Maybe You Should Read This First
It's getting toward the end of January 2026 as I type this piece. I'm not putting a date on it, because it's exactly the kind of work that I revise repeatedly over the course of several days, possibly several weeks, before I decide it's where it should be. I've learned to recognize those in advance.
Most of the work I do these days isn't that kind. For the vast majority of what I write these days, I plot it, I create it, I do a single edit read to correct any blatant problems, and then it's absolutely done. I release it and never change it again.
But that kind of work lives in a different part of this site. The writing in this part is all about changes and revisions and adjustments -- sometimes adjustments long after the fact.
Where I Am
As I type this, it's bitterly cold outside. The weather is gearing up for what we think will turn out to be a ten-to-twenty-inch snowfall over the next two days. No one is sure whether Monday will be cancelled. I have to remember to put on my desk slippers periodically while I'm sitting here because I have poor circulation in my feet and I'll get chilblains; I am bad about remembering this and usually get at least one attack a year. (I already had one in December.) I take my slippers off when I have to stand up to do something (I hate walking in them) or when my feet get too warm, and then get absorbed in what I'm doing and forget to put them back on.
Yes, they really exist. They're not just something that happens to people in Dickens novels. Also, no one seems to be able to agree if they're singular or plural.
We're getting old in this house. We're not antiques yet, but the mileage is showing. Wear and tear. More-than-gently used. I still have to do a subtraction problem to figure out how old I am (it amuses some of my friends that I have trouble remembering my own age), but I know I can see sixty not far down the road. Neither of us is seriously worried about having a heart attack from shoveling all that snow, but we're aware enough to be cautious about it. There aren't any hapless teenagers in our neighborhood we can pay to do it.
Trivial and mundane as those two paragraphs are, they strike me as the kind of impressions I may, I should live so long, want to remember. And while I've seen no deterioration in my memory, I think it might be getting kind of full. I take a lot of notes these days; I've reached a point where if the LRU in my brain chucks it out, I might not be able to easily acquire the information again.
A Least Recently Used algorithm. As opposed to the Most Recently Used algorithms you see populating your computer's menus and toolbars and your browser's suggestions. I don't think my LRU is particularly agressive or I wouldn't have so much worthless trivia cluttering my brain, but it's there. I know because I've trained it to throw entire projects into the trash once they're over, so I think the real algorithm may be "we don't think she'll ever use this again." The problem is, sometimes you realize many years later that you have to use it again. Notes are my offline memory.
I don't like writing about my personal life, the impressions and events of everyday bullshit. I used to like it a lot more than I do now, but, you know, there was also a time period when I thought everything I had to say made interesting reading. I haven't believed that in many years, and I try now to do the filtering; I try to only record it if it's worth recording, and very little of my daily life strikes me as worth recording. I'm not bad-mouthing my existence; it's a pretty good existence, in a lot of ways. But it's not exactly fascinating. I spend most of my awake hours sitting at this desk. I work there. I create there. I play there. It'd be a very dull movie.
But on the other hand, there's so much I've lost. People who were important to me once. Places and events. News of the day. So I think I'd better return to documenting some of it, for my own purposes. I don't guarantee any of it will be worthwhile reading to anyone else, but you never know.
Where I Was
At the top of the main page of this site is a line that says "Hand-coded since 1993." That's a rough guess based on when I first started making web pages of any kind, which would have been not long after I arrived in the Boston area. It's a true statement. It's been hand-coded the whole time (mostly), and I've been putting stuff on the web in one way or another continuously since then.
However, there are gaps.
My archival techniques over the years have been haphazard, to say the least. Files from various incarnations of various web sites are scattered all over my hard drives like piles of old papers I just threw into whatever corner was handy -- which is not far from the truth. I've never really liked looking back, and when I've taken down a web site for whatever reason (and there have been a variety of reasons, some better than others), I've been vaguely aware that I would one day want to have that information and I'd better keep it, but have never cared enough for the prospect -- or had the energy -- to do a better job of keeping it organized and systematic. I am, as a rule, neither organized nor systematic, except when writing murder mysteries.
There's more about this in "The Dredge." Suffice to say, I have non-fiction material lying around that was originally posted from 1998 through 2022 -- more than twenty years of crap -- and I've decided that the time has come to start dusting some of it off.
I don't necessarily mean literally reposting a lot of it. Most of it probably isn't worth that. It's more like sifting through the pile of junk and seeing if there's anything in there that seems worth re-recording now. Mileage, I assure you in advance, is going to vary widely from month to month and year to year. I have had my ups and downs.
I wouldn't bother except that it comes back to the thing about needing to take notes. Looking through some of this material, I see things I wrote about where I honestly have no idea what the hell I was talking about. I don't mean in the "what was I thinking?" sense, though there's plenty of that. I mean referring to somebody by name and being, now, "Who?" I mean, having absolutely no recollection of that person. Political events I have apparently completely forgotten happened. Places I went that I don't remember. So I think I'd better go try to get some of that back.
What You Get
So, then, Gentle Reader, should you show an inclination to wander into this part of the site ...
I'm going to be attempting to do a post a day. This means that many posts will be quite short. On a day when I release a new story or something like that, that day's post will almost certainly be "Here's the new story, go read it." On days like that, all my words are somewhere else.
Some entries will be me dusting off old stuff and having a look at it, sometimes for the first time in twenty years. These entries will be tagged "The Dredge" so you know what you're getting.
Other entries will be new observations of daily existence. I don't promise there won't be yelling; one reason I'm reviving this sort of quaint idea of a daily journal is that I find I often have some venting to do, these days, that I don't feel I can put anywhere else. You have been warned. (But in general I try to set limits on my political despair, of late, or it would quickly overwhelm me.)
Which brings us to the