At the new year I began one of my mid-term goals: pursuit of MCSD certification. I managed to get about 15 books for .NET 2.0 because it's being ousted by the 3.0 package and Vista. Nonetheless, I need to get my C# skills down before I worry about the new implementations offered by 3.0. At any rate, I wrapped up my first 3 month series of readings from John Sharp's C# 2005 Step by Step. I learned a great deal and am somewhat capable now I can write small, desktop apps with some basic functionality. Enough to develop light tools for helping at work with analysis of different files. Overall, I am happy to have finished stage one. Only 11 more to go and then I think I'll be ready to give the MSCD tests a shot. Right now I'm working on Developing Windows-Based Applications with Microsft Visual C#.NET. Seemed like a natural progression. I don't know enough about ASP.NET to move into web-based apps and I certainly am missing details for dealing with .xml-web-based applications beyond that. With that in mind, I still believe that after that, I want to try and shoot for the MCPD. But, first, I've got to be able to crawl!

On another area of interest, I've been thinking about something that, at least in my gut, bothers me about what it might imply, but, trusting God, will explore anyway. Last week it occurred to me, after listening to a talk in which C. S. Lewis' concept of the four loves was mentioned, it popped into my head that love, as a notion, ties much more closely with the body than we often think. I specifically started thinking about love and emotions. When people "feel" love, they don't feel love in their toe. They often feel it in their chest or heart region. And thoughts. When we refer to thoughts, again, we don't refer to our toes when identifying where thoughts occur.

Where I'm going with this is that many of the soul activities we refer to have correlations with specific regions of the body. Now, one thought is that we might be feeling partial expressions of the true emotion. For instance, love, in its full form, might be felt throughout the entire body. Mystics talk about the mind encompassing their entire being, knowing everything in their body. These larger than life experiences are probably more akin to the types of full-life use of the soul we were meant to have. However, most people live fractions of what they are capable of, and this explains why only regions of the body can be isolated manifestations of these soul experiences. I just find it curious as to why we feel certain emotions in certain regions and only certain regions.