Dreams Don’t Work Unless You Do

— John C. Maxwell

So I’m reading four books simultaneously now. It feels borderline irresponsible, given my compulsion to finish books, but I’m still making decent progress on three of them so there’s that. A History of Japanese Mathematics I’ve barely touched in like a month, but I’m not too worried about it; I’ll get to it when the time’s right. That’s a book I’m not in a hurry to finish anyway; it reminds me of my grandfather (it was his book before he passed away), so it’s nice just having it sitting by my armchair as a presence. But The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony is the new book that I just started; my book group is talking about it next Sunday, so I need to get it read by then and I just started it today. I’ve only given myself about a week to read the other books for this group before, but it looks like this one is about twice as long as the others, so oops. I think I should still be able to do it though, I’ve finished in plenty of time before. And I guess it’s not the end of the world if I haven’t read the whole book, either.

My other projects are coming along well enough. I’m almost caught up with my German flashcards; I had let myself slip pretty seriously for a couple weeks there, so I had a pileup of over two hundred cards at one point. But once I catch back up I’ll let myself start adding new cards again, which is always exciting. Sometimes I get new vocabulary by listening to Angela Merkel’s podcast and looking up words in there I don’t know, but mostly I get my new vocabulary from a frequency dictionary I have (that’s the strategy recommended by Gabriel Wyner, whose book I read about a year ago now). In weight loss I still haven’t made a ton of progress since the beginning of the holiday season; I still haven’t seen the scale start tipping downwards again since it ended, but I haven’t been trying too hard. I’m recommitting myself this week. I have light lunches planned to pack all week; considering my biggest calorie counts come from catered lunches at work, hopefully that will start to chip away at those numbers again. Mmmm, and I have a ton of berries to snack on at work tomorrow, and cherry tomatoes for snack the rest of the week. Woo, healthy snacks! I’m a huge fan of berries though. Raspberries are easily my favorite fruit.

I also pulled open Instagram for the first time in months! We’ll see if I get back into it again; maybe I know a bit more now about what’s expected and what people are looking for, so I’ll have a better time approaching the community. Hurrah for getting connected!

Mmm, apple pancake. At Esther’s, a little German bakery near Palo Alto