After I embarked on my newest chore, Caroline sent me an article about Hyperfocus ADHD. She knows me well and knew that after I started on this bit of work, I wouldn’t come up for air for a while. So, what exactly am I doing? I’m running 2,568 blog entries through Grammarly to verify that things are okay among the 1.3 million words I’ve written over the past years.

This all started because of a prior Herculian task which involved putting together a page featuring a single photo from every day we traveled since the advent of the digital camera. At the 501st post, I grew weary and took a pause, which lasted months. This is tied in with today’s entry because it was something related to the photos I posted for a particular entry and a seemingly lost image I thought I included on the page titled Travels In The Digital Age. As I got to that post, I saw errors in the grammar and felt I needed to correct them. That took on a life of its own, and now I’ve finished validating the grammar of 940 blog posts and have 1,628 to go.

Obsessively, my hyperfocus drills deep into my sense of “I must finish this as soon as possible” so I can focus on something else. Two something elses are in line to take over my hyperfocus. The first is I have to expand the photos included with early blog posts as those often only include a single photo to represent an entire day of travel; this was due to bandwidth limitations on the internet back before 2015. I needed to be conservative with how many images I shared; now, I’d like to rectify those omissions.

I’m estimating I’ll be done with this aspect of quality control in about ten days, at which time I can turn to determine the exact blog entries I need to flag for adding more images and consider what I might be able to say about them so many years after the fact. In the past, when I’ve written to images where there were no notes to help in the exposition of what transpired, I’ve given a warning at the front of the entry that what I’m sharing is wrung from memories that might be over 15 years old. So it goes.

Now we get to the ultimate reason for this diligence: this blog will someday disappear. When it does, I would like to know that my favorite writings will continue on into the future and the best way I’ve identified for that to happen is in print. To get to the point I can take much of this into book form I really need the grammar and images I want to include to be the most representative of our time.

But John, why do you think there should be any interest in these missives 100 years from now? Two people ventured deep into the breadth of America, recording their adventures for decades. With over 250,000 digital photos taken during those years and hundreds of thousands of words that accompany the images, I tend to believe that few others armed with a camera and notebooks captured so much detail while exploring America and occasionally Europe. I’d posit that we are the first to extensively chronicle our travels and life in America in the history of the country as what are the odds of another couple traveling for the past 22 years armed with digital cameras on over 200 travels and countless experiences?

With that knowledge and knowing that the bits and bytes that comprise this endeavor are temporary in nature, I feel it’s imperative to push this history into the permanent record. So, on I go with running Grammarly over this labor of love before focusing on prepping photos to fill some gaps and then identifying which entries should be preserved. Once all of that is finished, I can go to work on preparing the images for print, which have different requirements than what I’ve done to share them electronically.

Now, back to the endless repairs.

Update April 13th: I’m up to about 300 posts a day, with only 970 awaiting repair.