Zgriptsuroica tries not to get distracted by the new shiny

[zgriptsuroica]

I've been chipping away at things, though mostly focused on Icelandic and French the last couple of weeks. Balzac has proven something of a challenge. I'm currently about halfway through Illusions perdues, and I find that there are some sections where I can read 100 pages in one go and others where 15-20 pages in a day is a struggle and I find myself feeling sleepy after just a single page. I feel like this can be a bit like Moby Dick at times, but with printing and paper making instead of killing whales. I didn't make too much progress on anything else while trying to finish this in time for yesterday's book club meeting, but it didn't happen. Hopefully I'll finish the rest by next week.

I've dug into Hús Harmleikja more and may try to shift my focus to reading that now that I haven't got the book club deadline looming. I can read a 6 page chapter in maybe 2 hours now, so I suspect pushing on may really help to get a bit more comfortable and bring Icelandic more in reach for me. After all, it was only last November that a single page of a children's book took me 30 minutes to parse out, and this time it's a normal adult book I'm working on. I figure if I sit down and power through a chapter a day, I should be able to finish it in a bit over a month. I suspect I won't quite manage that pace at the beginning and may exceed it by the end, but hopefully I'll be able to get through the whole thing by early- to mid-May.

Since I'm obviously a speed reader in Icelandic already, I tossed an Amazon gift card I received towards some ebooks via Forlagið and another Icelandic publisher that makes books available on the Kindle store. I bought a Kindle Icelandic-English-Icelandic dictionary as well, but wound up returning it as it didn't get integrated into the available pop-up dictionaries like I'd hoped. There's not even a monolingual pop-up dictionary available, which kind of kills one of the main advantages of buying ebooks for language learning. When I get to it, though, I can look forward to reading Synir Duftsins, Englar Alheimsins, Snjóblinda and Þriðja Táknið. Mostly thrillers, which isn't my normal pick, but they seem to generally be pretty short and quick reads, so probably good for learning purposes. Of course, given the amount of thrillers and how many of the available TV shows are police procedurals, I may fulfill the joke I say on /r/learnIcelandic that all foreigners who learn it outside the country must wind up sounding like grizzled cops from Reykjavik.

Only two more lessons to go on Icelandic Online, and I'll be done! They seem pretty short, so I'm going to try and wrap it up this week. After that, I think I'll focus my efforts on reading and to a lesser extent doing exercises in "Íslenska fyrir alla" to work on composition. I think that redoing the whole course will probably be a bit of a waste of time, so I'll just try consulting the main text or other resources when I don't understand what an exercise is asking for. I'm also aiming to start participating more in the server as my vocabulary and composition skills improve, though to a certain extent I know I'll just need to jump in and do it.

I've been reading El astillero in dribs and drabs, as well, but it hasn't really grabbed me.

[zgriptsuroica]

After a touch over half a year since I began it last September (or perhaps late August?), I finished the final section of Icelandic Online! I did courses 1-4, so I'm leaning towards trying to read a few novels over the remainder of the year, and likely doing some of the exercises in Íslenska Fyrir Alla to try and drill some of the declensions and such. Now that I've finished, I think I can give a decent overview of it.

On the positive side, it did manage to get me up and running, and I've started reading a thriller, Hús Harmleikja, by Guðrún Guðlaugsdóttir, so it must have done something right. It also does a decent job of introducing Icelandic culture, touching on some significant historical events, books, musicians and films. It's also free, so it certainly has that going for it.

I would say that it generally does a poor job of explaining much in the way of grammatical concepts, though. If you start this course and have no clue what the dative case is, Icelandic Online is not going to really do much in the way of explaining it for you. It assumes a level of familiarity with grammar from would be learners that is well beyond what I would say most people have. Another point of frustration is that they link the Icelandic-English dictionary hosted by the University of Wisconsin as the reference dictionary, but I very quickly found many words in the course that were not included in this dictionary, which is a bit puzzling. By the time I started in on course 3, I'd largely abandoned it in favor of the Íslensk Nútímamálsorðabók when I could understand the definitions there, and Glosbe's Icelandic-English Dictionary when I could not hack the monolingual dictionary. I'm still on the hunt for an offline dictionary app, mono- or bilingual, that I could use to read on the subway or in other situations where I haven't got internet access.

The course also has some questionable choice of vocabulary, with words like hálshöggva (to behead someone) featuring early on, I believe around course 2. There's also no translations provided for the vocabulary used in a lesson, or really any indication as to which are the keywords one should focus on. Similarly, while the breadth of cultural topics covered was appreciated, I do have to wonder about the obsession with hot tubs. It feels like there were at least 20 units that closed with a dialogue in a hot tub talking about how much people love going in hot tubs in Iceland. It wound up seeming a bit excessive and I kind of got sick of those lessons by the end, was glad to see the last of them. Finally, I would say that there was a pretty dramatic spike in difficulty between course 2 and 3, and it just kept ramping up for the remainder of the courses.

It does seem like a lot of complaints, so I'll clarify that I'm definitely glad it was available to me and I don't know if I would have even started on Icelandic without it, but it's certainly doing things on hard mode to learn Icelandic with these courses as your primary instructional material. Though, with Icelandic, I suppose there's only hard mode, in a way. For now, I'd like to read a fair bit, work on understanding spoken Icelandic and begin participating more in the discord. I think if I can get my skills in these areas up to it, I'd like to maybe go and attend one of the summer courses at B1 or B2 level at Háskólasetur Vestfjarða, perhaps 2023?

Not terribly much going on outside that, since that's taken up a good chunk of my time focusing on wrapping up the course. I finally got caught up with inputting vocab from my novel into my Anki deck for Icelandic, though focusing more on reading means that will undoubtedly lead to a much larger list soon. I've mostly been reading Illusions perdues and otherwise treading water listening to podcasts for French and Spanish. Need to get back into gear with them. After seeing the movie last week, I began reading the prequel volume for 呪術廻戦０東京都立呪術高等専門学校眩しい闇, which is quite the unwieldy title. Aside from character names, it's actually been a bit easier to read than I was expecting. I'm also thinking about turning to my Japanese Kindle for my "Read for 20 minutes" before bed books and hopefully get a page or two of a novel in per night if I stick with it.

[zgriptsuroica]

So it was a bit late and I missed the book club meeting, but I managed to finish reading Illusions perdues on Thursday. It was quite the journey, though I don't know that I necessarily want to chase down all the threads in it to find out how every character wound up. Were it not for the end notes in my copy, I definitely would have been lost with a lot of the political commentary, not to mention all the argot de la papeterie et des journaux. I stand by my previous comments that if you ever find yourself reading Moby Dick and thinking "Wow, this would be awesome if it were about making paper and working in 1820s Parisian newspapers instead of whaling!" my man Honoré de Balzac has you covered here.

Moving on towards April's book, I've begun reading Maryse Condé's Ségou: Les murailles de terre and I'm having an easier time getting into it. Meeting is next Tuesday, but I'm aiming to finish it by Sunday, if not earlier. So far, something about the characters and setting is just clicking for me and I've been enjoying it a great deal. I've also been pretty happy with the book club for getting me to look at more African literature, which I don't have a great knowledge of.

I've also been reading Hús Harmleikja, faster than I would have imagined I could in January, not as quickly as I would like right now. It's not the greatest book ever written and I'm learning some relatively useless words for this stage in my studies (Reimleikar, draugagangur, afturganga and so on), but it I can sit down for two hours and finish a chapter, even stopping to look up lots of words every page, so I would say it's kind of what I need right now. A shame there's no audiobook for it to buy from Forlagið to work on my listening as well. I may have to try that with my next book.

Aside from things directly related to my studies, I've had a few tangential developments. I got my passport in the mall yesterday, so I can finally register for DELE exams when I see the one I want offered! I also qualified for doing Spanish->English translation jobs over on Gengo, so I'm going to see how that works out. I'll be trying to get cleared for translating from Brazilian Portuguese and French as well, so hopefully it'll give me a decent flow of work options as a side job. The other big news is that I got the new job, and start next Monday, so my free time will be substantially curtailed. With that in mind, I'm trying to wrap up the books I've got going at the moment so I don't have too much going on to juggle on top of dealing with learning a new job.

The exciting thing for this is that they offer a tuition reimbursement program, so I could go back and finally get a degree instead of leaving thing 3/4 finished for forever. I just have to see what the terms of the program are beyond maintaining a certain grade or better. If there's no requirement to pursue a degree relevant to this specific job, which is what conversations thus far have lead me to believe, I could have some fun with it. I'm thinking about doing a literature degree in either French or Portuguese (or maybe both?) to get some formal accreditation for my abilities there while also being able to polish off the degree relatively quickly. I suspect I could finish everything needed to complete them based on my already obtained credits within about two years, even only studying part-time. That would have me covered for the myriad jobs that simply require a degree, any degree so long as it's a Bachelor's degree. After that, I could have some fun up to the limits of what the company will reimburse me. I'm assuming there's probably a maximum number of years I can take advantage of the program, so it would probably be wise to go back and get a second degree in something rather more employable than French literature, especially considering I've no desire to either teach nor enter into academia. If I could get my GPA back up, maybe a Comp Sci degree would be possible? Or Econ or something? It would be nice to also get something that gave me a bit of potential in emigrating to somewhere more in line with my views. On the other hand, I could study a bunch of other languages. I was pretty disappointed seeing how limited CUNY schools are with the languages they offer, though. It's not even that great when you start looking at the private schools like Columbia, NYU or Fordham here. Lehman College has a bunch of Irish language courses, yet you can only get a minor in the language, which is kind of weak. Still, there's plenty of stuff that would be fun to learn and all the better if I could get a free degree out of it.

With French in particular, I'm kind of hoping that it would force me to, you know, use the damn language and clean off some of the rust on my speaking and writing abilities. My skills have become sharply uneven, so it would probably be good to rectify that given the chance, and a degree would probably give me the needed motivation to actually stick with it. Heck, maybe I could get back around to re-taking the DALF and actually pass this time.

[zgriptsuroica]

I survived my first week at the new job, though it took a lot more out of me than I'd expected it would. Owing to this, I didn't really do very much at all this week. I've only managed to keep up with Anki and Clozemaster, read some more of Ségou and start in on 処刑少女の生きる道, finishing out the prologue reading a little bit each night before bed. This week having a GP with a Sprint race and an appointment with the optometrist didn't help either. Going to call it an early night, try to read a page or two of Hús Harmleikja to avoid not having read any Icelandic all week and turn in to bed. Hopefully as I get used to the job, it'll get a bit better and perhaps I'll even get in better shape. I knew it would be rough coming off two months of sitting on my backside doing nothing but reading, but I hadn't anticipated I would be this tired.

[zgriptsuroica]

I've been holding steady over the last month of so. I finished reading the first volume of Maryse Condé's Ségou and I'm looking forward to the second. Since then, I also started and finished Raphael Montes' Dias perfeitos and highly recommend not reading it. I'm not sure where they found the people to praise this book on the covers, but it basically read like a nice-guy incel's fantasy about how to win over a woman with zero redeeming qualities and a resolution that would be considered tired even by the standards of day time soap operas. 処刑少女の生きる道 has been my book for reading a little bit before bed each night. I haven't made massive progress, but I'm 15% in now and enjoying it so far. Considering how unstructured my Japanese studies have been since I realized I could just steamroll my way through manga, albeit slowly, leaning on Jisho, I consider it a small victory when I come across words like 導力 that neither the pop-up dictionary on my Kindle nor Jisho wants to recognize as a word and not just recognize it, but confirm my guess at the reading was right when I watch an episode of the anime.

I've been bringing Hús Harmleikja back and forth to work as my main focus now, and I'm starting to really get into it at this point. I'm not sure what caused it if it's anything more complex than just 100 pages of exposure to the author's pet words and writing style, but I feel like my reading speed has really picked up, and I'm usually able to knock out at least a chapter a day (5-8 pages) between my bus ride to work and breaks, which wind up being a bit less than an hour a day. I'm eager to see how this picks up. If I keep on this pace, I may well finish it by the end of June, which I would be quite happy with.

With my focus on Icelandic and Japanese Light Novels that are honestly probably too difficult for me, I'm realizing my reading goals in my signature are probably overly optimistic, perhaps with the exception of French and Spanish where I can crank my way throw shorter novels over a weekend if I really get into them. That said, what I'm doing feels pretty productive, so I'm not going to let missing some arbitrary numbers get me down.

I've kept at my studies, even if I haven't quite had time to update as regularly as I might have liked. Aside from work, I've also been trying to work on some better habits and look at some things to improve my health.

[zgriptsuroica]

I've cleared the 50% mark on Hús Harmleikja this week and have been really moving along, my best day managing two chapters! I also managed a 50% success rate on my four sentences posted in the Discord group tonight surviving without anyone finding something wrong with them so far. Progress! I've found some more bands I've been enjoying as well. Two of the standouts are Egó and Utangarðsmenn.





There's also a ton of Icelandic Rap and Reggae on Spotify, but it's really not doing anything for me. The rap in particular just sounds bad, maybe some of it will catch my ear when I can actually listen along to it and understand some of the lyrics. Much of my planned listening practice (mostly watching shows) has been placed on hold since my computer's sound has been shot since the ports on the front of the tower seem to have shorted out. With the bluetooth dongle for my soundbar plugged in in the back, it just cuts out every few seconds. Fortunately, I'm expecting my new one to be here sometime by Monday or Tuesday afternoon. A quick install and I should be able to get back into things. Maybe my Kodi add-ons will have updated by then and I won't keep having it freeze my system every time the Trakt or metadata scrapers get called.

I'd like to try and get as far as I can by the end of the summer with Icelandic (maybe read a third book for the year?), since I'm planning to sign up for some university courses for the fall semester. It would be charitable to say I was a terrible student when I last made an attempt at it 10 years ago, so I'm planning on a couple semesters of courses as a non-matriculated student to get my grades up and hopefully not have to go straight onto academic probation when I enroll again. Work will reimburse me for the tuition to finish a degree at the universities around here so long as I maintain a certain GPA, so I want to make the most of it. I've kind of lucked my way into a pretty decent paying position for someone with just a high school education, but I also realize it's rather precarious. Looking at the available courses, my plans of doing a quick literature degree for either French, Spanish or Portuguese have been fairly well decided for me, given how sparse the offerings for everything except Spanish are. Looks like I'm aiming for a BA in Spanish literature, so I'm going to try and take a course or two this fall that would be relevant for it, to avoid wasting too much time. I rather expect that will completely murder my free time for reading in Icelandic and making any sort of satisfying progress unless I really go hard on it now and learn as much as I can.

Unfortunately, if all goes according to plan, this state of things may continue for several years. I think I'll enjoy the BA in Spanish literature and it'll cover me in the event something happens and I lose this job so that I can still qualify for the all too common "Bachelor's required, but any one will do" jobs. Still, I'd like to follow it up with something that would have better career prospects associated with it, even better if it would let me emigrate at some point. Once I've got that in reserve, I can take as much time as I like for really going hard on Icelandic, picking up a new language, or deciding I want to get a BA in Portuguese, or a Master's or even a PhD in Spanish if I'm feeling extra ridiculous. I can sink my time into that when I get to it, but I want to have a plan B that doesn't involve me going back to retail or cutting fish if I have to leave my current job for whatever reason.

As for French, I read Kim Thúy's Em last weekend. I was an interesting series of snippets of stories of the Vietnam War, though there wasn't much in the way of a narrative structure and it left me wanting more. I get it's not what the author intended to do with this book, but I would have much preferred to see the individual threads more developed. Next up for French is André Maurois' Climats.

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I did a bit of a marathon session early Saturday morning and finally finished my first Icelandic novel written for adults! I can't say that Guðrún Guðlaugsdóttir's Hús Harmleikja is a masterpiece of crime fiction (to be honest, calling it okay might be a bit generous), but it worked decently well for a first novel. There was certainly a hump to get over in terms of vocabulary and style initially, but it plateaued for me around 150/255 pages, at which point I started flying. I think I read the last 105 pages in about the same time it took me to read the first 15 or so. I was thinking it might be good to find a better series and just read a series, the idea being to give myself more exposure to the language to internalize things, while not having to readjust to a new author's vocabulary and favorite structures or flourishes with every book.

My main issues with this book on its own merits are twofold. First, the author spends nearly the first 3/4 of the book playing into this supernatural aspect of the events that just kind of fizzles out at the last minute to all be the work or delusions of a mentally ill old woman who had a real rough life. It just came off as lazy padding and didn't really do anything for me. The other issue was simply that I couldn't believe the other characters kept talking to Alma. She spends the second half of the book speaking to the same handful of people, then going straight to her police contacts with what they told her and having them wind up being questioned about things they had just revealed to her. Heck, three of them kept mooching off the house she was watching for a place to stay!

Maybe I'll try another book in the series at some point, since I figure there must have been something good going for it in order for her to get seven books published, but it's low on my list of priorities. I'm thinking of reading one of the following:

• Bróðir - Halldór Armand - I can read the whole blurb now and only had to look up one word, so maybe this is on my level now? A bit longer than my previous book.
• Englar Alheimsins - Einar Már Guðmundsson - Really famous book, I think the wonderful Soffia gave it a favorable review both as a book and in terms of it being a relatively easy read. Way fewer unknown words skimming the first page of the ebook I have, though I did notice a typo too. I could also watch the movie for some extra practice.
• A handful of thrillers - I've got three more thrillers I bought when someone gifted me an Amazon giftcard. I would expect so of the vocab would transfer over from Hús Harmleikja
• Blóðberg -Þóra Karítas Árnadóttir - The shortest book I have, but it's set in 1608. I can get more of the summary, but the actual text makes my head spin.
• Tími Nornarinnar - Árni Þórarinsson - The longest book I've got that wasn't written by Halldór Laxness. On the plus side, I've already seen the show, so I know the main strokes of the story.

I'm leaning towards a few short books so I might be able to finish another book or two by the end of the summer, but I might go for the long one if I can read another book quickly enough. Of course, my self-imposed deadline might wind up coming to naught. The CUNY system has a surprisingly lacking number of courses for Spanish, or for any other language, really, and as a non-matriculated student, I'd have to wait until just before the semester begins and hope that I could get a seat in one of the sessions. Right now, it's looking like I might be leaning towards either a course on post-Civil War Spanish literature or a survey of Mexican literature.

That aside, I'm trying to wrap up some other books I have on hold, then beginning André Maurois' Climats for the next book club pick. I kind of doubt I'll wake up two hours early to participate in the discussion, but I've found it a nice way to keep myself on track reading French books and checking out authors I wouldn't have found out about otherwise. I'm also thinking about revising my approaching to reading in Japanese. I've been holding off reading most of the manga I want to with the idea that if I keep giving in and reading them in English, I'll never make progress. In light of my thoughts about reading a series in Icelandic, I'm going to try a new approach, reading a single manga and light novel series each in Japanese, and anything else being fair game in English until I finish them. I think I'm going to go with 古見さんは、コミュ症です。for my manga series and 処刑少女の生きる道 for my light novels. It was creating a lot of stress that I couldn't read things fast enough/balance other languages to make reasonable progress on all the stuff I wanted to read, so I feel like it was starting to get counter productive for me.

Also, I had no idea what I was missing out on just using ibus-mozc as my IME on my last computer. I decided to try out the mozc-ut-united engine for ibus with the accompanying dictionary that makes use of Google's IME project (or at least the open source version), and what a difference it makes in the predictions!

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I wound up starting Englar Alheimsins and have been enjoying it a fair bit so far. There's a good bit of unknown vocabulary, but it doesn't feel terribly overwhelming and I can get through some chapters with minimal look ups. I think I ought to be able to get through this book pretty quickly, I managed almost 20% in my first week, and that was a pretty busy week where I didn't have as much time to read as I might have liked. I suspect I'll gain momentum as I go and be able to make some decent progress, especially having more free time over the next couple of weeks.

I'm contemplating dropping Anki from my routine for Icelandic and just doing Clozemaster for a while longer. Anki is becoming more of a pain to maintain, and I feel as though I'm getting diminishing returns on it versus just, you know, reading books and watching TV and stuff. Clozemaster at least has the benefit of being premade, at least until I finish the "Fluency Fast track" deck. I also cancelled my Polylogger sub and uninstalled it earlier today. While I liked the app in concept, I found it a bit cumbersome to use to track all the little sessions throughout the day, like reading for short bursts on the bus to/from work, etc. Maybe a "Quick session" widget that defaults to starting with the same options as the previous session would have worked for me. More damning, in my opinion, was the lack of options to opt out of the social media features of it. Out of the blue, I had random people following me, and clapping at me and cluttering up my notifications. I just wanted to get some stats in peace and quiet.

I wrapped up Climats, which was well-written and enjoyable enough, but left me feeling a bit "So what?" Basically just bored upper class French people sucking at marriage and being mopey about it at the end of things. Not to say I didn't enjoy it, but the back cover's blurb about it being some psychological masterpiece with insights into the human condition seemed a wee bit overstated to me. Waiting to see when Albertine publishes the summer book list, but I have some more material in the eaves if the mood strikes me sooner.

I also took some actual concrete steps and began reaching out to schools asking about programs to be able get back to school and finish my undergrad already. Hoping to go with an online Spanish BA program and being able to mostly do asynchronous classes if I test out of some of the lower level stuff. It would be nice to finally have my degree and not have that over my head, though I would still need to go back and study something with a bit more robust of a career track, most likely.

After further discussions, looking to move with my family by or around September. We're currently saving up for it, but I'm pretty sure that we've found the neighborhood we want to go to. It was nice and quiet, and would more or less maintain my commute as it is around 20-30 minutes door-to-door. It would also bring some temptation along with it, though. As I stepped off the bus, I actually heard people speaking Irish just out and about in the street. It would certainly be a good opportunity to learn Irish while I was there.

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After just over a month, I've finished reading Englar Alheimsins. It was mostly enjoyable and kind of touching. There were some pretty humorous moments mixed in, and I think the small subsections of the main chapters really helped me to maintain my momentum. I might read a book or two in English and maybe French or Portuguese, then come back to Icelandic before I fall off my streak. I've started listening to episodes of Draugar Fortíðar here and there as well. That one just about completely escapes me unless it happens to be about a topic I'm already familiar with. I was surprised how well I could follow the episode about the Dyatlov Pass incident, for example. Other than that, I'm just trying to focus on getting used to the sounds and rhythms of the language and enjoying it when I do understand the odd sentence here and there.

Aside from that, I've stalled out a bit lately while work kills me. I'm also now formally in the process of applying to go back to school and get a BA in Spanish, so that should eat up a good chunk of what little free time I had. Given the decrease in free time, I've gone through with cutting out Anki and I'm not even worried too much if I missed Clozemaster each day, so long as I read something in Icelandic. I'm thinking I'm going to follow through with an idea and try reading a series if I get one that clicks, that way I can build up some momentum with having familiar vocabulary and style from one book to the next. Though it's realistically probably too long to be a comfortable read for me quite yet, I'm thinking of starting up Tími Nornarinnar next, since I know I like the characters and plot/style well enough unless the books prove drastically different from the TV show.

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So after talking about it for a while, I've finally signed up for a degree program! If all goes according to plan, I'll have an honors degree in French and Spanish in a few years, along with an excuse to take a week vacation each to France and Spain during the course of the degree. While I feel pretty comfortable in Spanish, I think this would be a good chance to improve my abilities in more formal and academic registers, as well as likely having to get a bit more used to Iberian forms. On the French side of things, I'm hoping it'll force me out of my rut of being almost exclusively passive in using it. My writing and speech are certainly vastly inferior to my actual comprehension, and this would be a nice chance to address that. Allegedly, this course will take me to the C1 level in both of my languages, though that seems a bit ambitious were I starting from scratch. As it stands, the Instituto Cervantes self-assessment quiz places me somewhere between C1 and C2 (with the obvious caveat that it has no production component, but I'm less concerned about that in Spanish) and the university's assessment advised jumping straight into an intermediate French course. In many ways, I'm super excited about this. I'll finally have a qualification to point to vouching for my ability on my resume and such, and should something happen that I lose this job, I won't be locked out of the myriad "Bachelor's degree required, any subject/field" jobs that are so ubiquitous here. I really don't want to wind up slipping backwards to work in retail or as a fish cutter again if I can help it.

The major downside is that I'll be, obviously, severely time constrained in terms of what I can do with other languages between full time work that goes 40-55 hours a week and a part-time course load the school estimates at a further 16-18 hours per week. I anticipate some advantage in that I'm looking purely for an economical and painless way to get a degree rather than learning something entirely new from the ground up, but I don't want to overestimate that, at least not my first semester or two. Unfortunately, unless this proves much easier than I had anticipated, it will likely mean my only active focus might be Icelandic, with Portuguese on maintenance mode and Japanese likely being dropped entirely, for the time being. I may try to tweak my Japanese and just focus on extensive reading and gradually ramping up, but I feel my Icelandic is on the cusp of actually being useful, at least for consuming media. I'm about 40 pages in on my third Icelandic novel of the year, and planning on sticking with the series since I enjoy the style well enough and hope to make things easier by getting used to the author's pet words and style. Short of finding myself suddenly surrounded by a language, I don't anticipate being about to significantly improve or learn any other languages during the next several years, particularly if I start taking more modules per year to graduate faster.

I'm contemplating treating myself to a new fountain pen (Maybe a Pilot 823 with a Falcon nib, a Montblanc 146R or a red Visconti Wall Street, though I'm leaning more towards the 823 or nothing), in order to celebrate the occasion and get myself hyped for note taken, but I don't want to get ahead of myself. I've already got plenty of pens, maybe it would be better to wait until I actually graduate and get something wild as a reward.

To further complicate matters, I'm also trying to move apartments at the moment, so I might find myself stretched pretty thin in September or October. Classes start in October, so it would be best to get it squared away by then if I can, but the rental market is crazy at the moment, we'll see.