What NONCombat skills are YOU working on?

Here's a small list of what I'm working on, adding studies and/or exercises to my daily or every other day schedules.
Each one will take many months to get down properly, some may take years, and must be maintained with regular practice.

Basic health improvement: I'm wrapping this up into one category as it's including diet, exercise, change of habits, etc.
Increased visual recognition/mental processing, hearing, touch, smell.
Breathing exercises for greater lung capacity
Slight of hand/hand motor skills
Strength training: chest, arms hands

Basic Spanish
Sign Language
Morse Code
Braille

Pharmacy
Improvement of First Aid/EMT-B
Investigative Skills

Since I intend to live a very long and interesting life, and do not expect results until much hard work and dedication, the list is not as overwhelming as it would appear to be.

Right now, working on writing.

I want to be a fiction writer someday.

physical training, better diet, mental agility and creativity, memory, lung capacity, endurance... etc, etc, etc

Comedy.
Lucid dreaming.
Nightmare induction.
Painting gear.
Crash test dummy/stunt dummy.
About to be working on making videos, special effects, tilt shift filming, chroma keying, audio mixing, drawing, limited animation, model building and modding, stop motion animation, machinima, puppeteering, etc, (and integration of all that) again.
Korean language refreshment.
Teaching (I'm about to spend a month in a class about it).
Whatever skills, knowledge, etc are demanded by whatever next crazy thing I think of

Also I'm quitting smoking because I have to to get my nightmare pills, the simple act of quitting smoking itself apparently can cause nightmares, and I need lung capacity to quip while I get my ass beat.

I guess you could say I'm putting myself through a refresher on intel work and getting to know various areas in and around San Francisco, too.

I know a lot of the time I probably just seem goofy, but someday at least a few people will see what standup comedy can do to a person and adopt it as their religions, too. But you have to take the good with the bad. When the comedy gods tell me to battle nightmares for a while, I don't get to say no.

But I suspect they're like Mr. Miyagi somehow. Like the point isn't really painting the fence.

And yeah.

A few other things in the works, some topics I'm trying to learn about for a future novel:

-genetic engineering
-hypnotic suggestion
-subliminal messaging
-project MKUltra
-basic sociology and psychology

A few things for RLSH work:

-first aid
-diet and fitness
-self defense
-sewing

For work:

-SEO techniques
-Proxy servers (targeted to specific cities)
-Credit reports
-The fair trade act

For myself:

-soldering
-writing proper poetry
-meditation and calming techniques
-ancient and medieval world history

On Hold:

-Conversational Japanese
-Conversational Klingon

Survival Skills;
-Radiation and it's detection and shielding
-Ham radio license
-Lashing structures together
-emergency medicine
-tool and weapon construction

Other;
-non-electric housegoods

volunteering volunteering volunteering

mostly for animals and the homeless and killing ivy



...and learning mandarin

Very nice variety of skill sets!

I would also add the time honored tradition of lockpicking to my list.

I have been reading about how to write for comic books.

I'm trying to get better at parkour and buildering. I'm staying the night at a friends who lives a ways away to learn better. I am also learning how to withstand major amounts of heat. Also I am attempting to dance.

Ballet. Don't laugh, that stuff will kick your ass.

Medicine. First aid-stuff, so far, then for 'real' starting January.

Self-sufficiency. Long-time interest, hoping to gear it more towards urban environments.

Mind work, all sorts. Only been tip-toeing around the subject, but hope to get into it for real soon. Meditation, pain tolerance (which is not as hardcore as it may sound; I get stung from hairs underneath my clothing), self-discipline (in which I am sorely lacking), all that jazz. The rest of it kinda falls apart without it, after all.

Would love to get into Parkour, but since my body was put together on a Monday I'm afraid my joints would kill me in my sleep.

doesn't stop some people

There are parts where injury should not be risked if you can avoid it. Brain and joints definitely go on that list.

Sadly I do agree.

I already have the lockpicking, just very out of practice. I am also working on Parkour, although there is not much out here. I did think of a place last night, I'll have to check it out some time, it's on the north end of Peraland, TX. The old RICE DRYER PLANT off of Beltway-8. I did some photographs out there a couple of years ago, I think it would be a good place to parkour, it has loading ramps, storage areas for pallettes that are elevated, etc.

Thats a perfect place to parkour if you ask me

Reading some classical philosophy; Descart, Bertrand Russell, Nietzche, etc.

Started doing 10 situps three times a day recently!

Not a lot currently really... hate putting my life on hold to be my Dads primary caregiver. But I am the only child and we have no money so then it was a nessacity.

SkyMan wrote:

Reading some classical philosophy; Descart, Bertrand Russell, Nietzche, etc.

I'll be taking Philosophy this Fall/Winter. Now I know who to hit up when I want to discuss my homework. Shiny. ;)

I'm filling in the gaps on my tech knowledge and integrating that into my thought methodology. This is going to take 3-4 years more at this rate. Natural Philosophers are driven to stop and think about how everything they know interelates. Then of course I got to build things based on that new knowledge too.

I don't patrol so not much physical stuff but here is what I am learning that may be of help to teh community. Or not

-Autocad 2011 engineering software
-Archtectural desktop architecture software
-Visual LISP engineering programming software
-Visual C# /dotnet interface design software
-Project Management
-Begining Spanish
-Maya 3d animation software
-Solar Power
-Magnetics applications
-furniture refinishing
-Painting for enjoyment

Web design and photoshop.

Zetaman wrote:

Web design and photoshop.

Nice.
I am great at database and information retrieval, but I don't have a clue with photoshop.

Sadly it is a lost art compared now to Illustrator and Flash. It's becoming a secondary function.

Wonderful, something else to get behind on!

I must confess, I'm a bit of a techno-phobe. I find the Judge Dredd term "future shock" to be most appropriate.
Oh, I utilize what tech I need to get along in modern life, internet for info/socialization/contacts, cell phone, etc., but the THOUGHT of how quickly things advance and change now scares the heebie jeebies right out of me when I stop to ponder it. Change on such a quick and massive scale almost overwhelms me.
Somedays I wish it was 1950 all over again.
And I wasn't even born until 1972

D'ast! I forgot about photoshop!

Oh well, I got a friend who does graphics for a living. I can commission him to do it.