/now
Summer Solstice, 2026
I have been keeping busy since I last wrote, and although I've been doing a fair amount of writing, not much of it is ready for public consumption yet.
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I'm continuing to read a lot and have been keeping up the pace of at least a book a week since the start of the year. Some are short books, like poetry and graphic novels, and some are longer and denser nonfiction, so it probably evens out to the difficulty of reading a middle-of-the-road adult novel every week.
Unlike 2025, I did not set out with a reading goal in 2026 but I believe I have surpassed the reading that I did last year. It happened organically because I stopped doing a couple of other things: watching YouTube and listening to podcasts. I've been trying to taper off my YouTube consumption for quite a while and decline in the quality of content on YouTube is really helping me in this journey. There are a few excellent channels that I check in on every once and a while, but the return on investment I get from spending an hour scrolling through YouTube shorts has become so low that I've lost interest.
Podcasts, though, were the surprise. I deleted my Spotify account and intended to find another platform for listening to podcasts. I just haven't gotten around to that yet and it turns out my life is completely OK without podcasts. I concentrate better on my work because I don't have a podcast playing in the background and I've somehow reclaimed a lot of time that I didn't even understand I was wasting.
Last time I wrote, I was trying out doing a time audit. I did not end up finishing it because I just couldn't add one more thing to my life to keep track of. But of the days that I did track, podcasts didn't show up because I was always listening to them while doing something else. So I'm not sure if I reclaimed actual time, headspace, or both, but am enjoying the change.
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I've also been spending more time outside. It's a beautiful summer so far where I live and I'm out in my yard planting, watering, and weeding regularly. We got our house re-sided in May, which was a big two-week disruption, but now that it's done I finally feel ready to start planning how we're going to landscape our yard. I'm learning that to garden successfully, you just need to learn to love your garden and be out in it every day the weather's good, even if only for a few minutes.
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Last time I mentioned signing up for Postcrossing and I have stuck with it since February. As of now, I've dropped 26 postcards in the mail: 2 got lost, 4 are en route, and 20 arrived at their destinations. I've mostly been mailing to the US and Germany, which, along with Russia, are the Postcrossing powerhouses. But so far I've received cards from Japan, Taiwan, England, Belarus, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, and China--and of course the US and Germany. It's pretty cool! Postcrossing is an especially nice hobby if you are in the US because our postage is so much cheaper than many places. It only costs $.61 to send a postcard domestically or $1.70 to send one globally. In many countries, they have to pay the equivalent of $4 or $5 just to send a postcard to me. It's a dorky little hobby but it's genuine human connection and keeps me from rotting my brain on screens. And remember, if you are interested in having a snail mail penpal, I might be a good fit.
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I have also started grinding through the redesign of this website. Since I insist on doing everything by hand, it is a lot of work but my goal is to future-proof the code so redesigns should be easier in the future. Once I decided to just reconfigure the design instead of doing something completely different with it, I found more headspace to tighten up the code.
I got the idea of the /now page from Derek Sivers, which I found through 32-Bit Cafe.