ROW80 – 2021 – Round 4 – Check-in 10 (December, 12th 2021)

Hi everyone!

Note: To keep these post short, I’ve made a Trello board with my goals for the year. Feel free to check it out if you want to know more about the bigger plan.

My word for the week is UNEXPECTED, some of it good, some not so much.

Just as I started thinking I might be able to actually relax by mid-December, work things starting piling up. The good one is a new contract, which is even better as the other things mean I need to look for other sources of revenue for early 2022 until the situation settles. 

Long story short, I work with 2 exams and their accreditation is coming to an end. Because the organisation in charge of renewing it is late, there will be at least a couple of months when I can’t start new contracts using them.

I have a third option but it’s a bit pricy and it lacks the other two’s flexibility. Anyway, there’s nothing I can do about this until January, so I’m focusing on other matters for now, and hoping it will all work out somehow.

Another news, which was not unexpected but uncertain, is that I’ve been accepted to the university I applied to for a Bachelor’s Degree in Japanese. Spring term classes are starting around mid-January and it’s a full-time semester, so it should keep me busy even though it’s beginner stuff (which is why I went for full time in the first place, as I’m t an intermediate level but need the credit to complete the degree since I’m self-taught).

This is nice but it also means a little extra work right now, though it’s mostly to get familiar with the online learning environment.

Now, one little surprise that affects my goals: I was supposed to record meditation sessions in French for a nonprofit, but when I started it was in Canadiant French, which is fine but totally unnatural for me. I reached out to the organisation and it turns out they’d prefer “European French” (I’ll have to clarify there are several of these, though they are much more similar), so this recording goal will be postponed till the new translation has been checked.

Finally, I’m considering a new alpha-reading technique after Hubby told me he’d discovered he responds better to audiobooks and would be interested in listening to my next one rather than actually reading it. This means a lot of extra work but I think it’s worth a try as reading out loud is a nice way of feeling the “mood” and the “flow” of a text. I really didn’t see this one coming, as I didn’t even know he had tried audiobooks (Hubby’s not the most efficient communicator ^^), but I really think it could be great, despite the extra workload.