Week 28/2025

7th July to 13th July 2025 (Monday to Sunday)

The first half of the week went mostly in office work.

I have visited Vadodara for a family matter. Mom is with us. My mental health is at its worst. I am taking a break from office work (still doing other side projects slowly) and working on my self. This family matter is taking too much out of me. Not able to focus on any projects/work.

It is ok, it is a phase. It will also pass. I wish friends could come to visit us. I am feeling very alone. We, me and Nidhi both need support.

If you are reading this, have the luxury to work from home/take leave from work. Please do come to visit us in Ahmedabad. Spend time with us without any agenda.

I am very proud of myself that I am committed to weekly notes. Week by week documenting the journey, reflecting… just putting out words there also gives me relief… this is my medium of sharing… sharing a piece of life. Sometimes it puts me in trouble also when I put some sensitive info out there but it is ok. I am learning. I don’t want to censor so much. I read Divya’s weekly note. The way she expresses gives me hope.

Thejesh shared some very interesting stuff about ‘weekly notes’ in his latest weekly note which I liked so much. So sharing here again :

• Blog post by James - “More People should write”.

• Excerpt from the book “Field Notes on Science and Nature.” which describes the nature of weekly notes:

Taking time to write out an idea or observation forces us to pause and consider. Recording the daily unfolding of experiments—their success or failure—encourages an honest assessment of how each day’s work fits within the underlying goals and theory of the project. It takes time to create a narrative of experiments, events, and observations, but it eventually pays dividends because it forces thorough examination, which is a common characteristic of science across disciplines. In Darwin’s description of the marine iguana, for example, we can imagine him on board the Beagle, penning his zoological notes and pondering the origin of their “apparent stupidity.”

Resources on nature journaling:

How to teach nature Journaling Keeping a natural Journal

I will write my experience with nature journaling and teaching natural journaling to educators and children in a separate post.

I wanted to build a social media feed kind of page on my blog for a long time. Just like Twitter feed with short text or image. I saw an example of that on Sylvia’s website and tried making it for my Hugo site with the help of ChatGPT. Finally made the basic version which I like. I will share the link after I put something on it. I will also try to create a different RSS feed for that.

Let me tell you this, do you know some people go to their favorite shows/books/places when they are low or stressed. I go to my favorite blogs/weekly notes. Specially Thej’s blog and Kartik bhai’s blog. I read old posts. At Kartik bhai’s blog I read his reports about DebConf or other FOSS conf/meetups (Wikipedia, OSM, blogger community). It is very refreshing for me.

Saturday & Sunday was little happening. I had a call with Sanjhe Sapne team, mentoring call with Earth Educator fellow, and I attended one office work related online workshop.

Sunday I met dear friend Malay after few months. We talked about many interesting topics. One thing I shared with him was the disappearing of open source/FOSS communities. Few years ago there were communities of Wikipedians, OSM people, bloggers, Linux meetups… nowadays there are very few meetups in cities like Ahmedabad and Vadodara. Nowadays I see meetups around AI and AWS :) which is ok… I don’t know I like more of the old stuff :)

I need to prepare myself for working with children. Need to do some robust planning, some theater activities for self to get into the zone… I need to leave these screens and be more with myself.

I started reading again, very slowly I am picking up… finished last few chapters of the book called ‘Electric Train’. I am going to pick the book called ‘Rakhdu no kagad’ (which I already read in the past) again. Going back to familiar things… this is the phase right now.

Nidhi also made Puranpoli for the first time. Forgot to take photo of that :)