This entry is a little late! But I’m picking up where I left off, and I aim to catch up on posts this week.
Travel
😩
Sunday, the day after the wedding, I tried out my new instructions to myself for taking public transit home from the airport. The mistake I made last time was choosing the wrong stop to leave the “L.” The Clark and Lake station is confusing, so in my instructions afterward I steered myself away from it. This time that first leg of my journey from the airport to the Metra station went flawlessly, thanks to my notes. It was dark when I got there, but that just gave me some terrific photos of the city.
But it also meant I’d started the trip pretty late, which was the mistake I made this time. It pushed my train ride home very late, and I had to sit around Ogilvie for an hour-and-a-half and have awkward conversations with the panhandlers circulating through the building, a surreal experience I have to say. Then when I got to my local train station, it was way past the last bus, so I walked home just to see what that was like. I booked it with my luggage trailing behind me and got home 15 minutes sooner than Google Maps had predicted. It was a very sweaty time.
Productivity
😐
I took a mental vacation to recover from my vacation. I think the stress of the past few months finally got to me, and maybe my long day of travel was the last straw. In any case my brain decided I was done staying disciplined, so I didn’t get a whole lot done the rest of the week. It wasn’t a total loss, however.
Learning
🙂
I looked for sources of names to feed into my PAO system for memorizing numbers. I needed lists of famous real and fictional people organized by their first and last initials.
Ones that didn’t work: ChatGPT and other chatbots (they’re easily confused about spelling), Hoffman’s Memory Toolkit (names based on the Major System rather than the Dominic System I’m using), Wikipedia (too much work to collect the names), peoplebyinitials.com (too many names to sift through, inconsistent data), thefamouspeople.com (not organized by initials).
Sources that did work: Yan’s list of 10,000 famous people (especially the Roger Keays version arranged by initials), playback.fm names by initials, memoempire.com names by initials.
Having done public transportation most of my life, I know what you mean about the panhandlers and homeless people. I’m sorry to hear you had to walk that much due to missing the last bus. I could write a whole essay about public transportations from airports.
I would read that!
What a lovely photo!
I’m glad the wedding was such a joyous time.