(This is a now page, inspired by Derek Sivers’ now page.)
I live in Durham, NC, now retired as a contract software technical writer for a federal agency.
- Busy working with my neighbors on Bull City Commons, a cohousing community that we self-developed and self-manage. I write and maintain the Bull City Commons Blog, am the lead of the Building Maintenance Circle (hah!), member of Marketing Circle (hence the blog + marketing emails), member of Building & Grounds, help maintain the public website and internal Google Sites intranet pages, manage the Service Requests form for non-emergency requests from residents, serve as an internal facilitator for our Plenary meetings, and am on Team D for our quarterly team-cleaning program. Is that a lot? It sounds like a lot.
- For January to March, reading or re-reading only books I already own. The one I am enjoying the most is Rob Shearman’s 3-volume short story collection We All Hear Stories in the Dark. I’m reading at least one story a day. I recently cracked the code, a bit, of the books’ structure and have settled into now just reading the stories I haven’t read yet.
- On my Kindle, I’m flitting through a variety of things:
- The Ink Trade by Anthony Burgess
- The Journal of Jules Renard
- Supercoach by Michael Neill
- Simple Marketing for Smart People by Billy Broas
- (I really do need to commit to a novel or other long work.)
- Also started converting my old MOBI formatted ebooks purchased or downloaded from years past into EPUB format for uploading to my Kindle. Trying to centralize all my e-reading on the Kindle Oasis (10th gen) and my iOS Kindle apps; Apple Books is OK but a very stiff interface and not inviting to use.
- On TV: we’re keeping up with “Abbot Elementary” and “Shrinking”. Finished “The Studio.” I’m looking forward to starting “How to Get to Heaven from Belfast,” from the creator or “Derry Girls.”
- Putting a 3x/week kettlebell workout on my calendar, to be done at the Duke Fitness Center since I can never get the traction going working out at home. Also attending tai chi and yoga classes at DFC, along with a Saturday morning Tabata class.
- Creative projects: none at the moment.
I can be contacted at brownstudy+microblog at the domain gmail.com.
Updated: 2026-03-05
