January Update

I'm in the process of learning PHP/MySQL (and Javascript) for my day job so that I can help out with the web development stuff that my company does on a regular basis. It's interesting and as usual incredibly fun for me to be learning something new in programming (and my first professional training in any kind of programming).

Coincidentally, only a day or two before I found out I would be doing this for my day job, I got back into map editing for Starcraft 2 pretty intensely. It's a very interesting thing to get back into because I was doing a lot of map editing back in March-May while I was unemployed so it feels almost nostalgic to be doing it again.

Also last Thursday, January 13th was my first day attending Bushikai training for Nihon Jujutsu here in Frederick. In quite certain terms - I got my ass kicked. I couldn't even get through the warm ups (including a minute of push ups, carrying people around, all the fun stuff) and my body has been sore all over for the last few days. However I'm planning on going Tuesdays and Thursdays to start, adding Saturdays in once I'm a bit more in shape and hopefully even doing Mondays regularly as well. When I'm in shape I should be able to handle 4 days a week, I hope!

Reading Update: I am now 33% through book 8 of Wheel of Time, The Path of Daggers. For anyone that hasn't read the book series through book 8, I'm about to discuss a spoiler: It is on exactly page 207 of book 8 that the first mention of the weather finally getting cooler again occurs (mentioned by Faile). Now I just need to go back and re-read and keep my eyes open for when Jordan introduced the first real indication that the weather was staying warm into the fall. My guess is that it's sometime in book 4 (or even book 3) because that was the book that I read over a course of 9 months and so explains why I don't have a very good recollection of when it first started.

Overall that's probably one of the largest "plot" arcs that's happened in the books so far, really taking place over the course of 4-5 books, whereas most other things (so far) have generally lasted only 1-2 or at most 3 books excluding some of the largest plot points that are arguably in every book. To me that's pretty exciting, and is helping me propel through the middle of this book.