June Review

The last day of June. I want to get back into the productive state I was in until the end of May, but I haven’t quite worked up the motivation. I’ll start by looking back on the things that I’ve accomplished in the past six weeks or so.

I finished the outdoor table, my first real woodworking project. It doesn’t really match the furniture, and I’m worried about the hard-to-reach places that I wasn’t really able to seal, but overall, I’m quite happy with it. It looks cool, both rustic and stylish, and it seems capable of fulfilling its function too.

In a few days I will have finished my third session at Liberty University, marking the halfway point of courses I have to take (there’s also student teaching in the spring which I’m not counting).

I started listening to music again recently. It inspired me to practice the piano a bit more consistently, and now I can play Bach’s 2-part invention no. 1 pretty fluidly, and I’m on my way to remembering no. 8. I’m also working on Grieg’s Gangar (Norwegian march) and when I get discouraged or feel like playing something more emotive, I play the theme from Legend of Mana.

I read Troilus and Cressida after finishing Timon of Athens. It took me a long time because I never really got into it. It’s an interesting play, but better to study than to read, I suspect. The ending doesn’t feel complete at all, even though it is pretty much marked by the death of Hector and a short postlude. After that I read the Paradise War, which I finished on Sunday. I read the Song of Albion trilogy in 2005 (I believe I even wrote in a book journal about it), but I didn’t remember much of anything except the third book’s heartbreaking ending and that I really enjoyed the second book. Although the first book was apparently unmemorable, I was still somewhat disappointed by it—it definitely feels like just a set up for the plot in the later books.

I’ve gone through four Javascript tutorials in the last week, which are easy and interesting and have made me feel much more comfortable with Javascript. It’s discouraging that the projects are so simple that I hardly even feel like I’ve accomplished anything, but I’m telling myself that if I get through all 15 of these projects, I should be able to write something “real” in Javascript without having to google every single step and without getting frustrated when I get stuck.

Anything else? I cooked chicken piccata for the first time, which was quite good on the first night that I made it, and plenty enjoyable enough as leftovers, which was good because I had days of them.