I have been journaling on and off since the 1980's, formerly by hand in
blank-page notebooks occasionally illustrated with pen and ink drawings or watercolors
but since 2006 in this online journal illustrated with my, and since 2017 my wife Darchelle's,
photographs. I write mostly for myself; through both the process and the product of
journaling I am able to remember and reflect on experiences, primarily from the natural world, in a way
that I otherwise cannot.
In 2017, four years after I was diagnosed, my ALS had progressed to the point that I could no longer use any camera, not even a phone. I had first noticed weakness in my hands in 2012. My legs were initially unaffected so I kept on running marathons but in 2016 I ran my last one. It was also in 2016 that I began to use speech to text software (Dragon Naturally Speaking) because my fingers became too weak to use a keyboard. In 2019 I hiked my last mountain. Since 2021 I've been in a wheelchair and on a ventilator day and night, but that has not prevented Darchelle and me from geting out birding together. We stay mostly in Washington but we range from Asotin to Blaine and Salmo Pass to Cape Disappointment looking for birds, counting birds and photographing birds. My focus in these pages reflects that. Since March of 2025 I have no longer been able to use the speech to text software so I use my eyes alone to navigate on the screen and type on an onscreen keyboard.
Brian
In 2017, four years after I was diagnosed, my ALS had progressed to the point that I could no longer use any camera, not even a phone. I had first noticed weakness in my hands in 2012. My legs were initially unaffected so I kept on running marathons but in 2016 I ran my last one. It was also in 2016 that I began to use speech to text software (Dragon Naturally Speaking) because my fingers became too weak to use a keyboard. In 2019 I hiked my last mountain. Since 2021 I've been in a wheelchair and on a ventilator day and night, but that has not prevented Darchelle and me from geting out birding together. We stay mostly in Washington but we range from Asotin to Blaine and Salmo Pass to Cape Disappointment looking for birds, counting birds and photographing birds. My focus in these pages reflects that. Since March of 2025 I have no longer been able to use the speech to text software so I use my eyes alone to navigate on the screen and type on an onscreen keyboard.
Brian
