January roundup

It’s been a little bit of a vacuum month for me. I feel like January just sailed by. It’s been more of a cleanup month than anything else. It was so much happening around Christmas, and so much baggage that followed over New Years, that this month’s purpose was mostly for tying up loose ends.

German training

It’s been the last month of the class I’ve been taking at Migros Klubbschule. It has been a great run but to be honest I’m quite happy that it now comes to an end. Lately, I’ve felt a lack of motivation and I haven’t had the time to study as intensive as I’ve done previously. It’s going to be great to get back two full evenings each week in my life. I see my greatest achievement as having finished reading Die Entdeckung Der Langsamkeit. Now I’m going to take a complete break of German training in February. My next goal will be to try and get the B1 certificate in June. So I will probably start again to pick up some intensive training in April or so.

Blinkist

This month I’ve started using something called Blinkist. The idea of the service is to take nonfiction books and break them down into small concise chapters. Kind of like a brief summary of the best parts of the book. Each “book” takes about 15–20 minutes to finish. A great feature is that most books are also available in audio format. I’ve tried incorporating this together with my daily lunch walks. It fits perfect to finish two of these “books” per walk and I always come back to work full of inspiration after having learned something new.

Lifesum

At the moment, it’s quite hard to create a good digital health system which is not overly complex. I’ve tried out Lifesum this month to gain some more knowledge about my food habits. So far I’m satisfied with its ease of use. It shows me how many calories I can have in a day if I want to stay on track with my goals, and it’s very fast to add entries. Best feature is that it connects with my UP bracelet so the more I walk, the more calories I can have and it figures it all out automatically. Runner up feature is the measurement of water intake. It’s never been this fun to empty a water bottle and then refill it.

Meetups

January was a great month for meetups and I’ve attended several. It’s been really nice to get out and meet a lot of likeminded people. Hope to do that more in the future.

Reading

I’ve read a lot of fiction book this month and the highlight was clearly Circling The Sun by Paula McLain. I was very taken by how vividly this book painted the image of Africa. It was like I could smell the landscape just by reading it.

Ideas for next month

As I mentioned previously, I will have some time back in my life for this month. Something I would like to get into more are the new features of CSS layout. There is a revolution coming in the way we’re handling layout for the web. This is going to be huge so I want to figure it out the best I can.

• CSS Grid, CSS Regions and also a deeper understanding of Flexbox are things I want to experiment with this month.
• I will try forging my morning routine back into shape. I’ve been a bit in hibernation over the winter, but I will try to leave that now as the days are getting brighter again.