For a Saturday, I’ve managed to get a good amount of things done! Vin took me to one of my favorite coffee shops and we both got 2 hours of studying done; him Spanish and Ruby for me. I was struggling with the first problem right off the bat and he told me to research online how to do the ‘math’ for it, and it saved me. I did figure the math part out, maybe not in the most elegant way but I’m happy with the first attempt. I realized that I need to learn more about formatting strings so that is something to work on before the assessment. The problem itself is interesting, you have to convert a degree as an integer, to a string that shows the degree, minutes and seconds, with their symbols. The little circle that denotes a degree is hard for me to format for whatever reason. I even ran other people’s code in my terminal to see what it outputted, but it showed the same thing, a bunch of slashes and something that looks like gibberish. I will have to seek help in the school channel on what to do, but otherwise I sufficiently arrived at a working solution. After that we came home to rest and then went out again to but tea; I love my loose leaf English Breakfast! I also rowed today, and went grocery shopping because I decided on a whim to cook stew chicken, one of my favorite meals!

On a side note, my heart has this thing where it starts beating extremely fast and I’m not able to breathe properly. It gets to the point where I feel like I’m about to pass out, but Vin taught me something that slows down my heart rate and calms my breathing. It’s pretty scary but I’m trying not to worry too much about it.

Anyways, tomorrow is meant to be my rest day. I really do intend to relax, but I might end up studying for a bit because why not. It can only help me. I started my new month in my bullet journal but it’s not colored, so once that is done then I’ll take pictures of it. It’s going to be September, my month!! I hope to keep the momentum going in terms of keeping up with my personal goals, and using this journal has absolutely been a game changer. It keeps me accountable and it helps me to visual see what I need to do as opposed to having a boring basic checklist. Plus it’s fun to color, so that in itself is an activity.

I think technically, 70 and above is a passing score for any quiz, but I never thought of it as passing. An 80% or higher is passing, and that’s what I finally accomplished today. I will say this though, if I had stuck with my original answers on two of those questions that I missed, I would have made a 100%. Thinking about that makes me want to cry, but I’ve already shed enough tears for today. Seriously, at the last question of the quiz, I had a tiny meltdown. I had to pause in the middle of taking it to eat and calm down. I told myself when I came back to it that no matter what score I get, it was going to be alright. I just accepted the fact that I just couldn’t figure it out. This morning I created a log post on my 100 Days of Code repository and rewrote it three times. The first couple times I had written in the ‘thoughts’ section about the fact that I was nervous and was worried that I wouldn’t passed. Then I scratched it all and wrote at last, I will pass with an 80% today. I think the universe sent it back to me. Looking at all of my previous quiz scores, there is obviously a slight increase in the overall score, so that must mean that I’m learning something, even as the lessons get more and more difficult. I thought it was just me having a hard time parsing through loads of code but it isn’t, apparently the quizzes give almost everyone a tough time. Anyway, I worked up a lot of my nerves the past week preparing for this quiz and I guess it paid off. I’ve started writing anki cards for most-used methods so that’s what I’ll continue to do for today, just to let my mind rest a little bit. Tomorrow I will have to jump back into the Small Problems exercises. *cries inside* So those are even tougher than the ones in the actual lessons and make me feel like a dummy more than anything else I’ve encountered in 101. My goal was to take the assessment in September but that might be pushed to October. I’ve realized that I absolutely need that time to let this information sink in.

On a side note, I’ve noticed a changed in my body: I have more energy. That doesn’t mean that I’m not sleepy or wishing to sleep (because I am), but I’ve noticed that I’m able to endure…things. Before, I’d lay in bed all day and not want to leave for hours. I’d sleep in, not study that much, and physically feel like I had to drag myself to do literally anything. For the past week I’ve taken my iron and vitamin d vitamins and I suspect that has something to do with it. Oh! 5 days in a row, I’ve done my exercising on the row machine and took only one day off to rest, and resumed. Never in my short life have I had tone legs, but now that I’m forming them, I can’t imagine what they even felt like before! I feel so much stronger. It’s such a great thing feeling that I can hold myself up and do things for an entire day without losing the energy completely like what I’ve been feeling for years. Hopefully this lasts as long as I keep up with it.

A few days ago I took my Lesson 4 quiz and like I said before, I made a 75, which isn’t wonderful but it’s progress from my last Quiz. Granted, it was only about 2 points higher but still, I’ll take it. Obviously my goal is at least and 80% so I’m moving through the lesson assignments at a snails pace. It’s getting to the point in the lessons where we have to take apart code snippets line by line, letter by letter. It’s easier now for me to look at the code and try to figure out what it will output and return, but it’s more difficult to articulate each line and letter. It even says it when you start the lesson: “Take your time, and go through it all carefully. The goal is to deeply understand it all, not finish the assignment as fast as possible.” Which is easier said than done, but I’m not messing around. Also I’m working on studying consistently throughout the week, at least 3 hours but no more than 6. If I want breaks, I take them without shame and then I get back to work and eliminate all distractions. It’s Wednesday and so far the past two days have been going okay. Despite physical pains and waking up so much lately than I want to, it still gets done. Working with nested collections and articulating problems is tricky, so it’s very important to understand it all.

Aside from Ruby, I’m learning German. It’s a beautiful and fun to learn language. A lot of the words look like English so it’s not as difficult to pick up then when I tried French. Now that Vin is doing it too by learning Spanish, I have some competition. That’s exactly what I need to keep going and stay on top of it.

When I woke up this morning, I was a cat mom to 1 boy, and now I’m a cat mom to a baby kitten! He’s so freaking cute! I feel like we (kitten and I) had a connection. He loves to roll around and play, which is great for the older cat because we’ve always known that he needed a playmate. Anyway, the house is full of boys!

I felt that I was more organized today. There are a few things that I didn’t get to do but it’s okay, that will be pushed back to tomorrow. I’m trying to learn how not to be too hard on myself and just let it go if something doesn’t go according to plan. Well, I never was an organized person to begin with, but now that I’m trying to be, sometimes I fear that if I don’t get to do something on the list that it means that I’m not doing well enough, and that’s not true.

I did manage to get a couple problems done for Easy 4 in Lesson 4, however I noticed a considerable amount of difficulty has increase. It’s gotten to the point that no matter how much I read of the problem and try to understand it, I just couldn’t do it. That really worries me 😦 These are the easy problems, how am I going to be able to solve the medium level ones for the assessment?

I’ll keep trying for tomorrow. I also managed to make a video for YouTube since I made it a goal to make one every Monday of every week. I can’t let the people down now. Even though sometimes (almost every time) I realllly don’t want to, I do it anyway. I sometimes take comfort in the fact that no one will even watch them, or care, so at least no one can see how much I probably suck. JK I don’t suck, but I am a newbie and it shows. That’s the whole point of me doing the videos though because I want to visually see and hear my progress.

That’s it for now. It’s been a long day and tomorrow will be even longer. I got a speeding ticket two weekends ago and now I have to do driver’s ed tomorrow. Yay.