Javascript, here I come

My first tryst with Javascript was way back in 2001 when I wrote my first ever serious coding for a truly ERP product. A majestic 4000 lines of code that did everything on DOM and on XML (Microsoft.XMLDOMDocument) that cd ever be done - moving elements from one xml to another, hiding, moving, removing dom elements and what not. I was proud of it then and even more proud of it now - it is completely unrelated matter that the whole code was rewritten in just over an year as it was unmanageable, what i wrote was actually jscript (hey, but what is the difference) and the ERP product was scrapped within the next 4 years.
Post that I dint write much j(ava)script - i became the com/com+,sql server,.net man and for the best part of my career till now was out of touch with javascript. Occassional visits to javascript home for snacks could not be avoided and i was always amazed by how alien and ununderstandable it had become since my 2001 days.
First and foremost, declarations like
doSomething = function() { alert('i am doing something'); };
what the heck is this
and then
var some = {
name: 'abc',
another : {
anothername: 'cde' }
};

worst was when i started going through firebug's code in the hope of extending it for our requirement - it truly was gujarati and tulu (desi greek and latin :) )
Was hoping to understand the advances in javascript for quite sometime and opportunity for it came in the form of Jquery - truly an amazing framework - not since .net when it was introduced to the world, not since tsr in c when it was introduced to me, was i as excited about the possibilities of a framework..

Jquery is amazing, if you have not explored it, it is high time.. JQuery, here i come