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.

Resolutions

Happy New Years, everyone and I apologize for the late post. It turns out that visiting family and being social takes away from blogging time.

I don't make New Years resolutions every year and I think last year was the only time I kept all my resolutions because I only made one (I resolved to finish my thesis). This year I have free time so I'm feeling a little ambitious about this sort of thing. So ambitious, in fact, that I will not only make resolutions, but also share them publicly.

First of all, I resolve to read more books. I'm not sure how many books I read last year, but it might have been less than ten. I read a lot of papers, but those aren't quite the same. I think a reasonable goal is somewhere around 26 books (this is one book every other week), but since I'm feeling ambitious right now I'll set a goal for 30 books. In addition, half of the books I'll read this year will be written by women simply because women are severely underrepresented on my bookshelves at the moment. I'll keep a running tally of the books I'm reading/have read in the sidebar.

I also resolve to draw more by making a point to draw something every day (or spend some time working on a larger drawing every day). Here, I'd like to make a point of drawing things I don't usually draw and playing with techniques I don't usually employ (because I'm lazy). Granted, usually, I don't draw things if I don't think about them so it's not especially easy to think of what should be included in this list so I might ask for suggestions from time to time. I'll probably post some of them on here every once in a while.

I also resolve to run more. I've been working on getting back into a habit of doing this regularly in Japan (coming somewhere cold and snowy has not been helpful for doing this at all) and I would actually like to participate in a race this year. However, since I'll still be in Japan, this means I'm forced to make an additional resolution.

I resolve to study Japanese more. Based on some preliminary googling, the way to register for the small races in Japan involves being able to register on websites that are only in Japanese. As good as Google is for translating these, sometimes it does some funny things during translation. Also, it would be nice to be able to communicate effectively (for obvious reasons). Thus, I resolve to learn at least one new kanji a day and to spend some time every week practicing my reading/writing/listening/speaking.

Finally, I resolve to blog more. Starting either next week or the week after when we're back in Japan and things have settled down, I will include a post on Thursday as well as the regular Monday posts (or normally regular). I'll try to keep the Monday posts about interesting things that happened during the week and observations about living in a new place (or however you would describe the topics of my posts so far) while the Thursday posts might be about something else entirely (I have some ideas).