Newsletter #5
A bit of an off month for me, but I suppose we all have those.
Happy May!
I started off the month catching up with some friends visiting from Australia. We spent a day together in Kamakura and Enoshima - always a lovely spot to go for a day trip from Tokyo. With a large beach and a lot of cafes, I feel like it’s the closest you’ll get to a Sydney vibe in Tokyo.
I'll be honest, April was a bit of an off month for me. My routines got a little out of whack, and the Japanese kanji flashcards started to pile up. When it’s a 100 or so a day, it’s pretty manageable when you do little chunks at a time, but when you miss a day or two and it stacks up to 300, it kind of feels like this insurmountable challenge which delays me from finishing them even more.
I feel like goal-setting is 50% whether you can get back on track after you get derailed. I’ll say that I’m half back on the tracks at the moment.
On the blogging front, I had a mix of hiking and programming-adjacent content. I did a round-up of some of my favourite Fuji hikes, a behind the scenes of my blog, what it's like to do a 4-day workweek, and a hiking post on Mt Mitsutoge.
Last month I went ham on blogging and published 8 posts, while this month was a more reasonable 4. I did have bold plans to ready up drafts for a couple more posts so I could have them auto-release while I’m on vacation this month, but that didn’t really come to fruition (oops).
I also went on two hikes this month. The first was up to Mt Odake and Mt Onigadake, which gave some insane views of Mt Fuji, albeit a little hazy.
And then I went to Mt Futatsuzuka, which is this mountain (well, more like a hill) that’s basically on the side of Mt Fuji itself. Super cool place for a hike.
I’m procrastinating on writing up the posts for both of these hikes, but they should be coming in May!
In other news, I noticed that my post on Mt Ontake strangely had a huge uptick in views (over 1000 in a day). It turns out that someone shared it on Hacker News, which if you're not familiar, is a a popular link sharing site for programmers. In my excitement I went to see the comments, and there was just one from a person who lamented not being able to go hiking because they would need to pee every 2 hours. Not quite the lively discussion I was hoping for but hey. 😂
April in numbers
🏋️♀️ 15 visits to the gym
🏃♀️ Ran 0 km and hiked 19km
🇯🇵 Wanikani Level 41 → 41
🇨🇳 Pimsleur Mandarin Lessons 51 → 61
🇨🇳 HanziHero Level 2 → 2
📚 Read 0 books
📝 Published 4 blog posts
Stats-wise, I will say it hasn’t been a good month for me. But if I look at it from a glass half full kind of perspective and ignore the language learning side of things, I still did pretty well on the gym and blogging front.
I did set out this year to try and set less goals for myself, but in hindsight, I feel like I set as many as I always do. I could tell you that I don’t have enough time to do all the things I want to do, but I would be lying - I still do faff around on Reddit and YouTube a fair bit, so I know I do technically have more time in my day.
Anyone have any words of wisdom for me? I’d be curious if anyone has some sort of routine to reset themselves and get back on track. Or whether you just never get “off track” at all - maybe it’s more of a state of mind? To me the feeling is similar to when you’re on a diet, and then you break it to eat something you’ve been craving, so then you just give up on the whole day and tell yourself “I’ll start again tomorrow” (if anyone can relate... haha).
Anyway, see you next month!