The Dance of Time; to and fro…

Things are settling back down into normalcy after the holidays. With the issues with my health coming right before that, it’s seeming like I lost an entire month more or less; going to work seems almost surreal. I’m not complaining; I thoroughly enjoyed the holidays, and am now really missing my parents, but I know I’ve got to get back to normal life.

As I’m settling back into normal life I’m taking stock of my various projects and hobbies and trying to figure out where time is going to go. There’s a bit of shuffling going on. As I am stepping away from the diet, that means I can spend my lunch breaks reading instead of going on walks, so I’m doing that. I’m reading two books in parallel, one on language learning (“Fluent Forever”) and a collection of essays on Buddhism. I’m taking a continuing studies class on Buddhism in February and March, so I figured I could do some prep work to get the most out of the class.

The language learning book is one I had started out back in late October and ended up shelving in order to read a book a coworker gave me, The Checklist Manifesto, and because I knew I wouldn’t have much time for language learning during November because of NaNoWriMo. One thing led to another, and so I’m just picking up Fluent Forever again now. One of its recommendations is to install and start using Anki, so that was how I spent a lot of my afternoon — setting up Anki and getting a deck working and then starting to use flashcards.

Another part of my afternoon and yesterday was spent working with Python and my partner to build a little bot that can get stock information from tweets. We’re not setting the world on fire at this point, we just are getting the most recent tweets from a collection of people my partner selected for tweeting relevant information. It’s been nice to do some coding outside of work, and since data science is something I’ve been interested in for a couple years now, this seems like a good way to get my feet wet.

Things shuffle around; things come and go. My 2017 has gotten off to a pretty great start, and I hope to keep things on track. One day at a time.

One takeout box to chew on at a time…