On returning from Korea I found that while I had absolutely no antipathy towards my usual university studies, the fact I was looking forward to the new term was almost by default: no reason to not be looking forward to it, but not any real emotional attachment to getting back, either. It’s been interesting to see that change over the past few days as I get more into my vacation reading (something I need to get a bit of a move on with, predictably). And now of course Korea feels rather more distant than it did.

I am now finally seeing some progress with learning to type properly. I am sitting down to practice with gtypist for half an hour each day but am increasingly seeing my fingers moving to the home row and actually hitting the right keys during normal computing. It’s still massively more effort to type properly and I think I’m holding my hands over the keyboard wrongly as they can get tense and sore on some occasions; on others, I don’t have any problems doing certain reaches. We’ll see how much more natural it gets if I keep up the practice; eventually, I will force myself to do it all the time. My speeds are around 80wpm atm, approaching my usual 90wpm that I get when not typing properly.

The third thing I have been working on, learning Korean, has not really been progressing as I haven’t really got into a habit of studying it formally. If I can only get a little more grammar under my belt then I can practice writing sentences to friends on Facebook and the like which will dramatically improve my capacity I imagine.

It’s nice to have a great deal of freedom, since I’m not finding any success in finding a job, to get on with projects like this in a fairly restful manner, padded as my time is with a great deal of non-academic reading.[1] Despite this I am finding that I don’t actually do as much in each day as I would like to, and I don’t really have any idea why this is. I’d like to be more efficient in order to get more out of the summer.

I’m trying to learn how to skip so that I can exercise on more days per week, since running for more than three is awful for one’s knees. Korea-inspired, of course.[2] By making exercise more regular it’s easier to stick to my running routine. But so far I can only jump over the rope once before I get caught up in it.

[1] I’m reading the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy atm and frankly I don’t know what all the fuss is about; it’s pretty mediocre so far.

[2] It’s also massively more efficient than running, since we’re evolved to be really good at that. You are out of breath much faster with skipping.