2022 has been a hell of a year. Of the course of the year I (in rough order):
- I started my journey in Japanese
- Lost my father to cancer
- Had a lockdown scare at my kid's school, where the school then failed to communicate out when the lockdown was lifted, leaving kids not picked up for over half an hour after an already rough day.
- Got allergy tested and started allergy shots
- Kid started walking themselves to school several times a week
- Continued D&D with my brother DM'ing a game, but the game husband was DM'ing with family friends fell off
- Got a mid-year raise after speaking with boss about how I'm essentially making less now than a few years ago
- Wrapped up my involvement in a major project at work and was able to shift focus back to a lot of my primary responsibilities.
- Got the house wired up to convert the stove and dryer to electric
- Found out we needed to get the stove converted sooner than expected, as it was expelling well beyond safe limits of CO while running.
- Dishwasher broke the day that we got the new stove. Got new Dishwasher.
- Kid is now too big for bedtime cuddles and storytime
- Fell hard on both my knees in early November. Bruised them badly at the time.
- Searched for some alternative to Twitter. Landed back here, and at Post.News as my primaries.
- Dude who was supposed to pave our and neighbor's driveways totally ghosted so we'll be spending another winter with shitty gravel in the driveway
- Finally put a plan in place to replace the back steps of the house this spring as soon as weather permits.
I'll elaborate further on some, but not all of the above points.
( Grief is complicated. )JapaneseOne thing that helped me keep focused this year was Japanese. On New Year's Day last year, I decided to pick Japanese back up and commit to learning the language. One of the initial motivating factors was being able to listen into a fandom podcast I found interesting, rather than having to read subtitles as I went. Reading manga and listening to anime are also both motivating factors. I found a great course and community through ToKini Andy. I've had a lot of successes in my Japanese journey. Given that I've been able to stick to this while dealing with a major loss early on, and while working, I'm pleased with how far I've come 1 year out so far, and I'm excited to see where I'm at next year.
- I've managed to go through 9 out of the 12 lessons in the first textbook so far (I was on pace to 1 lesson per month and thought I'd finish the book, but fell off track in July after a bad cold followed by two lessons filled with very tough grammar points).
- I can recognize about 98% of the N5 kanji (lowest skill level) and about 80% of the N4 kanji
- I know about 50% of the N5 level grammar, and 60% of the vocab (the biggest limiting factor on the vocab is the kanji readings, as there are a lot of vocab words that I know in hiragana, but haven't yet learned the kanji for).
- I've read two manga with the help of a book club on the discord server (Shirokuma Cafe and Yotsuba to!, first volumes)
- I have 5 manga on my desk that I plan to try to read in the coming months.
My listening/speaking still leaves a lot to be desired, since I don't get many opportunities to practice this organically.
D&D
My husband started a D&D campaign with some family friends over Zoom during the pandemic. It became a near weekly outlet for all of us to connect with someone outside the house. It was great, we all had fun. Husband got a new campaign for us to try as a one off, and we brought my brother in on it as well.
Once things started to open back up again, our friends were perpetually unavailable, often cancelling very last minute, even when we shifted to less than weekly. So, we started up a secondary campaign with my brother DM'ing since my husband doesn't usually get to play a character, and my bro wanted to try DM'ing.
This pretty much turned into my family just playing bro's game every other week when the family friends just disappeared from constant busy-ness, maybe....Mayish? And then disconnected from social media for a month or so without so much as a "hey". So we haven't really heard or connected much with them since then, despite them saying in July they were going to figure out what times might work to play again, and 2 months ago, one spoke with husband on phone saying they wanted to play again, and they occasionally send the large group chat random memes with no context other than it's a D&D joke.
It feels sort of shitty to suddenly be entirely forgotten and left to the wayside just because they can now go places again. It's weird because they were very much as cautious as we were about precautions and keeping a bubble, and occasionally still posts reminders that COVID is still a thing, and yet...they were out going places quite a lot. Which we only know because we're connected on facebook, not so much because they even talk to us.
However, the brightside is that we've had a good time D&D'ing with my brother. I think the kid wishes there was someone his age in our group to play (family friends have a kid their age), but it's been a nice way to spend quality time with bro this year when I've really needed that connection, and he probably has, too.
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