I have been keeping up with my DuoLingo lessons. The streaks and friend streaks and leaderboards do enough to make sure I never skip a day. That an the incessant notifications from the app. But ... I do have one distraction from my language lessons.

DuoLingo has chess lessons. I've always wanted to learn to play chess, but beyond learning how the pieces move and then getting destroyed repeatedly in online games, I never pursued it. But now I'm getting little tiny play by play lessons of different scenarios and how to respond and why. I am BY NO MEANS good at it. God damn, is it ever hard. When I do go on Chess.com and play strangers, I do NOT do well. I get so nervous and make so many bonehead mistakes.

I will say this though. I know very little about openings. And I'm completely lost in the midgame. But the endgame. Man do I seem to be good at the end game. After my opponent has decimated my ranks, I can dance around, gobble up their pieces, avoid checkmate, and usually in even the most dire circumstances end things in a stalemate draw. I'm sure a lot of that is due to me being matched with people with similar ranks who don't know how to close out a game and against anyone competent I would be dead in seconds. But it's still fun. I wish I could play someone I know regularly but I can't find anyone willing to play me. So if you have a Chess.com username and want to play with me leave a comment. I love saying leave a comment like anyone is reading.

Also, side note. I now know what a Queen's Gambit is and honestly it's not that cool. It's just an opening move/moves. It sounds like it's some kind of dramatic endgame sacrifice of your queen to win the game or something. But nope. Just the first move or two with your pawns.

Any time anyone asks what superpower I would most like to have, I always answer that I would like to speak every language with native fluency. And yet, I've rarely if ever done anything to approach that goal. Daniel and I did take a semester of French at SMU one time. That was fun but without continued effort didn't really stick.

Then my best seven foot tall woman friend suggested I download DuoLingo. It's free and you can learn any number of languages. So I did, and I started taking French lessons. Then I decided to throw in German since I already know it pretty well and it would be fun and easy to refresh. Then we planned a trip to Portugal so I focused on learning was Portuguese I could in the months leading up to our departure.

THEN I got so sick of the advertisements that I paid for a subscription. They got me. I admit it. But now that I'm paying for it, I'm going all in. I am currently switching daily between: French, Germany, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Danish. What's weird is that while switching between them certainly slows my progress, learning seven sets of vocabulary at once hasn't really proven to be any more difficult than one.

I know that these little exercises and AI driven conversation and voice recognition are unlikely to make me fluent. They're unlikely to allow me to converse easily in a foreign country. But I don't really care. Because (A) it's fun, (B) it's better than doom scrolling, and (C) it really does teach you a LOT if not all you need to know. When we were in Portugal, I busted out a few phrases with our guides (which of course ended with hilarious failure as I spoke Brazilian Portuguese), but also just consumed words around me. I knew what the little Brazilian kid was talking about when he screamed, "Abacaxi! Aacaxi!" at the top of his lungs (he saw a pineapple laying on the ground).

And that was enough for me. I cannot explain how utterly maddening it is for me in a foreign country to see words all around me and not know what they mean. I don't CARE what they mean. It just bothers me not to know. This really helped with that mental fatigue. To see a sign in a store window and know that it says "Closed on Mondays." It allows me to move on and not fixate on wanting to stop and translate.

So anyway, that's my plug for DuoLingo. It's free if you can withstand the most obnoxious assault of ads for phone games deliberately designed to wear you down into signing up for a subscription. But if you've ever been even a little curious, this is a super low effort, low risk way to delve into it and feel like you're accomplishing something every day.

I just thought I would take a moment to fill you all in on the goings on as of late. Yesterday was a pretty good day. I had two people tell me they saw me on the JumboTron at the game. One was this kid Ryan that I shoot with in Archery, and the other was my dear Nancy. That made me happy since NONE of the people I hang out with regularly bothered to see me. Oh well, no hard feelings. In Archery I shot pretty well, got the second highest score I've ever gotten. I also scratched the shit out of hand. It doesn't hurt but it doesn't look very attractive either.

Nothing too exciting has been going on. We got the analog portion of our digital thermometer designed, tested, protyped, and built. It works, folks! My professor held an Aim 'n' Flame up to it today to see if it could react to the high temperatures and it performed exactly as we'd hoped. We have some minor tweaks to do, but basically all thats left to do for this portion of the circuit is to lay it out and order a pc board that we can solder it to. Then we have to get started on programming the digital logic side of it so that it actually outputs a number you can read to a couple of 7-segment displays. Wheee. I love circuits.

I hate my life.