Work just piles up more and more. On the one hand it's frustrating not making faster progress on so many projects. On the other hand, it's kind of exciting to have a to-do list with so many interesting things on it.
Saturday I went to juggling and did mostly club-passing with Dave. My left-hand chops are almost getting reasonable. (Using "chops" here not in the generic sense but as a term for a specific type of overhand pass that's thrown with a bit of a downward chopping motion and that I can do much better in my right hand.) We had some food at Cottage Inn afterwards, then I went home while the rest of them left to see the Simpsons movie. I'm sure the Simpsons movie is fine, but the idea didn't interest me.
I got some peaches before juggling at the farmer's market. I always do that on Saturdays, and carrying them around the rest of the day is always a problem. I've never figured out how to do it without damaging them. But it just means we have to eat them sooner. They're always extremely good, so that's not hard.
I've resisted the mobile phone until now, but two things have worn down my resistance. One was our trip to San Francisco earlier this year, when we had several groups of friends to meet all at the same time, and made them all work harder to coordinate with us then I think they should have had to.
The other is the OpenMoko project, which aims to build a phone completely from free software. I ordered one a few weeks ago, and with luck it'll arrive Friday. It's a developer preview at this point--the hardware's apparently stable enough, but it sounds like the software can't even dial or receive calls reliably yet. Looks like great fun to play with, and possibly give me a chance to speed along development in some small way, but I'll need a SIM card to actually play with it, and, well, a cell phone with a prepaid plan doesn't cost that much more than just the card, so I may as well have an actual working phone too. So I've got some other inexpensive GSM phone also winging it's way towards me.
Tonight I figured I'd try a local French conversation group. I love to read French (novels and especially comic books), so I maybe have an OK vocabulary at this point, but I rarely have an excuse to speak French.
I'm not an extrovert, and it took some effort to convince myself to go to walk into a coffeeshop to find some random group of strangers to talk in a language I'm incompetent in. It went well enough, though. They look to be a fun, diverse group of folks. Only one of them seemed really fluent (hard for me to tell), but the (painful) exercise of forcing myself to find the words I need to express a thought is good on its own.