calculating

I haven't really written anything in a while. Life has been a little slow.

Work is becoming routine and comfortable. The home is starting to feel lived in.

It is my greatest hope that someday I will be able to have a designated parking place. Those of you with garages or carports or assigned parking, hear me: You are living my dreams. Don't take it for granted.

I started studying for my next exam. It is 15 weeks away and I had to prepare a study schedule. I'm accountable to someone now for how much time I put in. I thought I put in a lot before, but I realize now that I was taking it easy. I have to do 400+ hours in 15 weeks. That means 20 hours outside of work per week. Hmmm.

I was supposed to do 6 hours today. I got a late start but I have a good method. I set a timer and work for an hour straight. Then, I set a timer and take 30 minutes and watch a movie or do something mindless. Rinse. Repeat. It's always hardest at first because the problems are so ridiculously complicated that when you are just learning the topic, it can be very demoralizing. But, once you can get down to solving problems within less than ten minutes without having to get help and actually get them right some of the time, it starts getting easier to sit down and do it. The hard part is the discipline to stay at it until then.

At the moment, I am trying to master a new calculator - which does things in ways I don't quite get. I press the [+] button expecting, nothing to happen until I enter the next number to add, and it treats it like an [=] and adds the last two numbers I entered, even though there was a different operator in between them. Actually, I don't know what it is doing. This is just a wild guess. All I know is that I don't know how to key it to get what I expect. I found a book on it... so I have some leisure reading.