I'm not sure how I missed pdb before, but it's magically awesome. (Thanks to Jeff for inadvertently introducing me to this during PyCon.) This may be because I'm used to breakpoints and debuggers from my forays into embedded stuff, but I went "YAY DEBUGGING EVERYWHERE" crazy today before I realized excessive use of pdb does not enlighten you further after a certain point; it just slows you down.

But that was fun. And now I have a new tool. Yay! Toys for my brain!

Also, I'm proud of myself because I managed to use my computer reasonably sufficiently for a few hours last night without X or internet - just me and the command line and some manpages. (And then I figured out how to unbork X all by myself. Which I'm also proud of.) I feel like a proud toddler who's waddling into the kitchen to show off that look, shoelace tied and I DID IT BY MYSELF MOMMY but - well, in the world of computers, isn't that pretty much where I am? More or less steady on my own feet, able to run around and converse in reasonable (if childish and lacking in vocabulary) sentences with mature "adult" beings in the field, a long way to grow but definitely starting to see how I could get there?

And it only took me 7 years to reach this point. Woo! (Well, maybe I'd call myself a preschooler with computers/coding, and a toddler with electronics.)