(This piece and the 22 which follow were originally posted at a Typepad site I maintained called “Enormous Moments —Notes from the Road,” thus the reference below.)

December 1, 2005
Thursday

Today is the feast day for Saint Eligius, a sixth century bishop who had the power to cast out demons and cure the sick. In the 1980s his name became familiar to people otherwise not knowledgable about the Catholic pantheon when the television series “St. Elsewhere” premiered. Set in a Chicago hospital named for the saint, it had all the stock characters of a ten 0’clock medical drama — the beleagured hospital administrators, the imperious and perfectionistic attending surgeons, the inept and often conflicted interns and residents. The name of the series derived from the idea that the hospital was so inferior to others in the city that ambulance drivers and patients called it “Saint Elsewhere.”

And so today my online presence finds me “elsewhere,” rather than at The Silken Tent, my mainstay domain since 1999. I am a writer in transition. I don’t like the design of The Silken Tent, I don’t like the tools (namely Netscape Composer, which some wags call “Netscape Composter”) I use to prepare and post the pieces, and I don’t have the skill to change them. By the period between the first of the year and my online anniversary in February (or at the vary latest my birthday in March), I hope to have a new design in place and the ability to maintain it.

But Holidailies begins in a week. Last year, committing to this idea kept me writing through much of January and introduced me to new journals and made me part of a community. I liked that, so I’m doing it again. I’ve decided to put dailiy posts here (“notes from the road” now means the road of suburban life, not just my gallivanting hither and yon), keep a notice on The Silken Tent’s front page about how to navigate its tangled cords, and just keep on keepin’ on.

Thanks for keepin’ on with me.