10 Minutes - Snow Day

Hi. It's Joe.

I enjoyed my snow day today. It was not an especially brutal snow day, and I probably could have gone to work today. But I took it off to give myself a 3-day weekend.

Just a little while ago, I got done working out. It was a light workout today, and just 45 minutes. I was hoping to do 90 minutes but I just wasn't feeling it, so I quit after my minimum 45 minutes. I am at 4 of 5 workouts for the week, so I am not worried about hitting my weekly goal. I will probably work out tomorrow and Sunday.

I also practiced Welsh today, for an hour. I made some decent progress. The word gellyg means pear in Welsh. I have a hankering for some fruit now, so I am going to cruise out to the Piggly Wiggly here shortly and get some.

Later I am going to practice piano. I am at 2/5 for both Welsh and piano for this week, but if I get an hour of piano in tonight, I will be 4/5 for piano for the week. Recall that my New Year's Resolution was to accomplish five 30-minute practice sessions per week for each of Welsh and piano.

I am thinking about changing it to three 60-minute sessions each. This will add up to more net time per week on these activities, but less consecutive days. I find that I need a day off sometimes to let everything I am learning sink in, and then when I get back to it two days later, my learning seems to be synergized. This happened with piano recently. Last week, I practiced the piano pretty diligently almost every day, but by Sunday's practice, I was really burned out and it did not go well at all.

I didn't end up practicing piano again until Thursday of this week (yesterday). And when I did, it went really well. I am working on a jazz piano piece that is not too hard, so it is a good one to develop my left hand chord playing and simultaneous right hand melody playing. I will definitely get an hour of piano in tonight. I can feel it. Tomorrow, I will do another hour of Welsh and then on Sunday I can hopefully do an hour of each.

I have a singing lesson on Sunday in Madison too. I might go to a concert in Madison on Sunday night. Very laid back weekend.

I am reading this book called "A Universe From Nothing" by Lawrence Krauss, that my parents got me for my birthday. It is a very cool read, but also very mind blowing. It did not give me weird dreams last night like it has on other nights. Today, I read a couple of pages, and Krauss said in about 2 trillion years, none of the light from anything outside of our own galaxy will be able to reach us. And by us, I mean the future beings that live around here, whether descended from us or not. It will appear to them as if they are the only galaxy that exists. They will be able to see stars in their own galaxy, because these are attracted by gravity and don't move away from each other the way distant objects outside the galaxy do. You see, the universe's expansion is actually increasing, and eventually distant objects will be racing away from all other objects at faster than the speed of light. Thus, the light from them will never reach us. Although the beings living around those distant places will see their local environment, they won't be able to see us either. That makes me sad.

But that is 2 trillion years in the future, and right now, time to go make a fruit salad.

Time.