Here’s some of what’s on my mind heading into this week:

Gratitude: My youngest daughter just got home from a two-week volunteer opportunity with a friend’s church in Arizona on the Mexico border; she worked in a food pantry, spoke with migrants on both sides of the border, and put a human face on often rancorous current events. I am grateful she had this chance, grateful for the old friendships my wife and I still cultivate, and grateful for the kind of person my daughter is becoming.

Expectation: At week this work we are entering phase two of a project that will further our integration with other software systems; we’ve been planning for this and working on phase one for weeks and seeing this as a needed step in our product development for over a year and it is exciting to be stepping into this next stage this week with a strong team and a good partner.

Check it out: What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, a collection of short stories by Lesley Nneka Arimah. Incredible, evocative, often funny and regularly haunting stories in a debut collection.