Juan Manuel, Eric, Jack, Arne, thank you all very much for your thoughts.
i've sort of come to grips with Jack's + Arne's, solution, and defined a "capture template" that adds something to a pre-named headline. (note and capture are among the org features of which i have maintained to date a studied ignorance; alas, or a-luck, no more.) i realized i would like to have headlines (mostly to have the convenience of =consult-org-heading=), which i think rules out putting my logs inside property drawers. Eric, when you use something RCS-like as your version control system, i assume that makes grepping to find some old note easy enough. but, these days i tend to use git. when (assuming) you use git, do you have some easy way to say "well, i had this code that looked sort of like this... where was it?"? (sorry, that's really a git question, but ...) cheers, Greg ps -- for completeness, or code review... ---- ("l" "add a logbook entry" entry (file+olp+datetree buffer-file-name "Logbook") "* lbe: %?logbook entry\n :PROPERTIES:\n creation-date: %t\n :END:" :empty-lines 1 :tree-type month) ----