Issue 46 · Fireside

What We Made This Year

Workshop ledger through June 2026. The year is not complete.

The sentence I haven't finished anything can survive a surprising amount of contrary evidence.

It survives because finished means several incompatible things. A physical object can be installed and still invite another phase. A website can be live while its best feature remains unbuilt. A tool can function before its backlog has been processed. A game can reach a playable state and still sit unreleased. A child can be delighted by the first tower of a castle that has not yet acquired the rest of its walls.

Calling all of these complete would be dishonest. Calling them nothing is also inaccurate.

This is the ledger so far.

Complete Phase: The Studio Bookshelf

In May, the first phase of the studio window-niche bookshelf was completed. The former window had already been closed on the outside by a mosaic. The inside became an insulated recess with shelves, a removable sill, two repurposed sconces, low-voltage wiring, and Edison-style bulbs.

The lights work. Books occupy the shelves. A photograph records the niche as a working part of the room.

The project is not over. A clock case still needs its final lighting, the switch orientation needs correction, and the electrical system leaves capacity for a future back wall. Phase 1 complete is more exact than either finished or still working on it.

What was made: one functioning room-piece and the electrical knowledge to extend it.

Live: The Family Tree

Krumpos.org went live on April 8. The site contains 211 pages, including 173 ancestor profiles, surname indexes, branch pages, narrative material, search, and a map showing direct-line ancestors by birthplace and migration.

The genealogy existed before the site. Much of it lived in structured files with dates, citations, cemetery records, civil records, census information, and family relationships. The website changed who could reach it. A relative does not need to understand the Reliquary’s folder structure to find a person or follow a branch.

The living-history layer is incomplete. Interactive visualization and easier memory collection remain. The site is still live.

What was made: public access to an archive that had previously required its keeper.

Functional: The Photo Finder

The Door County Land Trust photo library contains roughly forty thousand images on a network drive. Photo Finder is a local application built to use computer vision to tag that collection so the communications team can search it.

The application works. The full backlog has not been processed.

This status is less satisfying than a launch announcement because the remaining quantity is the visible part of the problem. Yet the capability did not exist before. A search tool now stands between an unorganized archive and the people who need images from it.

What was made: a functioning instrument with a large job still in front of it.

Needs Review: Trailhead

The DCLT strategic planning system began as a larger application, failed in that form, restarted as Markdown and scripts, and grew into an Astro dashboard called Trailhead. It can display project trees and Gantt charts from Git-controlled documents.

It also contains legacy noise and an unresolved question: does it reduce cognitive load for the organization, or has it become another system requiring its maker to interpret it?

The dashboard exists. Existence is not the same as value.

This belongs in the making ledger because a year-end account should include objects that need judgment, not only objects prepared for display. Some work produces a tool. Some work produces enough evidence to decide that the tool should change or end.

What was made: a system and the obligation to evaluate it honestly.

In Progress: Castle Grayskull

A foam Castle Grayskull is being built for my son. It is planned at a scale large enough for him to walk through its mouth. The first tower is complete. The larger castle is not.

The tower has already performed one unexpected function. Erin brought it upstairs as a showpiece before she knew exactly what it belonged to. A contained part of a sprawling build became legible on its own.

The castle is a family play object first. It may later supply a chamber, stage piece, or reusable component for Yonder, but those possible uses do not need to justify the tower already made.

What was made: one tower and a piece of shared imaginative ground.

Provisional: The Hedge Corpus

The Hedge lab now contains a voice canon, a canonical manifesto, article briefs, drafts, batch reviews, field scaffolds, and a triage covering issues 21 through 40, with later batches continuing the sequence.

The files are not a published zine. Candidate status means ready for an authorship pass, not ready to carry my name automatically. Several pieces need real observations. Others contain interpretations that may be defensible and still not be mine.

The corpus nevertheless exists as material for judgment. Before it, The Hedge was a frame and a forty-eight-title scaffold. Now there is enough prose to identify repeated habits, strong forms, false notes, factual risks, and the places where a human author remains irreplaceable.

What was made: not forty-eight finished articles, but a body large enough to edit as a body.

The Status Is Part of the Object

This list should be revised in December. More things may be completed. Some current claims may prove inflated. Employer work may need to be described less specifically or omitted. The word we needs to remain attached to actual participants: Erin, Arthur, collaborators, coworkers, relatives, and the systems that assisted the work did not all contribute in the same way.

The correction is not to lower the standard until every start counts as a finish. It is to name the unit accurately.

A completed phase is complete. A live site is live. A functional tool is functional. A system under review is under review. One tower is one tower. A draft corpus is a draft corpus.

The ledger does not need to turn these into a single story of progress. It only needs to stop erasing them.

Workshop Sources