Category Archives: tempora

the Andover gig

About 3 weeks ago I got a request from Stephanie Aude, the Local History and Genealogy librarian at the Andover Public Library, to use a map I had drawn (in 1976) of the world around me when I was 10-11-12 (1953-1956) and lived in Shawsheen, a village that is part of Andover. In short order I volunteered to talk to the genealogy resources group at the Library, and the Event took place on April 10th… and was a grand success from my point of view. http://oook.info/etc/Andover.html has the materials I prepared for the presentation (along with links to various other bits I had gathered and shown and talked about). To my great surprise and pleasure one of the participants (Alice Mooney, as she then was) was a classmate from the Grade 6 class picture. Small world, as they say.

Along the way I revisited material Broot and I had gathered for a project we did on our own families in 2001, and was pleased with its eloquence.

As seems to have become routine, I’ve set up pages to gather links to revisit from April incoming, YouTube videos of particular salience, and videos specific to the current contretemps with Canada. And now I’ll get back to work on the Lexicon project.

Curating 2024

I’m working on the year’s-end curation for 2024, with the intention to enhance retrievability for documents I’ve collected and created in several media and various form factors.

By laying these things out for inspection via web pages, I can derive some better understanding of where I’ve been in the last year, and perhaps develop a map of the landscape of rabbit holes I’ve visited. And maybe even construct a sense of What It All Means, and whither next to wander…

Parking these links in the blog will remind me where I’ve squirreled them away. I mean to update them as they are refined: weeded, sorted, commented… Here’s the current corps de ballet:

today’s revised Question

…where we find the personal inner resources to stay balanced,
to avoid unhealthy anger and depression,
and remain engaged in the world…

My response to the problem yesterday was to write Advice du jour and send it to a few like-minded others. Today, part of my answer is to MAKE stuff, to bring things into being… which is what the last blog post was all about. So here’s something from today:

AppWharfax2adj

Positively jovial, jovially positive. But this one might better reflect the sensations of doomscrollers:


AppWharfbx2adj

And one wants to collect Zeitgeisty images as they flitter by…


at the end of January 2024

Lest January escape me, time for a salvage blog post. A lot of my writing energies have gone into texts for Convivium discussions (Solstitial Matters, Word of/for the Year, Navigating the year’s challenges, Gettin’ Above Your Raisin’, or Beyond) and of course onto the ever-growing heap of yellow pads. Various affordances await my attentions (Valoi negative scanner, CZUR book scanner, a digital microscope), each bought with specific projects in mind, and because the technologies were irresistible…), and musical plots continue to hatch, as always. I’m preparing support materials for 5 of my photographs that will be in the Maine Photographers Showcase (opening in April), and navigating the flow of new books that sloshes over the threshold. And there are always new photographic forays. So: More of Same, Piles Higher and Deeper. I intend to use the blog to track such doings more assiduously, aware that the 20th Anniversary of the blog is fast approaching.

19xii2345c

Rescuing some files

In the root directory of oook.info I found a bunch of html files that would be lost forever if I didn’t link them somehow and somewhere, so several hours of messing with them has yielded a chronological table. At least this should make them a bit more findable, and they make an interesting map of some activities during the last 20+ years.