General impressions
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Okay, back to my structured weekly reports. Yes, it’s just 4 days since the last one, but I need to get back on schedule.
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Last few days were mostly dedicated to getting out of the weeds for routine things that were neglected around my illness and the trip (both life- and work-wise).
New goals
- 2025_summary_drafts - this will be my monthly goal for December. I usually want to write some summarizing posts for my blog(s) about what happened during the year on topics such as birding, books read etc., but the pressure to do that exactly in the last days of December sometimes adds to the end-of-the-year overwhelm to the extent that last year, for example, I didn’t even do the post overviewing my favorites from 150+ books read during 2024. I looked at a few such summary posts over the past couple of years that I actually did and estimated the total length I might want to write based on that. So, now this goal will make me contribute little by little throughout December, so by the last days of the month and year I will have everything ready, adjust any relevant numbers, and just post. I am thinking of three topics: birding, reading and - a new one - any insights on my beeminder goals for this journal.
Completed goals
- None this week
Derailments
- None this week
Changes to goals
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I dialed my goals dedicated to learning Lithuanian back up. Several classes were cancelled this month because of the two trips, and it feels. My level is nowhere near the level where you can just not use the language for years and then just open your mouth and speak at the same level of fluency at which you were. We will probably still be cutting down on lessons with our tutor, but we decided that it will be to once-a-week instead of twice-a-week after a while, rather than stopping them at all. So I dialed back up the goal for total amount of time spending on learning Lithuanian as well as restarted the goal, which previously reached its end date, for going through lesson notes and homework corrections to create Anki cards.
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In spring, I will be doing a short-term fellowship in Germany, so I thought I might as well undust my German ahead of that. I mean, I already have a goal for that but it’s been at a very low supporting rate of 6 minutes/day for the past few years. And if I decided to meet that requirement with Duolingo, it was basically of no use. (I finished the German course in Duolingo a long time ago, their “revision” exercises seem of very little use at my level.) So, upping that to 2 hours/week and no Duolingo. Mostly YouTube videos, I guess. If anyone has any suggestions of YouTube channels with specifically the German language spoken in Bavaria, that would be most welcome advice!