Hello, fellow tinkerer 👋

Happy Wednesday. As you're reading this, I'm recovering from brain surgery. This email was pre-scheduled, and I'll send out an update once I'm able to.

If you'd like to follow the journey of Betty the Brain Tumor (yes, I named the tumor), you can read updates here.

1) Reflection:

After I announced my brain tumor, I've been overwhelmed and humbled by messages from people and offers to help.

A person who will be invaluable to my writing during recovery is Elisa Douchette. She offered to help edit blog posts. I can dictate a post for my personal blog, use Zapier to send it to Elisa, she will edit the transcript, and my VA will publish it to my blog.

Writing is always how I process navigating the world, and it's important to me that I be able to do so while recovering. I'm so grateful for Elisa.

You can check out her newsletter and other resources here.

2) Product

For a long time, I used a giant dry-erase calendar on our wall, but eventually our lives got too complicated. Now, I use a Skylight calendar. There's a countertop version, but I have the giant wall version. It syncs our Google calendar, plus it has other features like menu planning and task lists.

My parents will be helping with the kids while I'm recovering. We rely heavily on our family calendar. It should be easy to follow with the Skylight calendar.

3) Tip

I start every day with New York Times games (Wordle, Strands, and Connections), and end my day with Duolingo. I had to pre-emptively break my 450+ day Duolingo streak, because I know that it will break when I'm recovering from surgery.

Someone recently asked me: Why is the streak so important to you? And I had to think. Is it the dopamine hit of maintaining the streak? Or because I want to do something for me? Something to think about if you are also motivated by streaks.