Seemingly, it happened overnight. Whirlygirl was suddenly a chore.

The catharsis of getting all these words outside of my head wasn't enough to draw me to TextPad late at night. My mind would cloud with the frustrating roadblocks of archiving and inane details of perfected minutia that made creating feel a lot like factory work. I got a little stuck. I got a little tired.

Todd put the idea in my head first, seeing the problem's root way beneath the soil. He suggested redesign. With a list alternately numbered and lettered, he basically said, "keep the pieces that work-- and ditch the rest."

I sent Todd on a mission to redesign my logo and institute a banner-type feel with two instructions: 580 pixels and dark. His obscene underutilization at MEDITECH, along with his curiosity about learning new software programs led to randomness.

I started spouting off quartets of six digit Web-safe colors and batting around font ideas. I read the phrase "la vie quotidienne" in a book and I begged Todd to draw me Eiffel Towers and fields of lavender and mimosa. I started to hack away at my "kitchen sink" code using my favorite old-school tools. I had momentum. I was getting somewhere.

But then I panicked. I liked my logo. I liked the idea that I'd finally created something that didn't grate on me after three or four months. I liked the idea that I had possibly branded something personal. And selfishly, I liked the idea that it was all mine.

So once again, Todd made his suggestion. And this time I had different ideas about what worked and what didn't. And it really came down to a matter of format. 4.0 felt like a long-ago discarded Betamax tape in this DVD world. I was ready to streamline.

And all I could think of were these words. Forgive me if you've heard them before.

"I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments - we hear a word that sticks in our mind - or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly. And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection - certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether, one we didn't even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real - this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives." ... Douglas Coupland

I wanted a place to collect these moments again. A place where experience and magic and language took precedence over archiving and coding and symmetry. I started thinking of how blissful it would be to write within the nearly non-existent constraints of an 89¢ magnetic doodle pad instead of taking on treacherous and laborious sky-writing.

And this is my offering. A place to jot with room to grow, so that I can capture my moments in brief and then let them simmer into longer pieces with narrative arcs. A place where I can start and finish in a quick 15 minutes before bed.

And hopefully, a place where you'll see me a little more often.