A Memory of Caring (WoT rant)

Since I finished my exam, I've busy reading my reward for studying so hard: the final book in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, A Memory of Light. It isn't quite living up to expectations. My 'reward' is seeming more and more like a punishment...

I'm not enjoying it as much as I'd hoped or expected. I mean, I knew this book would be about The Last Battle, as the entire series has been leading up to it. I guess I just didn't realize that meant the whole book would be battle. Battle, war, military strategy, tactics, fighting, dying... I'm 700 pages in. I don't care anymore. The battle is taking forever. I just don't care. I'm not one to skip ahead, but it's seriously dragging for me. I'm sure it's exciting enough if you're into that sort of thing, but I'm so not. Twenty pages of battle, okay. Seven hundred and it's still going? Come on. I'm a fantasy reader, not a general. This is not what I signed up for. I read 13 enormous books leading up to what should be the big payoff. Instead I get an epic battle. So epic I might never finish it. Let someone win already and tell me how it all wraps up! After 13 books and several years, the arc of this story needs a big resolution... a climax can't last 700 pages. Just get it over with already. The tension is dying, not building here!

Rejoining the world

I was studying for basically all of January for an exam that I finally wrote on Tuesday evening. It was my first written exam in a LOT of years, and it was my first attempt at writing a university exam in Dutch. Don't get me wrong; it wasn't an exam of Dutch, it was an environmental science exam, in Dutch. Hopefully I managed to get my thoughts across well enough to pass the course. Because I did really enjoy the course, so I'd like to take more, and the introductory course I took is kind of a prerequisite for everything else. We'll see. Surely the professor can tell that I'm not a native speaker and take that into account when my answers are maybe not quite as clearly expressed as he would like. I hope.

Anyway. I sort of withdrew from the world last month, and I'm just now slowly returning, picking up my non-study activities one by one. I went to another club for archery on Wednesday - the first in the regional series of friendly competitions - it'll move all over the area for the next several weeks. It gave me time to try out my car, though! Yay! My navigation system, too, which worked like a charm. It was great to not have to stand out in the cold waiting for public transport. Actually, without a car I wouldn't even take part in this competition - it's just too hard to get to most of these places otherwise. For archery, not having a car really limited me. It's not the main reason I bought a car, but it will certainly benefit from it!

I haven't started running again yet. I stopped when we got that dumping of snow mid-January and, well, let's face it, that only melted this week, so I've only REALLY missed a week of running that I should be sorry about. The other weeks don't count, in my book. It would not have been safe. Trust me. I fell getting off my bike - because my feet slid as I hopped off and down I went. I had to keep supporting the bike, too, because The Little Ninja was on the kid seat at the front and I didn't want to land underneath both him and the bike the bike to fall over with him on it. So I got a nice bruise on my cheek from where I essentially supported the bike with my face. I wasn't going to try running in that.

But I'm on the right path: back into my normal life! Work, archery, running, writing, socializing... and thinking about studying something new.