want to remember that happened that week – business, personal – it all goes into the same document. All week it looks like a long list of bullets.
Then Saturday, I clean it up, maybe drag in some photos, and save it, and open another one for next week.
If i just did this, it would be valuable. Like a low-key, low commitment diary.
But because I believe in the value of working in public, I pull out the items fit for public consumption and that I think my readers would be interested in, and share them [on my website](https://hughhollowell.org/notes/). They go out every Sunday morning.
I find them to be a pretty useful record of changes I made (When did I change domain providers? Where is hughlh.com hosted?) or vacations I took (what hotel did we stay in when we went to DC?) or even as a way of learning how long it’s been since I went home and saw my mother (the answer is always, according to her, “too long”).
**Because people often have logistics questions**: In Evernote, I have a notebook stack called Logbooks, then an individual Notebook called 2025 and each week is a note, titled by the date of the last day of the week. For example, this week’s note is 25-1-18. I use this title format so it sorts automatically in numerical order in the notebook.
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.
My wife loves the videos on YouTube by [Emmymade](https://www.youtube.com/@emmymade). They are a bit hard to describe, but a recurring routine is that Emmy will do taste-reacts, where she eats a food – usually something out of the ordinary, like [Hard Boiled Egg Chocolate Pudding](https://youtu.be/3H2iFS2jUyw?si=L_-7_ZNS-X7e_84Q). She likes lots of these things, and says so. But she goes to long lengths to not say she hates something. A sure sign she was unimpressed is she will say, “That’s not my favorite.”
In a similar vein, I hate to talk bad about a book I did not enjoy. Not all books are for everyone, and some books are just not written with me in mind. That isn’t the author’s fault, and it doesn’t mean it isn’t the ideal book for someone else. So, when I just cannot finish a book, or when I sometimes finish when I should have quit, my default descriptor is, “That just wasn’t for me.”
In a first meeting with someone yesterday, I mentioned that I was a sixth-generation Mississippian.
That lead to questions.
I briefly told how Jonathan Hollowell and his family had moved from Wayne County, NC to Marshall County, MS in the 1820’s, to take up land left when the Chickasaw were forced to move to Oklahoma.
Her: It’s remarkable you know all that. Was that passed down in your family?
Me: No – I had to research it.
Her: It was important to you that you knew?
Me: Vital. It makes it easier to be here – in Mississippi, with all it’s issues – now, if I know how I got here.
In light of *waves hands* everything going on, some folks are considering deleting their Meta accounts.
I’m not ther eyet, but that is largely becaise of the 19 years and 11 months of work I have put into that site. There is writing of mine on there that exists nowhere else int he world, there are pictures I posted there that don’t exist elsewhere, and messages on there with people who have died.
The good news is you can export all of that. Facebook makes it surprisingly easy.
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.
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.
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.
