A Small Report, Episode V

Right, so it has been some five weeks. However, those five weeks included Christmas, so I feel perfectly justified in not having blogged every week. They have been some pretty uneventful weeks, anyway, at least on some level. I went on a two-week Christmas vacation to the Canary Islands, which was rather nice. The winter always gets to me a bit, being pretty much dark and gloomy for most of the day--dark when you leave for work in the morning, dark when you leave work in the afternoon. So two weeks of sunlight was refreshing. Also, we at least have some snow at the moment, which tends to make the mornings and evenings a bit brighter, and also of course we are getting more and more sunlight every day now that we've passed the winter solstice.

I've had some setbacks as well. I cracked a tooth on my vacation, and had to have that fixed. After that, I passed a kidney stone, which wasn't particularly pleasant. At all. But--knock on wood--that's now over and dealt with, and so maybe I've paid my pain bills for the time being.

I'm a bit disappointed in what I've accomplished since my last post. Gym is a no-no, unfortunately. I really have to start making an effort with that. I've read some books and and watched some movies. In particular, I read Stephen King's Skeleton Crew and the first part of George RR Martin's Dreamsongs during my vacation. I've read a little computer science literature, but not as much as I would have liked. I can't seem to do any painting lately, which is probably in part due to a) a difficult first subject and b) a lack of focus on doing painting (which means I put in perhaps 15 minutes per evening, if at all), but is still a bit discouraging. I've also tried to do some programming for fun, but have made little progress there as well (but I'll get back to that in my next post).

All in all, the start of 2009 has been a bit discouraging. My goal right now is to go the gym at least a few times before I write my next report, which should be in a few weeks. It seems reading books, watching movies, painting and programming is more or less impossible to do simultaneously, so I will to interleave going to the gym with something that can be done in small intervals, which means that painting is not an alternative for the time being. Maybe I'll return to painting in the end of February, or March.