Thank God for Training

      Having jumped head-first into a lot of new things over the course of the past month (a new position at work, training for another marathon, a full-time course load), and experiencing the ensuing balancing act, I've spent a lot of time doubting my abilities to do some or all of these things.
      However, I've been delighted to find that I'm actually not bad at any of these things. My fitness hasn't actually disappeared in my three months of sparse gym attendance--from the get-go, I've been training at a higher level than for my last race, and my body is handling it just fine. At work, I've discovered that I was already fulfilling many of my new responsibilities before my promotion--now I just have a fancy title and meager pay raise to establish my authority. At school, and particularly in this course, my (too many) years of (mostly) good study and work habits are starting to bear fruit.
     When I last wrote here, I was preparing to start A1 and conditioned by the fear of an overflowing inbox of Piazza questions to expect a hard row to hoe. I've started now, and while I can't say that it's easy by any means, it's much less daunting than I expected. Much of the assignment is focused on the initial steps, particularly programming the TOAHModel class--most of which I knocked out in one afternoon of work.  Sure, I have some cleaning up and style editing to do, but I have the bare bones of the methods worked out, and it was utterly satisfying to print some representations of TOAH models (empty models, models with the first stools filled, models after moves have been made) and see what I envisioned seeing. E2 was a great warm-up as far a learning how to catch and raise errors, and I'm enjoying my newfound ability to write more versatile code, rather than having to implement stringent input preconditions.
      I'm backed up against the wall with other commitments this week--condensing my class schedule to two days a week to facilitate work seemed like a great idea until I had 2 midterms, one major assignment deadline and a lab within a 36-hour period--so I know I'll be cutting it close on the deadline for this one, but I'm confident about my progress and excited to get to work on the ConsoleController after those two tests are out of the way.