+++
date = 2025-08-01
description = "Welcome to the blog"
+++

I will be posting every day from today until my return from Germany! I will take the train down to Washington D.C. on the 6th of August and will say goodbye to my parents on the 7th. My excitement is nearly unbearable!

## Preparation

I've been keeping myself busy. I'm using [Anki](https://github.com/ankitects/anki) coupled with the [Goethe Institute A1 Wordlist](https://github.com/patsytau/anki_german_a1_vocab) at a rate of 60 new cards a day to crunch vocabulary. Because my prior knowledge of German is poor, I really need to keep a good pace if I want to be successful at the language! My theory is that my current circumstances, i.e. neither direct instruction nor immersion, lend themselves best to brute memorization (though I know [Stephen Krashen](https://www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/principles_and_practice.pdf) would disagree).

I'm also packing. This is a good time for me to trim down on needless belongings because I'll be moving out by the time I return! I love [Marie Kondo's](https://konmari.com/) methodology of joy-based purging. I find it quite freeing.

## Programming

As always, I have a number of programming projects going on at the moment. I just completed [Rust Elaborator](https://git.mtgmonkey.net/Andromeda/rust-elaborator/), a custom tool created at the request of my step-mother. I faced a number of challenges with that project, the most prominent being that of operating system - she uses Windows, an OS I don't understand and don't have the infrastructure to run. As such, the [Windows exe](https://git.mtgmonkey.net/Andromeda/rust-elaborator/src/commit/533ec341eabf3d28dcd4213ff883913cd4dad28c/rust-elaborator.exe) isn't, to my chagrine, built with Nix. I instead set up a Windows 11 virtual machine with [Quickemu](https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu), downloaded [Rustup](https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install), and compiled it the old-fashioned way.

Thank you for reading this post! I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day

~ Andromeda <3
