Newsletter #1

Hey everyone! I hope you have all had a wonderful holiday season, and are feeling refreshed and ready to get back into the swing of things in the new year.

Our new holiday tradition is to make a pizza in our tiny Japanese oven. Tastes great, but I think you need to think about the order of the toppings more carefully if you want an aesthetic photo...

I'm currently on a holiday in China but have got this newsletter and a couple of blog posts automated to go out in my absence.

I'm quite a fan of writing posts in advance, and that would be my #1 tip for any blogger out there. I'll have stretches where I write a lot, and then stretches where I don't write at all. But in my opinion, releasing a new post every Monday for 3 weeks is better than releasing 3 posts in one week and then nothing at all for a month, so that’s where the scheduling comes in.

On a related note, I wonder if that's why I've never been very good at setting New Years resolutions. For me they've always tended to involve something along the lines of "do x every day all year long" which falls apart pretty quickly. Not sure what my 2025 resolution should be, but my 2024 “start a hiking blog” resolution worked out pretty well.

My final hike for the year was on Christmas day up to Mt Amagadake, which is a small mountain near one of Mt Fuji's lakes (expect to see a post for that one soon).

I've also had a trip down memory lane this past month, with a couple of blog posts for hikes that I did in mid-2023, including Mt Aka in Nagano, as well as the long-awaited Mt Fuji post.

A photo of the sunrise, mid-way up Mt Fuji

Mt Amagadake was my only hike in December. I've been really slowing down on the hikes lately, although it is getting quite cold too which is a pretty good reason to stay home. In the meantime, I've been a busy bee on my blog, adding a new about page and also updating the design of my book reviews section.

I've also been experimenting with trying out Obsidian to write and manage my blog posts and notes. I'm not quite sure yet that it's the Notion-killer I was hoping it would be, but I have stopped using Ulysses and switched to Obsidian for my writing at least.

Finally, I’m planning to release a new “year in review” post on my blog tomorrow, so keep your eyes peeled for that.

Until next time!