April month in review

Today is the last day of April. It has been quite a month, with a lot of amazing adventures.

The month began for me in Kyoto, Japan. The day was rainy, but it was peak cherry blossom season and I took so many photos of those white blossoms against the gray sky. The next day my 16-year-old and I went e-biking in the beautiful Lake Biwa region. On the 3rd, we went to Universal Studios Japan, with Super Nintendo World being a real highlight. The next day we took a bullet train back to Tokyo, then did a sushi making workshop, and ate at an amazing tempura place that night. On the 5th we went to the Borderless Digital Art Museum — quite the visual spectacle. And then flew home!

Life resumed its mostly normal pace after that (with some jet lag…actually a lot of jet lag) but there were some other April highlights. On the 10th my husband and I went to see Jerry Seinfeld perform in Reading. There is something to be said for laughing a lot. I went to Longwood Gardens the next day (and Chanticleer on the 15th). The cherry blossoms in my yard were amazing too! On the 19th I sang in a performance of the Missa Gaia. And on the 23rd I went to Brooklyn for the 25th anniversary party for the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus. Since my friend Amanda drove us to/from Brooklyn we got to catch up, which was also nice. She’s a very busy lady and I am grateful when I get to see her. Then my college kid came home on the 26th. I’m tremendously proud of how he did his freshman year (a 4.0!)

I saw both the 14-year-old and 16-year-old in music performances in April. It is definitely a parenting milestone when your kids’ concerts are good.

Of course, not everything went well. There is, of course, everything in the larger world. There is drama of various sorts in my immediate sphere not to be blogged about. On the more mundane level: Some bug in the yard completely munched all over the 6-year-old so there has been a lot of hydrocortisone and warnings not to scratch too much and make scars. The family schedule had to be reconstructed once we decided to move him to car line from the bus in the afternoons. The house is getting cluttered with 7 of us here and I am not willing to prioritize getting parts under control again right now because I feel like I should be devoting any extra time to book publicity. I spent 30 minutes cleaning the kitchen last night and there’s crap all over the place again this morning. Book promotion is, as usual, simultaneously thrilling (I get to talk about my ideas with people!) And frustrating (there is a lot of stuff out there in the world — and asking people to buy and read a book is a bigger ask than a lot of other things).

(Gillian, a dear friend of this blog, did a lovely write up of Big Time in her Savvy Patient newsletter this week! I definitely remember that first time log she sent me in 2016! She read my intro to I Know How She Does It, about going berry picking with three little kids while pregnant with the fourth, around the time she was pregnant with her fourth and building her medical practice, and thought “This lady gets me and my life!” If you’re not subscribed to the Savvy Patient, you definitely should be.)

(Also, I’m quoted in an article over at Bustle. )

I did manage to get my hair cut and dyed ahead of my 25th reunion next month. I got Botox! I did not lose any weight though, to be honest, I haven’t really been trying.

I started working on The Golden Hours. I wrote about 3500 words yesterday and have more confidence this book will actually be written on time!

May will be May. It will be “May-cember” with a lot of end-of-year type stuff already crammed in the first bit. I’ll do a post tomorrow looking forward to the month. I do not plan to be on any 12-hour flights, thank goodness. I love travel in the sense of being at cool locations. I do not like getting to and from there. I spent 1/60th of April on a plane. At least that was a lower percentage than March.

Last call for pre-orders! If you are thinking of purchasing Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance, I really appreciate it. If you are thinking of doing so, ordering ahead of time really helps me as it shows retailers that demand will be brisk. You can pre-order at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Books-a-Million, Hudson, or through your local independent retailer. I’m hosting a virtual launch party on May 5th for people who pre-order. Just fill out this form and you’ll get the link.

If it’s not in the cards to buy the book right now, please ask your local library to stock copies! Libraries often take patron requests into account in their purchasing decisions. Thank you!