"When I was a youth, I did youthful things, but when I got older, I still did youthful things."

Tomorrow, this journal will be a year old. Tomorrow's entry will be the last one for a while. It's been an interesting year, putting up words and pictures, with one entry per day. And it's been a bit of a challenge as well.

When you get older, time moves faster and faster. It seems like just a couple of weeks ago that we moved to Virginia, but it's closer to three years. My granddaughter is now over three years old (she's the reason we moved down here), but it seems such a short time ago that she was just learning how to walk.

So I decided to have a project for this year. One that would mark the passing of the days. I would keep a journal, with an entry for every day. It would mark the passage of time, and force me to produce something every day. After some thought, the current format took shape. The pictures would be large, and the words, on days there were words, would be on any subject that interested me.

What emerged is an online book, itself an artwork, that became part of my online museum. I built the software that handles the journal myself, since building software is my day job. It's actually a database program that makes it very easy to assemble and publish this work. There is some complexity underneath, but the user is presented with a very simple interface that allows viewing by turning the pages of the journal, or by picking a date from the calendar.

I experimented with the number of days that would be on each page, sort of like a "blog," but soon settled on a format of one page per day, so the journal entries resemble the pages in a book.

My muse for this journal, as in all things, has been the Hobbitt. Her gentle voice helped shape this work.

This journal is dedicated to my children and to my granddaughter, as something to look over and enjoy in the future.

Tomorrow, I will write about some of my plans for the new year.