june + july 2026

Happy sunday! To quote myself from last year

Well, I missed the June newsletter

The summer months are always busy. I’m usually traveling somewhere (probably to Toronto via Kingston), camping somewhere (probably on an island) and staying away from computers like they’re hazardous waste (outside of work hours).

This year, getting sick was thrown into the mix. So sick that I literally can’t remember when I’ve been more sick. More on that later.

june

I was in Victoria for all of June which was wonderful. June is one of the best months to be in Victoria.

visited a culinary school

continued work on Elaine’s garden with Ash

(I moved several large rocks to the backyard which was quite satisfying)

hosted a dinner party with Ash (and very much enjoyed playing jackbox afterwards)

(our favorite Tee K.O. creation)

attended a wonderful wedding for our friends Alex and Carm

Ash and I had a dance session on the beach with this DJ

played golf with Ashley for the first time

went to vancouver for Maya’s birthday!!

bought a whetstone and properly sharpened my knife

(^a very thinly sliced tomato)

got ashley’s bike tuned (it’s much faster now)

july

July was a substantially more chaotic month, due to traveling and sickness.

went kayaking up the gorge with some friends

made a shelf! (more on that below)
flew to kingston on Jul 11
went disc golfing for the first time in kingston (I lost badly)

celebrated my grandmother’s 80th!!

was surprised when a close co-worker left the company
took a train to montreal on Jul 17

made a music video in montreal with kai and elizabeth

flew to toronto on Jul 20
attended shopify summit
ate at some nice restaurants with Ashley
got sick
flew home on Jul 29

hotel laundry, how to

I was living in a hotel in Toronto for a while in July and had to figure out how to do laundry.

The hotel charged $50 per dress shirt and didn’t seem to have pricing for anything non-formal.
The closest laundromat was 30 minutes away and I didn’t have time to do that anyways.
There were several dry cleaning places around, but the turnaround time was like 4 days which made no sense for me.

This is a long build up to me admitting that I did my laundry in the hotel sink with shower gel and shampoo (a first for me).

It actually worked quite well for the shirts and underwear I had - but the socks wouldn’t dry.

ways to dry socks in a hotel, ranked

hair dryer
compress them between two towels and put some weight on it
hang them to dry

I, of course, had to try methods 2 and 3 before noticing the hair dryer. With that thing my socks got dry in about 5 minutes.

When drying socks in a hotel, use the hair dryer.

sickness

Mere days after successfully drying my socks, I got sick.

You can see the rapid progression of my illness through my Whoop metrics:

It was the most sick I’ve been in years - I think lost around 5 pounds from the whole thing.

There was a bad cough, pain when swallowing, no speaking for a couple days, an awful flu, a full 24 hours of exhaustion, nausea, and - interestingly - an aversion to the umami flavor.

In the end, things settled down. I’m back to baseline now and very grateful for it.

bedroom shelf build

Before all of that, I built a shelf! I’m quite proud of it.

background

back when me and ashley first moved in to the apartment, i spent a day drilling some 2x4s into the wall beside our bed to make a couple “ledges”. it was the place i put:

my phone (out of reach)
my watch
some photos
miscellaneous objects

every evening i would put away my things on it and every morning i picked them up for the day. But it was way too small.

coincidentally, I had

a friday off
a 2x4’ piece of 3/4” plywood sitting in my office
a pinterest board full of plywood constructions
an ambition to build something more serious than a phone stand for Ashley (that she went viral with btw!!!)

the build

i made a slideshow about it here → https://cdn.kahvipatel.com/my%20bedroom%20shelf.pdf.

and i was absolutely thrilled when the french cleat mount worked properly:

end

and that’s it! see you next month!