Mihir Pathak | મિહિર પાઠક

Week 32/2025

· Mihir Pathak

4th to 10th Aug 2025 (Monday to Sunday)

This week seemed to fly by. I was still writing last week’s note on Tuesday, and now the week is already over.

I spent most of this week with the children. As part of my full-time work, I’ve become a regular part of the Kindergarten pilot program. I conduct hour-long sessions with the children every day from Tuesday to Friday. When I spend the morning with the children, the entire day becomes enjoyable, though I do get tired afterward. Making 30 children sing songs and do physical activities leaves me feeling a bit drained. It reminds me that I’m 30 years old now… but it’s still incredibly fun.

On Monday, Nidhi came to the office. All of us office friends gathered together and identified the biodiversity spread across our campus.

Regarding office work - my office laptop still hasn’t been repaired, so I have to think and write in a notebook. (I’ve also deleted Instagram and other social media apps from my phone, which helps.) I often find that having a laptop with unlimited internet creates a kind of distraction.

Now, when I have actual work to do, I either ask to borrow someone else’s laptop or complete the task on my phone. The laptop at home has essentially become a desktop, so even there - when I need to do real work, I connect to the internet through my phone and work on the big screen. The key is not taking your laptop and phone into the bedroom - that makes a huge difference.

Last week I was considering something like publishing blog posts via email, but after talking with friends and doing some reading, I found a new and simple solution: prepare a markdown file in SimpleNote and copy-paste it into GitHub’s mobile app. Cloudflare handles the rest. I also tried an app called Git Journal, but encountered some metadata errors, so I stuck with the workflow mentioned above.

This way, even if my laptop isn’t available, I can at least update my website from my phone. Of course, I still need a laptop and Linux setup for editing themes and other technical work, but for blog posts (just text), this method works perfectly. I still need to figure out the best way to post images.

On Friday evening, I went out for dinner with my office friends. It was enjoyable. The highlights of this week were definitely the time spent with kids and friends.

Saturday - Raksha Bandhan: Nidhi enjoys celebrating festivals, and I thought it was a day off, we could relax… but we celebrated it in a small way. We made Shiro/halwa at home and ordered puri sabji from outside. We tied rakhi to each other, shared our feelings of gratitude with the universe, and prayed.

In the evening, I completed some work-related tasks and meetings, then went for a short ride on the Activa.

રક્ષા બંધન

My health is fine now. Yesterday my blood pressure suddenly dropped, and I felt dizzy. I drank ORS which helped somewhat, but I still have a headache.

Today is mostly about rest and housework, with a little preparation for the work I need to do with the kids starting from Tuesday.

Today Nidhi successfully made dosa on the cast iron tava for the first time. (I forgot to take a photo)

Khojbin Mandali

Nidhi conducted two sessions at the Learning Center this week.

In the first session, there was an activity about types of trees and how to identify them.

In the second session, she worked with the children to create a local map and mark trees on it - essentially making a tree map.

After conducting the sessions, Nidhi felt she needed to work on her voice projection, so we did some voice exercises together. I firmly believe that anyone working directly with children should do exercises similar to what actors do. I’ll write more about this topic in a separate post.

Other Updates

#weekly-notes #personal

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