there is always something to learn

january 14

as you are all aware, the world economy is in shambles and the trickle down effect is being felt everywhere - there is simply no work right now for those of us who were busy structuring financial products for the last few years. is it time to start thinking about a career change? only time will tell

in the mean time, i keep learning and right now i am making my way through the second volume of essential chinese characters - otherwise known as



if you are also trying to learn chinese, i have found this site to be very helpful http://www.mandarintools.com/worddict.html

i've been learning to read and write on and off (more off than on) for the past year or so and can now roughly understand portions of a chinese newspaper

i've also been trying to get into shape but for some reason, i just keep gaining weight - apparently fathers-to-be suffer from empathy-related weight gain but at this rate, rebekah will never catch up to me. i don't quite understand why this is happening especially because my diet has been quite controlled as of late - my increase weight is having a negative effect on my climbing, most recently evidenced by my needing to change 'beta' on a route at the gym because my butt is too big - i use to easily high-step the final move of this .11 but now my enlarged behind requires that i keep my feel lower on worse holds. any suggestions for quick weight loss would be greatly appreciated!

with extra time on my hand, i have been playing a bunch of sit-n-go tournaments on pokerstars - 5.50 buy-ins - i usually like to play 18 players but will sometimes go down to 9. however, on monday, i signed up for a 90 play tournament and came in third! no too shabby but i got lucky twice - both times i went all-in pre-flop as my stack was getting low - first time, i had AJs against AA - made a straight on the river; the second time i had JJ against QQ and hit a J on the turn. both times it was against the same player - better to be lucky than good? what do you think?

things that I am not looking forward too: the cold weather that is suppose to hit nyc http://www.weather.com/weather/tenday/10009?from=36hr_fcst10DayLink_undeclared

i suppose it is january but given the temps during the past few years, this cold snap (plus the large amount of snow we got when in vancouver over the holidays) is certainly unexpected.