Book of Days: asher553

AUTOMOTIVE. It's been a little while since I posted a journal entry. The biggest development in my day-to-day life is that I am finally a car owner once again. A couple of weeks ago - 'twas the 18th of April, Sunday, to be exact - I completed the paperwork and drove home in a 2019 Nissan Versa sedan. From a practical standpoint, this will make grocery shopping a lot more efficient, expand the radius of potential job prospects, and open up the possibility of driving for Uber Eats again if I want to scare up a few extra dollars. Of course, it'll also make social life and dating feasible once again, and it will finally allow me to get out of town and see the country. I'm planning to drive to the coast (about an hour) soon, possibly this weekend. Some time when I've got a couple of days and can book a room, I'd like to visit Coeur d'Alene; it's about a 6 hour drive. I've never been to Idaho and I'm looking forward to visiting.

WORK. I'm nearing four months at my present gig, and I'm fairly happy with it. We just hired on a couple of new techs on my team, which is always nice. It'll make the workload easier, of course, and allow more flexibility in managing it. It also means that I move up in relative seniority.

HOME. I've ordered a couple of folding bookcases from Target. (The set I ordered from amazon resulted in a delivery SNAFU, about which I may post a rant separately. The item got as far as the Hillsboro post office, which then refused to deliver it because it was too large.) This is the first item I've bought for the place in a while, and they're needed to organize the existing clutter. There's going to be more clutter here soon, too, because I'm going to finally start bringing my boxes of books home from storage in Portland.

I didn't get as much done this weekend as I'd hoped, but I did manage to get through Shir haShirim (Song of Songs) to the end, which was the Bible project I'd tasked myself with a few weeks ago. It's not that long - only 117 verses, although the verses tend to be longish - and it's part of the liturgy (read publicly on the eve of the Sabbath and/or Passover, depending on local custom). Plus it's really beautiful, and it is referenced by countless Israeli pop songs. So I wanted to sit down and take the time to get familiar with it. There are some grammatical anomalies in the Hebrew, and a few words I had to look up (with no help from the Artscroll non-translation) but overall it was pretty smooth going.

Today (Sunday) I spent some time working on programming, although I didn't get as much done as I would have liked. I've dabbled in C++ and Visual Basic, but I've decided to get serious about learning Python and C# in Visual Studio. Right now I'm working through a tutorial where you make a timed arithmetic quiz app. Now that I'm on GitHub, I can leave feedback on the tutorial and join discussion forums for learners.

The weather here has finally started clearing up, and we're getting patches of sunshine from time to time. We're not quite out of the winter weather yet - it's expected to be cold this week, and we might even get one or two more days of snow before it's all over. But thankfully we've had a mild winter overall, and I haven't had to test my snow-driving prowess on these hilly roads yet.

Tomorrow is pay day, and that means I finally get to drive my car down to the tire shop and get a set of new tires. Not the most exciting thing to spend a big check of my paycheck on, but it's gotta be done; and given the road conditions, and my remote-ish location, I think it'll be prudent to invest in a good quality set.

So, off to bed, and then to another work week.