Hard to believe that it’s the end of February 2021 already and we’re now into the Year of the Ox according to the Chinese zodiac. I wrote at the beginning of the month that I wanted to finish up with the tracks I’d made for Jamuary 2021 but, here we are at the end of the month and I’ve barely touched them.
One reason for the lack of effort on my behalf is the simple need to get some other things done that I’d been putting off throughout January. Another reason was that work restarted before and after Spring Festival, so the time that I could commit to the finishing of the tracks shrank substantially.
Further, I was finally able to record another two episodes for my podcast, with Anna Bass and John Rennie, so prep and post production took up some time. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to those episodes yet, they’re great if you’re wondering what life is like as an expat. Anna is originally from Moscow and now lives in New York while John was in Japan just before the pandemic hit but he is now back in his hometown.
As I look ahead for the next couple of weeks getting into March I wonder how much time I’d be able to dedicate to finishing up those tracks. It doesn’t look like much. Next weekend, March 5th to 7th, I was thinking of doing a bit of a running challenge all weekend which might leave me sapped of energy. I’m not sure, I’ve never ran so much before so I have no idea how my body and mind will respond to this challenge. We’ll see if I even go through with it.
The other thing I want to get done in March is start publishing videos, and I think I’m a little bit more serious about this than finishing a lot of those tracks from Jamuary. My reasoning for this is because I’d rather see more of my travel videos published than re-do some tracks that I only recently made. In some ways, I don’t think enough time has elapsed from the Jamuary challenge to give my brain the rest it needs to listen to those tracks again.
What kind of videos?
I’ve been meaning to do this for a while and my latest loss of camera equipment (I left my GoPro 9 attached to a share bike and, well, finders keepers on that one) has again made me think about how easy it is to lose the footage I’ve gathered. So, instead of trying to generate more content at the moment, I’d like to finally go back through all of my videos and start posting them, either uncut or slightly edited. That goes for GoPro footage, photos, or even drone videos. I’d like to see much more of this stuff published, so that’s what I was thinking I could do in March.
I would have the same approach as Jamuary but for finishing videos instead. Every day I’ll pick a video to work out, most likely something simple, complete any necessary editing, create a soundtrack, and then publish. The idea is to do one a day which should very quickly eliminate my backlog of videos to upload.
And as March begins that signals to me that I’m only one month away from another anniversary of this website and a year anniversary for my podcast. My current standings for publishing is about 446 posts in total but only 21 episodes of a podcast (plus 5 or 6 live episodes).
The website is due for a major overhaul both in terms of design and organization. I’m looking for an easy way to back up the full site while also taking a screenshot of each post as it stands right now. Once all of that is done I’m looking to vastly improve the look and layout of the site not only for you to use, but also to look at. I personally think the current design is a bit hideous.
The podcast, I think, will continue to be an interview style format. I’ve talked to a few other people about coming onto the podcast and, as my workflow smoothes out, things get easier to get prep, produce and post. Given my current schedule, if I tried to do any more than one or two episodes a month I think I’d just get bogged down so I’ll keep it as a leisurely pace.
In other news, although I have to finally sign up the target remains. I’m looking to get the HSK 4 test done by the end of March so as to complete that portion of my study life. I seem to have drastically cut down on my studies mainly because I’ve hit a wall of sorts. I find I don’t need so much to study the characters to improve my current test score but my sentence construction and reading speed. The part that I’ve done the worst on in my practice tests is the section wherein I have to re-arrange the characters into a proper sentence. This is something I need to work on before the test.
I’ve also decided to take up Russian again. This is designed both as a distraction and as something of value. During my conversation with Anna Bass you’ll hear her say something along the lines that everybody is studying Chinese these days. This is true, so I figure one way to hedge my future language abilities is to learn another, but not a completely new language. You’ll recall I’ve attempted Russian before. My fear, of course, isn’t losing out on time, it’s the apparent cycle that seems to be taking shape: I sure hope I’m not heading for a repeat of 2017! Or is this a completion of the plans I had prior to 2017?
So those are the updates for the end of February. We’re seeing a massive exodus of colleagues from the ranks which doesn’t really signal the lack of demand, rather, signals the current ability to move around the world. The thinning of the ranks actually means there will be more work for those of us still remaining here in China, so it looks like the job is safe for at least a little while.
Hope you’re well!