Couldn't report yesterday since Dad took the computer in the evening, so a quick status on yesterday.
Living in the Real World: Full marks on this one. I walked for almost 4 hours and went barefoot in a fountain (Chicago's Millenium park - gorgeous).
Random stranger: Not really random, definitely not a stranger, but I met up downtown with David, a friend from high school (hence the 4 hours wandering the city streets, including the last 15 minutes charging frantically through Chicago trying to get to Union Station before his train left). Yeah, this is me trying to excuse my lack of finding an actual stranger to talk to.
Nontechnical book(s):
John W. Gardner's Self Renewal (which I read on the train) reads like a manual for incoming Olin students. The first half is vastly better than the second. More on this in a separate post.
Also got halfway through a pretty hefty tome on qigong. One of the things I want to learn about when I go to China is the traditional medicine - or actually, their entire concept of health, disease, energy, and healing. In the Chinese mindset, health and medicine isn't something you just go to the doctor for; you heal yourself every day through the exercises you do, the food you eat, and the way you move and think. It's a kind of balance that I'd like to learn, since balance (and stillness) is something that's sorely lacking in my life.
Technical book(s):
Sheepishly swallowing my words on finishing Learning Python here - chapters are not the same thing as sections, and sections are huge. (This is why I need to look at the actual book when estimating reading speed, not the online table of contents). I read about 11 chapters, but that totals to only 3 sections. Got a long, long way to go.
Productivity:
Nope. I do have a good excuse for it, though. Instead of spending the evening coding as I'd planned, I spent it wrestling with the financial software (Quicken) on my mom's laptop. Hurrah for repeatedly importing and checking statements from various banks and financial institutions. Hurrah for brain-numbing work. (Is there personal finance software out there that's human-usable? Quicken and Money strike me as being frustratingly overkill, and I need to find something more than Excel spreadsheets for myself soon.)
Final grade for the day: C+, but an A for effort.