Drumroll, please...

I guess it's finally time to declare goal 42, Learn how to program a website, officially underway. First, I tweaked the code for this blog in the weeks before launching it. Then, I completely modified a different template for my friend Chelsea's blog. And now, I am proud to present, for your bookmarking pleasure, the official Swingsets and Cathedrals favicon! Apparently, that is the term the internet, with its seemingly infinite ability to portmanteau, has thought up to label the little icon next to the web address up in the address bar there, and on your bookmark toolbar. Look! See! Isn't it adorable? It was actually surprisingly easy to add to the blog; much more difficult was the actual making of it in Paint.

Anyway, time to hit up at least a thousand grains of rice's worth of capitals before bed. Bamako, Mali! Antananarivo, Madagascar! Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia! Conakry, Guinea!
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A Secret

While I am fairly confident that I could label a map of Africa with all the correct country names, I was really bad about learning their capitals. Same for the islands of the South Pacific, and, to a lesser extent, those of the Caribbean, but in every region, I knew at least the major ones. I have been playing Free Rice for the last 45 minutes or so trying to remedy this, and earned 4030 grains of rice and developed a few mnemonics for remembering which capital goes with which country - at least when the names of the capital are provided and I don't have to recall them straight from memory. I'm hoping that by doing this every day for the next week, at least 2500 grains, I'll be able to reinforce the names even more. Just to confirm my basic geography skills, I'll also sprinkle in some of the "Countries on the map" game, too.

I also realized I should probably get a (re)start on Rosetta Stone Spanish, so my goal for this week is to try and do at least half an hour of it every morning before work. I find that scheduling things to do before work instead of before bed makes me much more apt to do them - partially because it gives me a nice excuse to delay heading over to the office, and partially because I'd just rather go to sleep at night. I'm also trying hard not to overschedule myself, but it's very difficult. Forty hours a week at work is a lot of time, something I know shouldn't be a huge surprise to me, nor something that I let get in the way of me doing what I want to do. Especially when the real reason is TV. Anyway, that's my plan for this week. I'll keep you posted on how that actually goes.
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