January 19 Update

I am listening to two audiobooks: Sodom and Gomorrah (English translation) by Marcel Proust and Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers.

This month (January 2025) I began reteaching myself the PHP programming language (which I last used for a freelance project in 2005) with an aim to writing my own WordPress theme for my blogs. Then I discovered Jekyll and the Chirpy theme, which is perfect for producing this blog, and I have lost interest in WordPress. However, I have a small data project that tracks the audiobooks I have listened to for which PHP would a good solution.

I am also learning modern HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from Dave Gray’s tutorials. I am way behind the times, having learned these in the early 2010s and not keeping up with new standards and capabilities.

For the past three years I have been taking classes in astronomy from various astronomy clubs. I have an idea that I’d like to put together a four-session class that is a survey of the Milky Way galaxy, and I’ve begun to collect notes.

After a minor injury last August, I started running again in November. My progress has been steady, and I ran 22 miles the week of January 6 with a long run of 10 miles. Since that completed 10 weeks in a row of running, I took six days off to rest my joints. I ran today before tonight’s snowstorm, which will make it difficult to run for a few days. My goal is to run at least one half marathon in 2025.

Bicycling is on hiatus because of the cold weather. I need to take my bike in to the local bicycle shop (LBS) for annual maintenance.

Each week, I reduce clutter in our house until our trash bin is full. It will take many more weeks to eliminate the clutter accumulated from living in our house for almost 24 years.

I closed my Twitter/X account in 2024, and I don’t post anymore on Facebook. I have an Instagram account that I use only for seeing what my friends are doing. I just opened a Bluesky account, and it feels like the old Twitter of the 2010s, but I post rarely there.