Thanks for the post zero, glad somebody can get through my philosophical ramblings.

Since I last posted, things have been pretty good. I got another skiing lesson and finally am confident on most "blue square" trails [the intermediate ones]. To skiers this probably sounds absurd, but Ive taken things fairly slow because I dont want to get injured and because I want to make sure I have decent technique before I work on harder trails. This also let me finally ski the whole way back to my condo which is on a fairly steep and often icy trail. Some friends came up today and while they definitely toned it down a bit for me, I was still able to do a lot of skiing with them at a slower pace and they all commented how much better I was getting. I still have a long, long ways to go but these seemingly little things really made me happy and will help keep me motivated to get in the practice.

Ive been getting in good poker action recently, but it has all been at fairly low stakes. Whenever I have had longer HU matches at bigger games against decent regs, the swings have really been too much for me to want to deal with when I have so much on my plate. With the next bit of news, I am hoping to start sitting some higher stakes games again which will be stressful, but I am excited for.

I also heard back from my advisor after going over my last revisions of my thesis and he said that it all is looking very good and will likely only need some minor touch-ups before it will be ready to defend. This was great news as I really was not looking forward at all to doing any more major revisions and am going to be incredibly happy to have this out of the way. My subject definitely interests me, but I cant honestly say I really care all that much about it anymore. I have spent an absurd amount of time on this and it has definitely prevented me from doing a lot of things I would have much rather done. I guess it will be an accomplishment to have it finished, but it just doesnt matter much to me, sort of like my degree; I did both because I felt like thats what I was supposed to do. So once I have this out of the way I think I am going to feel the lifting of a big burden and am excited to enter a phase of my life where I really only have to do the things that I want to.