Preparation

Taking the new year holiday to try and prepare for the upcoming year. Trying to review the last year and figure out where I’d like to do something different.

I am going through my social media feeds and trying to konmari¹ as much as I can. Being selective on people with good signal to noise. Removing people who are (often quite understandably) reacting to something frustrating, rage inducing, etc. I understand there’s injustices in the world. I am tired of being force fed new things to be angry about every day. But even in the goofy-fun side of my feeds, I am trying to clean up. What discord servers I am in, who I follow on twitch or youtube. I reviewed my RSS feeds. Now I have an inbox zero in my rss feed². We’ll see how long it lasts. Even if I don’t properly read each post, inbox zero for my RSS feed has an important quality: there’s an end. It’s actually an aspect of Bluesky that I quite like and I hope it keeps. Since they’re not (currently) motivated to force you into an infinite feed to power ads. You hop in, you catch up, you finish. Beginning of this year, I mentioned trying to allow myself to get bored more. I don’t think I did a great job of it this year. But in the last week or two, I am finding with what I’ve recently cleaned up I am able to hit a stopping point. I am hoping I can keep that well maintained. Guarded even.

At the end of summer, I started a gym membership for the first time since moving to Japan. I thinking to upgrade to a better gym. Free weights are supposed to be better than the machine exercises, right? Programming is sort of an on-going random brainworm that will attack. I will get focused on some project. I will just let those happen when they do. Professional benefit to just let those happen and learn something new. I can work on writing about those rabbit holes more. Then I have painting and drawing to fill in any gaps I have. I still struggle to find art relaxing at times. Creative work after work is difficult. I want to get good at it, but I got a lot more bad drawings trapped in my pencils and I have to get them out. It would be fun to do more photography, but I haven’t had a particular motivation for it lately. Maybe blogging more will get me thinking about it again. I like including a picture I’ve taken even if it’s random and not really related to what I am writing about. I am thinking to try and do more computer based journaling. I feel the habit sticks a bit better and it also leads to more blog posts. I had a goal to write more last year, which went short of my expectations. I did more pen and paper journaling. I enjoyed it, but it’s a completely different activity to me. My previous goal was not focused on trying to increase my blogging. I still don’t want to force that, but I miss blogging. My Japanese language progress felt very invisible this year. I was doing a weekly 1-on-1 tutoring session and a group lesson every week. This is a very slow burn on improvement. I need to jump back into a bit more active studying.

My residence card renewal is wrapping up. All prepped and ready to pickup once the office opens up after the new year. Can’t believe I’m about to be at the 5 year mark. That doesn’t seem correct. We’ll see how long of an extension I’ll be able to get. At this point, as long as it’s not a 1 year extension I’ll be pretty happy.

Also, we were able to make some decent eggnog. Friends found a recipe online and was able to make it. Very good.

I hope you’re having a lovely end to the year.