The new project at work has sort of ballooned in scale: one of my boss's quirks/flaws is that in the course of discussing something, he fails to do running arithmetic in his head, so at the end of the conversation, he doesn't necessary have a sense of an idea's scope. So we talked and he listed all the database tables I needed to create, not quite realizing that it all added up to a lot of work. I have this damned work ethic that makes me want to finish it before I leave; tomorrow I'll start letting go of that idea.

Excellent second round of interviews at Company B this afternoon/evening. I did very well again, I think, and I'm much more drawn to the company knowing more about it and getting a better sense of the staff and the working environment. I've been reading Joel Spolsky a lot recently, and realizing how important the office environment is in every way, and how much a more pleasant place--nice colors, plenty of space, and on the engineering floor, the lights turned almost completely off and a nap cubicle hidden in a corner with a very nice couch. I think they'll make me an offer, and then I can be done with this whole thing.

Driving home from strike yesterday, I had a feeling of aliveness, of excitement, of newness, and I realized that I'm feeling *challenge* again. I've had to become more expert in Perl to get the job I want, and that seems to have paid off in a couple of neat opportunities; I noticed today that switching fields has gotten me excited about working with computers again. That and other movement in my life, that has (finally!) come out of my attempts to induce movement in my life, leave me feeling like I finally have some stuff to sink my teeth into: in more negative terms, things I could conceivably fail at. I know that's not the most optimistic phrasing, but challenge isn't really challenge if you're guaranteed success eventually. If you cannot fail, then it just becomes the tedious execution of a plan. So I'm gunning for these higher-level jobs in a programming language where I've never done any significant professional work, working on substantial hard-to-solve problems, for amounts of money that leave me with a powerful desire to justify my salary...though it's unlikely, I could just fuck the whole thing up somehow. I perceive a chance of failure, so it's exciting.

I spent most of this year feeling highly stuck. Now I'm not. Though I am awfully sleepy.