On the off-chance that your New Year’s resolution involves learning a new language, I thought this was a really cool map charting the number of jumps between a new language and English.  It’s English-focused because the information is pulled together from the government agency that trains US government employees going to other countries, such as diplomats.  If you speak a language other than English, it’s interesting to see the number of jumps it takes English-speakers to get to your language.

So French or Spanish take 575 – 600 hours to master whereas Hebrew takes 1100 hours and Japanese clocks in at 2200 hours.

What I’d love to know is the tipping point of how much of a language you should learn before going to the country and throwing yourself into the fray in order to absorb the language while it’s surrounding you.  If you enter with nothing, it’s frustrating, but if you have a base of understanding, it feels like you pick up the language faster once you’re listening to it 24/7.

Which language would you love to learn?  And where does it fall on the difficulty scale if you’re an English speaker?

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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On the last day of the year, I cleaned up my to do list and got ready for the work week.  I played a lot of Shuffle Cats, crossword puzzles, solitaire, and Sudoku.  We watched the first Lord of the Rings movie because we missed our yearly tradition of watching all three films between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.  We ate appetizers for dinner.

I never got out of my pyjamas.

It doesn’t look very exciting when you write it out like that, but it was the perfect way (for me) to spend the last day of the year.  Nothing big.  Nothing grand.  No champagne or fancy party.  Just everyone piled into a bed, eating chocolate, fighting orcs, and waiting for the ball to drop.

How did you mark the last day of 2017?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

As someone who recently made a hard decision that changed my life for the better (at least, I believe it changed my life for the better, though since I can only live the one choice, I really have no clue if it would have been better the other way, right?), this article in the Harvard Business Review struck close to home.  I felt like things were being done to me, though in reality, the control was there all along.  I just wasn’t exercising it until I exercised it.

Like this line: “you can choose to believe that the right actions will lead to the right feelings, rather than the other way around.”  I need to believe that more in 2018.

I’m not big on setting resolutions; not because I don’t think there are things I should change in my life, but because the biggest problems are not always apparent on January 1st.  For instance, the issue above didn’t even start until the spring, and I didn’t realize it was a negative aspect of my life until I was several months into the situation.  That was a resolution I needed to make on the fly to take care of myself.

If I had to set one thing, I need more sleep.  We were so good about getting in bed at a reasonable time for a very short period of time last year, and then we went back to our old, unhelpful ways.  We need to hang a sign in our room reminding ourselves to stick with the bedtime routine until it becomes a habit.

What are your resolutions this year?

It has been quiet this week online, so I decided to push the 675th Roundup off one week to next Friday.  I feel weird when I do this — I’ve been writing the Roundup since 2006, and I only skip it once or twice a year (and some years, not at all) — but it’s probably good to take a break once in a while, right?  Play a little sudoku.  Try out new vegan brownie recipes.  Clean all the post-it notes off my desk.

Or let’s try this: I’ll leave the Roundup up to you.  Leave links below to the best posts or Tweets or Instagram photos you saw this week.  We can all comb through them while we drink hot chocolate, and then regroup for a normal Roundup next week.

Sound like a plan?

I don’t know how I found this article on Man Repeller, by which I mean that I have zero clue how I found Man Repeller at all.  But I did and I read a bunch of women all giving life advice to 28-year-olds.

The problem, of course, is that you’re seeing 28 through the lens of a 32-year-old or a 41-year-old.  You live 28 once, but you see that year differently as each age passes, so it’s impossible to give advice to 28-year-olds that won’t be rewritten next year or when I enter another stage of life or believe something new.

It’s also hard to give advice that doesn’t come off as trite: “what an amazing time that was in my life.”  What does that even mean?  Is there ever a time in life that is not amazing considering that we can see time period through numerous lens?  At 28, I was spinning my wheels, doing fertility treatments.  At 28, I had a fantastic job teaching middle school.  At 28, I was walking around London with my husband.  At 28, I was up all night worrying that we’d never be able to afford a house.

I have no advice for 28-year-olds or 32-year-olds or even fellow 43-year-olds.  That’s the thing about life: every single experience is unique.  No one size fits all.