So it’s been nearly a month since I last posted. Not good for my resolutions at all, is it? There’s a simple explanation, though: I underestimated the workload I was putting on myself with work, classes, student organizations, responsibilities at home as well as household projects, and extracurricular activities, and, in addition, overestimated my ability to juggle all of that effectively. I have a bad habit of doing that.
And as a result the blog has languished a bit. And by “a bit”, I mean almost a month.
Thankfully, however, we’ve gotten past midterms, and I’m taking this as an opportunity to get some posts in before I get swamped in more papers in a couple weeks. I’m scheduling some time at the end of each day to write blog posts (thirty to forty-five minutes a day is not a lot of time, after all), and I’m going to work at making this a habit so I can have more content on the blog.
In the meantime, enjoy a dubstep remix of Edward Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King”. Yes, this exists, and it is hilarious and awesome at the same time.
One of the biggest challenges for college students such as myself is finding affordable (haha) textbooks at the beginning of the term… and then getting at least some of that money back at the end of the term when you don’t need the book anymore. I use Amazon to find textbooks (they’re almost always cheaper there than at the college bookstore), but selling them back is a bit of a hassle. Sure, I can just take them to the campus bookstore and sell them, but the one time I did that I got $20 for a $60 book and swore never to make that mistake again. Instead, I list the book as a used seller on Amazon, but there’s all sorts of trouble there, too. 
Every year I make resolutions about what I’m going to do for the new year, and every year I fall off the wagon sometime in mid-January, maybe February. However, despite all of these failures, I keep trying, because I have learned that eventually things seem to arbitrarily click into place. My best example of this in the realm of reading. For years I had a horrible habit of starting a book and not finishing it, not because the book was bad, or boring, but because I was distracted by the Internet. In an effort to break this habit, I started compiling a list of the books I successfully finished, but my lack of dedication to books created a lack of dedication to that list… until the summer of 2013, at which point I redesigned the list and tried again. This time, for some reason, it worked: in 2013 I completed thirteen books (eleven of which during the six months after the list redesign), and in 2014 I completed forty-three. There are no signs of me slowing down for 2015, either.
Ricky of Kokiri 