(no subject)
I'm feeling kind of together and productive with my life lately, so I think I'll start blogging again! What can I say, it's a lot more fun to discuss accomplishment than talk about how I spent a whole weekend in an armchair surfing the internet.
I went to the gym on Saturday with KP. She tried to kill me. Well, OK, we did the Zumba class which was fun but tiring, and then she said she wanted to go lift weights. So why the heck not? I mean, aside from the fact that I'd just gone from couch potato zero to sixty minutes of cardio and had turned a delightful shade of magenta.
But anyway, we did bench presses together and I felt pretty good considering it's the first time I've done them in forever. And I can bench more than her! (shh, it doesn't matter that she's approximately half my size). And then I went and played on the assisted chin-up machine for a few sets, until my forearms died. And then KP still doing things with dumbbells so I wandered around, found a plyo box, and discovered that if I'm on the box so my free leg can dip down, I can do full-depth alternating one legged squats a bunch of times! And a ginormous muscley guy with pretty blue eyes complimented me on being able to do them, so yay!
And then I was sore till Tuesday. But good sore! Body working again sore! And I did some 20 minute yoga things on Sunday and Monday, and then played with my barbell a bit this morning, and I'm kind of back in an exercising groove.
But if I don't mention it again next week though, you should probably assume I've slipped back into slackerdom.
I am also learning German! I'm halfway through the BBC's German Steps program, which is awesome (and I got to send in a correction to one of their pages where they'd linked the wrong flash file, so I feel contributy). I feel like it's coming along pretty well, I could exchange some pleasantries with Uwe's mom the other weekend.
The interesting thing though, is how learning German is bringing back some of my French and Thai. I actually went through the BBC French Steps challenges a couple weeks ago for fun, kind of bringing that back. And now sometimes when I'm trying to remember the German for things I sometimes remember the Thai, which I haven't thought about in ages and probably couldn't have thought up that quick before I started studying German.
It feels like there's a whole segment of brain that's kind of waking up and turning over and starting to chug away. I was listening to some Paris Combo and actually picking out the words, without trying - before I'd been just hearing the French lyrics as kind of instrumental. But with just a little bit of French recollection, they start making words.
I really like learning languages. I remember talking at the KITP conference with some people about how different languages are suited to things. Hungarian sounds like a very interesting language to learn. The description I got of it actually reminded me of lojban. I was going to say "except with much more conceptual ambiguity", but really lojban does have tons of conceptual ambiguity because complex concepts must be constructed, and different people tend to do that in different ways. I think. Been a while.
I want to learn all the languages in the world ever. I will put it on my to do list after "become a ninja".
I went to the gym on Saturday with KP. She tried to kill me. Well, OK, we did the Zumba class which was fun but tiring, and then she said she wanted to go lift weights. So why the heck not? I mean, aside from the fact that I'd just gone from couch potato zero to sixty minutes of cardio and had turned a delightful shade of magenta.
But anyway, we did bench presses together and I felt pretty good considering it's the first time I've done them in forever. And I can bench more than her! (shh, it doesn't matter that she's approximately half my size). And then I went and played on the assisted chin-up machine for a few sets, until my forearms died. And then KP still doing things with dumbbells so I wandered around, found a plyo box, and discovered that if I'm on the box so my free leg can dip down, I can do full-depth alternating one legged squats a bunch of times! And a ginormous muscley guy with pretty blue eyes complimented me on being able to do them, so yay!
And then I was sore till Tuesday. But good sore! Body working again sore! And I did some 20 minute yoga things on Sunday and Monday, and then played with my barbell a bit this morning, and I'm kind of back in an exercising groove.
But if I don't mention it again next week though, you should probably assume I've slipped back into slackerdom.
I am also learning German! I'm halfway through the BBC's German Steps program, which is awesome (and I got to send in a correction to one of their pages where they'd linked the wrong flash file, so I feel contributy). I feel like it's coming along pretty well, I could exchange some pleasantries with Uwe's mom the other weekend.
The interesting thing though, is how learning German is bringing back some of my French and Thai. I actually went through the BBC French Steps challenges a couple weeks ago for fun, kind of bringing that back. And now sometimes when I'm trying to remember the German for things I sometimes remember the Thai, which I haven't thought about in ages and probably couldn't have thought up that quick before I started studying German.
It feels like there's a whole segment of brain that's kind of waking up and turning over and starting to chug away. I was listening to some Paris Combo and actually picking out the words, without trying - before I'd been just hearing the French lyrics as kind of instrumental. But with just a little bit of French recollection, they start making words.
I really like learning languages. I remember talking at the KITP conference with some people about how different languages are suited to things. Hungarian sounds like a very interesting language to learn. The description I got of it actually reminded me of lojban. I was going to say "except with much more conceptual ambiguity", but really lojban does have tons of conceptual ambiguity because complex concepts must be constructed, and different people tend to do that in different ways. I think. Been a while.
I want to learn all the languages in the world ever. I will put it on my to do list after "become a ninja".