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Continuity
218 lbs. Couldn’t keep up with the intensity of writing in here all the time. Weight loss has levelled out to average 2 lbs a week which is where I want it.

Entry
Studying for the Project Management Professional (PMP) designation exam is going well, overall. My study group that meets on Saturday mornings covers a chapter a week. Sometimes I’ve been utterly overwhelmed by the chapter, other times I feel like I’ve almost mastered it.

Played my wizard in Diablo 3 a bunch over the last couple of days because I didn’t have my girl around online. I miss her but she was out doing good. That is a grammatically correct sentence! She was helping her brother move a friend who lives five hrs away. It was a 2 day event and I’m glad they made it home safely through the ice storm on the way back. Also glad they didn’t try doing it in one day!

My wizard is a machine now, I love him. D3 came out about a year ago (a little less) and the regional auction house (North America and South America share ONE auction house) has blown up into pure insanity with unimaginable prices, but I managed to find some good deals that really boosted my character. The community’s understanding of how to maximize damage has matured and I concluded there is NO simple formula to understand how to increase your damage output.

It’s highly dynamic and I’m left using a website where I have to punch in a large number of variables to see if the result is in the direction I want it to be. Each variable is affected by the others such that depending on how much of a certain set of stats you have. How much additional damage you’d do if you vary a single stat by one point is not linked to a single stat; that is, sometimes if you increase your attack speed by a percentage point you’ll get the greatest marginal increase to your damage output, but as you gain more of that stat the greatest marginal increase may shift over to say a percentage point increase in your chance to land a critical hit — probably because the critical damage multiplier has become very high too. In short, as I stated earlier, it’s a mathematical MESSY NIGHTMARE that I let websites run for me. I’m still stuck inputting 3 to 13 stats to figured out what I’m at, and fortunately only 4-6 (on average) to see the impact of changing a single piece of gear may have. The good news is I have about five times my damage output that I did only two days ago and this has made the game far less frustrating.

With some help I’ve finally crafted an introductory letter requesting a meeting that I can send out to a large number of people and hopefully detonate the barrier to entering the tight network of project management professionals here in the city.

Wish me luck — I NEED A JOB, NAO! THANK GOODNESS for my wonderful brother-thing offering to front all the costs of the wedding. I basically wouldn’t be able to pay for the venue in time unless I was hired by mid April. Speaking of which, more wedding planning must happen this week.

My dad wants me to practically ignore preparing for the exam, and basically not even get the designation because it’s a nice to have, not required. He doesn’t know that having the designation should also qualify under the TN NAFTA work visa heading “Management Consultant”, because you need to have an accredited designation that is in demand. The Project Management Institute (PMI) is internationally recognized, and PMPs are in demand. Yes I’d have to learn more to make sure this would enable me to work in the US, but based on what I’ve read so far it fits all the little requirements. I won’t be certified until the Summer I expect, and then I’ll be married in September, so it may sound like it’s not necessary.

However, the 5th edition of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) is replacing the 4th edition on 1 Aug 2013 so if I’m going to write the exam based on everything I’ve studied then I need to do it before then! Otherwise I’ll be left trying to unlearn the 4th ed, relearn the 5th, and be delayed in writing and earning the designation. That’s not to say won’t upgrade myself to the 5th ed as time goes by, I just won’t have to do it in a big hurry.

There, an entry! Weight loss must stay balanced, studying must continue, job networking must explode, and I must be married in … 171 more days? The counter in my title counts how many days I have to lose weight, not until I’m married. I will have far too many other things to worry abou,t and enjoy, in the final week before I’m married.