The shoulder season of spring and summer is here, one of the best times of the year where it's that perfect range of temperatures. You can be sleeveless but not sweating, and in NYC it was before the subway stations hit roughly the temperature of the inside of a volcano, so even commuting was easy.

I miss taking the subway. I miss the museums, the gardens, the parks, and the restaurants. Even though I know the atmosphere and actuality of living in NYC has changed, I remember how easy it was in many ways to fill your time or just plan for where you would go on your days off, even if often I was too tired to put those plans into action.

I also miss the exercise that came naturally every day. Just getting to and from work involved multiple flights of stairs and a minimum of close to four miles of walking a day. Here the choices are random planned suburban streets or nothing, and making the same loop every day with no particular reason to do so turns boring very quickly. I stopped doing yoga and most of the exercise I get is food shopping or going to Costco, or creaming butter and sugar together by hand instead of using the mixer.

Even when I was in my first professional job and had my own apartment in a town about half an hour from here the stagnation was the same. Nowhere nearby that was safe to walk around because of traffic, and having never being a gym rat, exercise really was nonexistent. Of course, I also had the metabolism of a 24 year old then, which helped immensely, but that advantage isn't ever coming back, so this 42 year old will have to decide to make an effort.

Pull out the yoga DVD from the small pile I don't have in storage (I was smart enough to keep it here), and start making a fool of myself contorting my body, learning how to stretch, balance, and hold myself in odd positions again. Try to walk more. Make my muscles move when all I want to do is sit and sew. The weather is perfect and this summer can be better than the last. I've worked through some of my anger over these long winter months, and perhaps this can help in burning off some of the rest of it. 

Small goals.

Since I'm 42 now, I can now officially say it is not the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Basically it was a lovely day where I got to eat a wonderful crab cake lunch outside with my family and had a cake I did not bake myself for a change. 

I stayed up last night until 3:30am doing the coding homework for the second week of class and I can definitively say that I learn better in a physical setting where I would have a TA check my code than in a virtual one where you plug it into a system that will give errors but no suggestions. BASIC came more naturally to me than Python since at least you could include goto loops. Perhaps there's an equivalent in Python but it really seems to be a linear code and we've covered while and for loops but it doesn't have the same flexibility.

Or it could just be that I'm really new at this and I may figure it out in the coming lectures. It's been so long since I learned anything truly from scratch that it's hard to remember just how long it takes to put the pieces together. I trained a lot of bankers and colleagues at my last job but it was much easier being the teacher, the student definitely has the harder role.

More than anything though, this birthday has brought home how much I miss my time at Cornell, and how much I miss living in NYC. But I think I'm making progress at accepting those things and times are gone. I still have no idea what life is going forward so I'm continuing to wait and watch.

 It's too soon to really tell, but I think I like the class. God knows it's compatible with my new schedule since it's on San Francisco time and I have never been a morning person, but really it's nice to not focus on me and my failed current life right now. I don't think I'll ever be great at coding but it's a skill to develop, the same as everything else, and it certainly can't hurt.

The discount that's running on the course is a huge plus right now so that I'm not investing more than a couple hundred dollars, and I'm not going to spend the big bucks unless I truly feel that I could turn this into more than an occasional hobby. My birthday's almost here and while I doubt I'll be any happier to be a year older, it will be a milestone of sorts in all the wrong ways. Anything that can take my focus off of that is an additional plus. Maybe this year can be better than the last.

On May 11th I'm going to start an Intro to Python course that will let me learn the basics before committing the full amount to a boot camp. God, I can't believe I'm even saying that since it sounds so trendy and pretentious, and FUCK I hate that this is the best option I have available. I know that it's a gamble since three months of learning can never equal a full degree in CS or a decade of actual coding experience but it's better than nothing, which is what I have right now.

I had to find a copy of one of my diplomas to send in as proof that I have graduated with a degree in the past, and I rifled through the box of papers I have here. Sure enough, I couldn't find my masters, but I did find my bachelors. Close enough I suppose.

In the meantime my sister is asking if I put it in a drawer and I snapped "of course not." Why? Because she has spent seven years with her stuff dumped here, so there are no drawers available for me. What I do have are two drawers with my clothes, part of a hallway closet, various other boxes or places I've tucked things away, and a small storage unit. My masters degree is probably in fucking storage with everything else.

I'll try to apply myself to this course without resentment even though I know I'm angry all the time. I have to decide to do this for me, and try not to feel forced into it. I used to love to learn, now I guess getting back to that might let me work towards having space of my own again, where I can find my things again. Maybe where I can find myself again.

I guess I have a new direction if I want to invest $15,000 and learn Python. Data scientist is sort of close to librarianship as I think it involves analysis of data and classifications, so that may be the direction to head in even though I barely have energy to get through the day. 

Honestly, I'm more excited about the pineapple coconut cake I baked that is light as a feather and tastes absolutely amazing. 

Tomorrow I have another telemed appointment with my endocrinologist and since I got my blood results back I know why my thyroid is constantly producing T4 and T3 without pituitary assistance. Graves disease for sure, since it runs in the family and the antibodies that were in my blood are proof that I've inherited it. I'll just keep hoping it's manageable and maybe contributing to my complete lack of motivation, maybe it's something that will get better. Something has to eventually.