Mother’s Day was last Sunday… As I get older, have more life experience, and more opportunities to learn about my mom’s life and experiences, I gain an ever-greater appreciation for what she did in raising me, giving me the solid foundation I move through the world with today. She had so many difficult choices to face, and stayed steady through situations that I know were hard to endure. I am so grateful to her, and especially over the last year I have felt even more so, as I have gotten insight into all this through helping her navigate some challenges of her own. I appreciate her always, but Mother’s Day is still a good reminder to really communicate just how much, in what ways, and why… We had a great moment of connection that warms my heart. 
It was a bit of a tough week for procrastination, though. To be more specific, I think I felt worse about procrastinating this week than I sometimes do, but I’m not so sure I actually procrastinated more, or was less productive. Kind of interesting that way…
One thing I end up doing a lot throughout the day that contributes to procrastination is checking my email (this is no doubt true for many people). So this week I started doing an experiment where I don’t actively read any emails (with a very few exceptions) until the end of the day. The results are a bit mixed, but mostly promising. It feels a little overwhelming to go through it all at the end of the day, but it is definitely quicker to go through at that point than at the beginning and then over time throughout, in little bursts. I think now I just need to do it at the right time, not truly the “end” of the day, but more the beginning of the evening, so to speak, around 6PM perhaps. Also to be clear, this is personal email, not work. I get a fairly low volume of work email though, fortunately.
I added some hopefully interesting, new topics to my digital gardens here, notably How to raise caterpillars into butterflies (for fun and profit?) and The importance of considering the Facebook user in community building (platform, UX). There are two major types of content I want to add here as often as possible: stuff I’ve already (partly) written, often in draft form in my old blog, or in Notion or something, and stuff I’ve had in mind for a long time but never actually written down (the butterfly topic falls into that category). There is a lot of content coming…
More adventures in buying and setting up a laptop for my mom. I ended up getting a Dell for her as it had the best combination of specs, reviews, and price. When it arrived it was in the most incredibly basic box, with very little to protect it, never mind fancy unboxing experiences. I am, in general, a function over form kind of guy, but I have to admit it was a bit disappointing and honestly felt kind of low budget, even though this was a ~$900 piece of hardware. Some companies have this nailed, Apple being the obvious example, and it really makes me wonder how much more an Apple-like experience costs in packaging, design, etc. It sure makes a big difference in how it feels to own a product, at least at first, and a lot of companies could probably learn something from what Apple is doing. Make no other changes to their product, just change the packaging experience, see what happens. Mobile phone manufacturers seem to have grasped this somewhat more widely.
I had a lot of interesting caterpillar and butterfly experiences this week, and captured some interesting new stuff (which I’ll share separately soon, but keep an eye on my YouTube channel). But also my cat Sam unfortunately ended up mauling a newly-emerged butterfly and there was no way it could survive, so that was an unfortunate happening that I’ll be avoiding as much as possible moving forward. Of course in the wild most of the butterflies I’ve raised would probably have been eaten long ago as caterpillars…
Also, the hummingbird has 2 eggs now!
