April 20, 2026
Something I thought about:
- I’ve been better about stepping away from all devices and not just social media. Things have continued to be busy, but we’ve had some good family time recently, and I want to get back to doing things like movie or tv nights, just to take a break and chill together. We went to a Bengali community event, and it was good to have the whole family dress up in Indian clothes and be surrounded by aunties and uncles. That was my childhood — every weekend, we were with Bengali families — and we didn’t have that in Switzerland, so it’s good to give the kid a bit of that grounding. And taking walks and looking at flowers and listening to birds has also been good. It’s cold again, so I haven’t yet managed to jump into the light gardening I’ve been thinking about, but I’ve been keeping an eye on both the temperature and my calendar. Maybe at the end of this week.
Something I did:
- Had breakfast with a friend
- Went to an annaprashan (first rice ceremony)
- Wrote a short piece that was a bit different from my past writing. It was a good challenge, and I was glad to finish something
- Attended several meetings
- Took several walks
- Read
- Went on a short hike to Ford’s Folly (and also saw the Martha-Mary Chapel, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” schoolhouse, and Grist Mill
- Took a lot of photos
Something I read:
- More of my current slow read: Roots by Alex Haley
- I finished Verity Vox and the Curse of Foxfire, a middle grade novel by Don Martin
- Good Prose by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd; I do love a collaboration between a writer and editor, and I happened to read this exactly when I needed it because the piece that I was working on had the problem of being a series of events and not yet a story, and reading Kidder and Todd go back and forth on crafting nonfiction stories helped me quickly diagnose the issue
- Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books by Hwang Bo-Reum; this was fine but not the book I hoped it’d be
