Jay

I haven’t worked on this goal for a while, as my old digital camera’s quality slowly declined. But since I got a new digital camera in September, the number of photos I’ve been taking each month has skyrocketed. It’s not just having the new camera; it’s that the camera is so slim. I never have to choose whether to have it with me or not. It’s simply in my pocket all the time.

That said, I’m keeping this as a goal, and raising the bar a little bit. I’ve definitely pulled my new camera out to take photos of interesting scenery / objects / moments from time to time, and I’ve taken tons of photos out with friends, but I’d like to get better at doing more day-to-day photography.

I learned basic Spanish in two semesters of high school, but that was years ago, and I need a much better understanding of it if I want to have the best time I can when visiting my friend Rachel in Costa Rica.

So, I have about a month before the trip. A couple of weeks ago I identified some steps to take, and tonight I loaded a bunch of flashcards into Mnemosyne, a very useful program that lets you rate how well you have different pieces of vocab memorized, and shows the ones you have memorized less well more often.

I’m starting by learning the 500 most-spoken Spanish words, and I need to create additional flash cards for the most common phrases.

I’m fortunate to have several friends who speak Spanish well, so I need to start having basic conversations more often too.

And my final step is having an English-Spanish translation service bookmarked in my browser toolbar. I want to make sure anything I don’t know how to say, or suddenly realize I’ll likely want to be able to say, I can have the translation ready to learn with a click of a button.

So, I feel decently prepared for learning. Now I just need to put as much time into it as I can spare, with all the other stuff I have going on.

I just started this list, and came up with 22 in my first session of thinking about it. I’d like to find more things that I can do instead of things that happen, but both are nice to identify.

1. fun songs
2. cooking for someone I care about
3. climbing a mountain
4. building sandcastles
5. winning a boardgame
6. singing a great song
7. having great sex
8. pleasant surprises
9. people showing that they care about me
10. hearing from old friends
11. giving people small gifts
12. dancing
13. feeling strong
14. seeing beautiful places
15. discovering new things
16. inside jokes with friends
17. snow
18. hot chocolate on a cold day
19. long conversations with friends (car trips, coffee, house parties, catching-up phone calls)
20. video Skyping with someone I haven’t seen in a while
21. having my work recognized for its quality
22. a good gaming session