I'm back!

...not that I really went anywhere, but I had a nice, little vacation from deadlines (even the self-imposed kind).

I'll do a more proper post on Thursday, but for now, I'll leave you with this lovely ad from the train.
 

50th post!

Since this is my 50th blog post, I thought I'd take a break from talking about Japan and take a look back at some of the things I've written so far. It's also a bit more than halfway through the year, so this seems like a good opportunity to report on the status of my resolutions this year. 

Since I started the blog, it has had over 2500 pageviews, which is much more than I thought I'd actually get when I started it, to be honest. The top posts (by pageview) are:

1. Land of (in)convenience?
   The Questionable Art of Nekoyoke
   Rush Hour Train Insanity

4. Settling In
5. Worst egg cartons, ever
6. If you're a dude...
7. Excessive packaging is excessive
8. Keeping warm in drafty apartments
9. In Tsukuba
10. Resolutions

None of these are especially widely viewed (the #1 spots each have 64), but it's interesting that there's a considerable mixture in the sorts of posts that turn up.

While it looks like people enjoy when I point out silly packaging decisions, assorted differences or complain about something. It also seems like you guys like when I post silly pictures of restroom signs or promise to do things.

It's interesting to me that some of my more thoughtful posts (like when I describe my local park or go act like a tourist) don't get as many pageviews as posts where I say "the egg cartons here are weird". I don't take it personally or anything like this, but I've been seeing these stats for a while and I thought it interesting enough to share.

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Anyway, on to the Resolutions and their current statuses. Back in January, I resolved to do the following:

1. Read more: With a goal of reading 30 books by the end of the year (and at least 15 by women).
2. Draw more: Draw something every day.
3. Run more: Run regularly with a goal of eventually signing up for and running a race.
4. Study Japanese: Learn one kanji a day and spend some time each week learning to read/write/listen/speak.
5. Blog more: Blog twice a week.

As one can see from my reading list, I'm close to halfway on the number of books (13/30 complete with two being read), but I'm not doing so well on reading books by women (2/15 with one being read). I started to work on this by downloading ebooks from Project Gutenberg, so I'll have a few in a row by women coming up soon, but I should probably hit up a bookstore to get some dead tree books too. I'm definitely reading for fun much more than last year though, which was the point of making the resolution.

I've been doing pretty badly at drawing every day. I'm not sure the best way to try to force myself to be accountable here either. If I said that I'd post something online somewhere (maybe get a DeviantArt account or something) then that's a commitment I'd try to keep, but I don't have a scanner and don't really feel like posting crappy pictures of drawings.

I'm succeeding at running more. I'm back to running 5 km three times a week and am planning on increasing to four runs a week (in a nice, gradual way to avoid injury). I've also started looking for races around Tokyo, but I haven't registered for any yet.

I've definitely been doing well on learning kanji, with more than one per day on average (as I mentioned earlier). I haven't been studying grammar and speaking and the like as much as I should, but I've been working on that as well as trying to learn how individual kanji go together in words instead of by themselves much more lately, so hopefully I should improve on that. I still feel a bit intimidated when I try to speak, which often results in me just not saying anything (or I spend too long trying to think of what to say and the opportunity to say something passes). This definitely doesn't help me practice and it's something I still have to work on getting over.

Finally, with the exception of March and April, I have mostly been posting a blog entry twice a week. So this one is pretty successful so far and I plan on continuing it for the rest of the year.

Though I would really like to thank you guys for taking the time to read my blog. It's definitely much more motivating to post new things when I see that my posts are being read (or glanced at anyway). I don't think I would have made it to 50 posts on a regular schedule if I knew that nobody was reading my posts anyway. I hope you continue to read, because I really do enjoy writing these and I have a bunch of ideas for future posts that I'd like to share with you all.