Monthly #9

A busy month front loading work at the start of September, before spending the rest of the month away in northern India with Kay.

🇮🇳 India. I'm Indian by birth. My parents moved the family to Australia when I was 2 years old, and although we went back regularly when I was younger it's been a full 20 years since I last returned to the country. So I was pretty excited by the chance to join Kay in Rishikesh and the surrounding region for a couple of weeks. She was there for some classes with her Pranayama teacher, and then traveling with a group of students and their teacher to four major Hindu temples.

It was a great trip, despite the fact that a landslide prevented us from visiting one of the temples at Kedarnath. India was as chaotic as I remembered, but you could see definite areas where the country has progressed. There's a lot of construction happening in the north eastern regions, especially around the Chinese border. The roads there at the moment are pretty terrible, but I reckon if we returned in 5 years that'd be a different story.

Everyone left the trip with different emotions. Some in the group found it life changing & spiritually moving. For me, there was no spiritual awakening, but it was pretty awesome to get back in touch with a place and culture I've been disconnected from for too long.

India was the highlight of the month, so I'm just going to leave it there for this review.

These are things I set out to do more or less of in 2024. I'm not big on habit tracking, so this "tracking" report is all just vibes.

• Going to the gym regularly: 😐 Lol, nah. Too much travel.
• Doing 20k+ bike rides each week: Nope ❎. Got the bike back from maintenance when we got back & hopefully the typhoon rains clear next week so I can start riding.
• Writing monthly reviews: Yep ⭐, you're reading it now.
• Taking the cat outside the apartment: Nope ❎.
• Capturing thoughts in a notebook: ⭐ Wrote a daily journal during the India trip.

• Sugary snacks: Yep ⭐. I feel that the trip to India helped with this. Now the hard part will be keeping up the discipline back in Taiwan.
• Using my phone in bed: Nope ❎.

• Taking regular breaks/vacations with Kay: 😀 We're planning our next trips, but aiming to make them more manageable than the ones we've had this year.
• Getting nerd-sniped by work stuff: Yes 😀. I still want to make a carbon tracking page for my website. Also had a few other ideas during the India trip.
• Following other folks on RSS: Nope ❎. Waaaay behind now. Still gotta clean up my current feed.
• Building a financial safety-net: Nope, but making a plan now that our traveling is out of the way.