Hi everyone!

Approaching the end of October, I finally managed to be on track with all my October goals that I listed in an earlier post. Let’s revisit each of the goals:

1. Veganism

This was the easiest goal for me. Apart from the family events and that one pizza right at the beginning of the month, it was pretty easy to eat vegan. As I mentioned last week, I want to continue with this, but allow myself more exceptions (for example when I’m invited somewhere or when my flatmate bakes some cake).

What I thought was really interesting (and kind of sad) was the situation at my grandpa’s birthday party this weekend. It was his 90th birthday (yaaaay 🎉), so it was a semi-big family dinner at a Greek restaurant. If I had said that I’m not eating ANY animal products, I would have only been able to eat french fries with ketchup. I probably could have asked for a salad with no dressing, but still. Even for a vegetarian this was a sad meal because there were no vegetables at all and the main dish was pretty much based on meat. Also, I’m literally the only vegetarian in my family. That’s kind of sad position. 😅 But I didn’t go home hungry, so I guess it’s fine! :)

2. Getting up early

Getting up early was kind of hard in the beginning, but about halfway through the months, I got into a routine of waking up around 7. This week, I was able to push it to 6:45ish consistently, which means that I achieved my goal of “getting up before 7”. 🙂

3. Learning iOS programming

This was definitely the hardest goal for me. For some reason, there was never time for it. But this week, I was able to properly start again! I’m about through with all the Swift basics and some basics for UIKit and Xcode. The course I’m using at the moment is Apple’s book App Development with Swift. I also have a really good idea for a simple but useful first app. I will tell you more about it soon!

I believe it was just a little too much at once for it to work right from the start of the month, but I’m very proud that I was able to get back to everything now! I haven’t thought about November goals yet, but I will mostly continue with what I’m doing right now and especially with JLPT preparation.

Apropos JLPT/Japanese

Studying has been going pretty well the last week or two. I’ve properly started with grammar and sentences, though the pace is still really slow. I should be well ahead with kanji. The only thing that I should keep in mind is that my Anki sessions are approaching an hour now, and I’m not sure if that’s sustainable on the long run (especially because this hour does not include things like reading grammar lessons or other things outside of Anki). But because I’m visiting a friend next week anyway, I decided to cut back a little on Anki before and during that trip.

My Japan Journey

A short update on “My Japan Journey”: I started going through old chat logs, and apart from getting REALLY nostalgic, I’m finding out a lot about what we did in those first weeks in Japan. I’m not yet sure how detailed I want to write the next post, but I’m definitely working on it. ;)

Journaling

Even this new addition to my daily routine has been going pretty well! I wrote entries for every day since I got the Day One subscription, and it’s starting to feel like something I MUST do every day (like Anki). What I’m going to do today is to look back on what I’ve written so far and start categorizing everything with separate journals and tags. Also it’s good to reread some of the posts because I’ve started collecting things I’ve realized or learned throughout this time. I’ll probably create a separate tag for posts that I want to read again regularly.

Running

Wow, I’m just realizing right now that almost everything has been going pretty well (that describes today’s post perfectly: going pretty well 😁)! I’ve started running about every second day again, and while I’m not nearly back at my previous distances, I feel like it’s getting better with each run! Yesterday, I started feeling really really tired, but instead of taking a nap (which NEVER works for me), I went for a good 7 km run and felt so much better afterwards. Very proud of myself. ☺️

I’m really glad that it’s going so well at the moment, and I will continue to improve my life step by step. Thanks for reading my blog! Until next week. 😉