posted 2005/05/19 at 03:29
So far I don't think I'm doing as well of a job on my summer to-do list as I'd like. My room is a little cleaner, I've played a little Final Fantasy VII, I've spent some time scratching Skooter, but it doesn't feel like I've done much. I haven't even gotten to any of my reading yet, and that may be the highest priority of all here over break. (In fairness, I like to do my reading outside during the day -- like at Wildwood -- but my schedule's still a bit messed up from being at the lock-in last Saturday.)
One thing I have done well is start my Japanese lessons back up. I'm going kind of slow here, but I'm doing a little every day and I think I should be back at my old peak by the start of August. The only thing I wish is that I had more traditional Japanese music to listen to while studying, particularly solo shakuhachi or shakuhachi and koto. I've got a few MP3s I've downloaded (legally) from John Singer's Website, but I can only listen to the same three tracks for so long, and Media Play's foreign music selection isn't what it should be. Given that I need to buy some books for the methodology of the composition course I'll be teaching in the fall, I think I smell an Amazon order coming ...
One thing I've been doing a lot of that isn't on my to-do list is playing chess. I didn't get a chance to play too much over the end of the semester there, and quite honestly I do think that studying and playing chess increases my mental faculties. Over time I think I may join the USCF again (I was a member for a year during high school although I never actually played a rated match), but for now I think I'll be okay just playing on my XBox.
Another thing I've been thinking about doing is learning Visual Basic again so I can take the meal-planning software I created a while back, and move it from its proprietary format to something that anyone with a (Windows) computer can use. Then again, I know from experience how much of a burden programming can be, and that task may be too big for me to handle with everything else I have to do here. (Besides, I'd GPL anything I released anyway, so it's not like I could make any money off of it.)
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon