Thought I’d post up a couple of goals I’ve just decided on, so I can either look back on this and feel proud of achieving them or look back and think what a naiive idiot I was.

All this organising of my Japan holiday (which I’ll be leaving for in two and a bit weeks) is rekindling my desire to go another country for a year and see how I hold up. Japan seems like an obvious choice since I’m interested in the people and culture and am learning the language… plus there’s a (relatively) cushy program called JET which pays for your flight there and back, pays more than any other English teaching job that you could get with zero experience in Asia, gives all this training and support and whatnot, and if you’re lucky even subsidises your housing and transport. On the down side the application process is once a year and takes something like 9 months with something less than a 50/50 chance of actually getting accepted. This means that I won’t be able to even apply until October and won’t know if I’m going for not until possibly as late as August the next year, assuming I make it that far. Failing that I’ll probably look into some other teaching-English-in-Japan company so I can prepare myself for leaving whether I make it into JET or not.

The second goal relates to the first - I’ve been studying Japanese for a year now, and at the end of this year I want to take a shot at the level 3 Japanese Language Proficiency Test. It’s a fairly low level - if the number of kanji you have to know is a rough guide, it’s about where a 7 year old Japanese kid is at - but it would be nice to have something more official and recognised than a TAFE certificate to point at if I fail at JET and have to go the private route. It also feels a bit more challenging - at TAFE it’s quite difficult to not be able to pass at all, especially for a 22 year old who only came out of many years of formal education a couple of years ago, and it’s good for me to have more of a reason to really work hard.

Hopefully I’ll be looking back at this in a year and a half from Japan with the certification that I have the language skills of a 7 year old Japanese kid under my belt. Go me!

A Chinese New Year (Year of the Rat in a few weeks!) picture that kind of… failed. But still, keeping in practice is good.

More clay stuff! I still haven’t found the perfect varnish yet - for this batch I’ve resorted to clear nail polish, and it’s not to bad… certainly doesn’t give the kind of protection needed for say, a keyring to make sure that it doesn’t chip.