Does anyone really not make them?
I don’t profess to making New Year’s Resolutions™, but January 1 has that inexplicable clean-slate sense to it. So in the end I always have some mental resolutions around this time of year.
One of those is trying for more frequent updates to this site. The last few months have been as scant as goals were in the Stars’ 2-1 shootout loss to the Canucks on the 3rd. (You might think listening to hockey over the radio is boring, but it’s actually quite entertaining.) A Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule might be nice, but it’s already Thursday, so that’s gone. So I think I’ll go for at least three updates a week, Megatokyo style. Every once in a while I’m sure I’ll pull a Fred and miss a day, but overall I think I can hold myself to that one.
Another resolution is to rework the kids classes on Tuesday and Thursday. Whereas the adult classes have been generally going well, the elementary-age classes have (in my opinion) deteriorated. I think some of the blame falls on me for not enforcing (or even having) a class plan. That and not having fun games that can somehow get the students to want to learn English. So the last couple of weeks of vacation have been filled with planning, multiple trips to stationery stores (probably the best part—sometimes I wish I lived in a Japanese stationery store), and hours upon hours of assembling cards, boards, and overlays for games like Connect-4, Battleship, baseball, and (of course) hockey. For the last two I’m relying on the dice pretty heavily, a la D&D. This results in great things like the goalie in hockey has a Saving Throw against all shots (except for, naturally, Critical Shots, which have no Saving Throw). Anyway, I’m either setting myself up for success or catastrophic failure—don’t know which yet at this point.