It’s getting cold as hell tonight, and so for supper I made my platonic ideal of chili, which means it tasted like the chili my mom made when I was young. We served it with Fritos, as God intended, and with good sharp cheddar and sour cream.

There is a lot I do not like about the world right now, but on a day where many bad things happened, I managed to make good food and feed my family, and that is not nothing.

There is a lot that will need to be done over the next four years. I have zero guilt about taking time to rest from it today.

I’m preaching tonight at Safe Harbor Church in Clinton, MS – a church with a large LGBT contingent in their congregation.

Tomorrow is the inauguration, and many of us, not just those in that community, are nervous.

God of love, God of hope
God of our understanding and longing
On the eve of the inauguration,
We are gathered tonight in this place to seek your will
And to learn how to try to do it.
We recognize that our desire to follow your will does not mean we always do
But we trust that our desire to please you does, in fact, please you.

It is a rough time right now, and many of us are fearful.
We do not always know where we are going, or what the future holds.
Our future is uncertain, shadowy, unknowable.
But we trust you, and seek the comfort of your presence.
We know you will not leave us, or forsake us,
And in the presence of our enemies, you prepare a feast.

Protect us, oh Lord. Watch over us
As we labor, and as we rest.
Give us strength to resist, hope to sustain others,
And make of us a testimony to your glory.

Amen

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.

And then, there are the other days.

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.

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.

My dad died when I was 48. For my entire adult life, every time I would call his phone, it would go the same way:

Him: Hello?
Me: Hey Daddy.
Him: Hello, son.

Every. Single. Time.

It’s the little things you miss.