Newsletter #7
A trip back to Australia! And an exciting new development
We’ve hit the halfway point of the year which is also the rainy season in Japan (boo). Luckily I’ve been able to skip some of it by taking a trip to Australia.
In June I published 4 posts on my blog:
The hiking in Japan and Kyushu wrap-ups are both attempts to get my hiking content out there more broadly. Writing posts about a specific mountain only reach a small audience (the biggest problem is that most people haven’t heard of the moutains I blog about) so I’m hoping that these style of summary posts will be more useful for people who stumble across my blog on Google.
A trip to Australia
Although I live in Japan, I work remotely for an Australian software company. One of the perks of the job is that we occassionally hold in-person gatherings for some team bonding, which basically means I get a free trip back to Australia 1 - 2 times a year. So I had another one of those trips this past week.
On my first one or two trips back to Australia after I moved to Japan, honestly speaking I would mainly think “I’d rather stay in Japan, Australia is so boring”, but now that I’ve been living in Japan for over 3 years, I’m starting to appreciate Australia a little more. It helps that this time was a trip during Sydney’s winter, which is an enjoyable escape from Japan’s humid summers.
After some coercion from coworkers, I lugged my camera over, which turned out to be worth it because I got some really nice photos of some birds at the Sydney Botanical Gardens. Australia definitely has Japan beat on the bird front.
Joining Hardcover
One cool announcement that I get to make is that I’ve joined the team as a dev over at Hardcover, a book tracking alternative to Goodreads. It’s a 5-hour a week commitment, so it’s just something I’m doing for fun on the side (I won’t be quitting my day job). There’s a Discord server where people can report their bugs, and there’s something really satisfying about being able to talk to users directly and work on the issues they are having. I’m quite far removed from that at my corporate job.
Hopefully once things start to settle down (there are a fair few bugs to fix first... haha) I can help build out some of Hardcover’s new features too. I’m keen to see where this goes! If you wanted to check Hardcover out, you can follow me at @emma.
Reflections on my goals
We’ve hit the halfway point in the year, so this month I also tried to take a bit of a step back to reassess where I was at with my goals. I had some exercise ones like running a certain amount of km or going to the gym x number of times. In hindsight now they were a little over-ambitious, and I’m going to amend that to be a more broad “do some form of exercise 4 times a week” goal which takes into account injuries and the like.
The other concerning thing is my goal to learn some amount of Mandarin has really not borne results. The first problem is I’m not studying enough, and the second problem is I had decided on using Pimsleur to learn (which is kind of “repeat after me” style of audio learning) and I don’t think that’s really gelling for me. I was using a flashcard app called HanziHero too, but the vocab I was learning in that and in Pimsleur were very different, which wasn’t helping things either. From July I’m going to try flashcards that specifically supplement the vocab in Pimsleur instead, and go back and repeat some of the older lessons that hadn’t really stuck.
Does anyone else do a half-yearly (or even monthly) goal review? I’d been keen to hear how you’re tracking.
June in numbers
🏋️♀️ 5 visits to the gym
🏃♀️ Ran 20 km and hiked 12km
🇯🇵 Wanikani Level 43 → 44
🇨🇳 Pimsleur Mandarin Lessons 65 → 74
🇨🇳 HanziHero Level 2 → 2
📚 Read 6 books
📝 Published 4 blog posts
The stats this month are looking a little dire. I managed to do my back in a little bit at the beginning of May (either from lifting a heavy box or a bad deadlift), and since then it’s not quite been the same so I didn’t want to risk it by doing too much at the gym.
You might remember earlier in the year that I also had some issues with my Achilles tendon not feeling 100% either (that has luckily mostly recovered) so it just feels like one thing after another! I actually turned 30 earlier this month so I suppose it’s all downhill from here.