I’ve been listening to podcasts for a few years now, and only recently switched podcast apps on my phone. I started with Overcast as the first podcast app, primarily leveraging the “Smart Speed” feature to trim silences so I could get in more listening. But back in my Overcast days, I was a more casual listener. More recently, I’ve switched to Castro due to a few super-handy features.

Over the past two months, I’ve successfully completed a challenge I set out to try: posting on my blog every day. I didn’t set an end date for this, but just kept at it every day. Once I had a visible streak, I felt like I couldn’t stop. In fact, I still have a continuous streak… I don’t have to stop.

This week was the first time I started to feel the change in the seasons. We had a much cooler day earlier in the week, combined with bright sunshine, that gave a distinct feeling of the start of a new school year. I took a shorter walk over lunch that day, and while taking in the exquisite elements of the weather, wrote down a whole flood of memories that this kind of season change brings:

Out for a date night with the wifey tonight, took this photo while sitting on a park bench after a nice walk.

There are some musical pieces that carry a personal story of discovery, either the first time you heard an artist or a specific song; how it made you feel. Due to the ubiquitous music-discovery features built into services like Spotify and Apple Music today, that experience is unfortunately becoming a thing of the past.

At a church potluck on Sunday, a conversation with another father challenged me to not give in to the lure of mindless entertainment. For much of my life, I’ve allowed “entertainment” to have some room to grow; it’s OK to indulge in entertainment as long as it doesn’t get out of hand. In college, I stopped playing video games because I saw what a waste of time they were. But I still indulge in an iPhone game every so often.