Today was win!
On the exercise front: I knew I couldn't do a regular chin-up, but I thought I could at least slowly lower myself down from the bar - until I proceeded to essentially jump off a chair 8 times in a row (that's about how effective my biceps were at attempting to slow my descent). I'm trying not to put myself into a world of pain tomorrow, so I'm going relatively easy at the moment, even to the extent of doing my "15-20 pushup set" with hands on chairs so I'm at a 45 degree angle to the floor instead of trying to go on the ground from my knees and having my arms collapse halfway through the second set. Not overdoing things is hard; I don't have good calibration abilities on my physical self yet, but I at least know how bad my calibration abilities are, and recognize I can't just rollback a bad ankle to its pre-17-year-old state, and... slow. Sloooow.
Furniture shopping for Mark's new apartment with everyone except my dad (who hadn't yet come home from work) provided an opportunity to practice my German ("Der Tisch ist auch sehr billig!"[0]) and learn some Fookien ("Lang bo lai je in huey bo ottoman."[1]).
Turns out Yifan is also studying German - she spent the summer doing research there and wants to go back. If I can figure out transport to Naperville sometime this week, we'll have a day of embedded tinkering (YAY! It's been so long since I touched hardware!) and German movies. By the way, the great thing about friends is that you can - even if you're not working on anything together - spend an entire day doing nothing but walking around a city for 7 hours (ok, food was periodically involved) and have a wonderful time.
And I am the proud owner of a portable vorbis-compatible music player. Merry Christmas to me! We'll see how well this works tomorrow when I load it up for its first full day of operation, but it seems to be doing rather nicely right now.
Not even writing in complete sentences here, or listing everything I got to do - feels good to be busy again. Now I'm good and tired and can take some time to think and rest. Aaah, it feels nice, being able to rest. (Why do I have to work harder at resting than I do at working? That shouldn't make any sense.)
[0] "The table is also very expensive!"
[1] "People don't come and sit because there's no ottoman."