must be the weather

We were under a tornado warning earlier today, which has now moved into DC and PG County. Tornado spotted near the Pentagon. Weird.

Odd dreams last night too, the one incongruity I remember was reading some email saying someone's most recent ex and their next-most-recent ex were going to be hosting some sort of party. I think "unlikely" would be an extremely mild description of the likelihood of that ever happening.

I must be some sort of masochist

(And no comments from the peanut gallery! ;P)

I managed to get caught up to where I'm working on week 5 of my PHP class (this is week 6), so what did I do? I signed up for PHP II - The Cool Stuff (meaning database access, xml, imap/pop, sockets, etc.). I think I'm probably crazy, as I had such a struggle the last week or two of this class. I understand in theory what needs to be done, but I'm not so good yet with putting that into practice.

I swore I wouldn't take two classes at a time again after my experience trying to keep up with the XML class and the number of assignments in the beginning PHP class, but these only overlap by a week. That won't kill me...right? And they're not offering it again until March, so I decided to take the plunge.

My brain has been atrophying. I haven't had any consistent work to do in about a year other than routine maintenance of our machines, and I'm finding it hard to get myself back into a habit of sitting down and saying "I need to do X, and it needs to be done by this date". I think having some background with Cold Fusion is making this class not quite as difficult as it could be otherwise, but I still feel like I shouldn't be having as hard a time with some of this stuff as I am. Maybe I'm really not cut out to be a web geek, at least not of the developer variety. I see Chris, who picks this kind of thing up in 15 minutes, and then I watch myself struggle with what seems like it ought to be a basic concept. Maybe my perception is just skewed though by the fact that I know so many geeks who pick up technical stuff so easily, or else have been programming for 15+ years.

I need an extra helping of self-confidence, please.