So cool!! I love the little racoon with the calender, he is real cute 
He can have all the smoked sausages!
Last week, I did a bit of language study every day! I also ran three times! This is a great start. I definitely still had some depressive days though. For this week’s goal, I’d like to try and show myself more compassion and actively work towards gaining my self-esteem back. I have found that when I’m depressed about things outside of myself (bereavement, my job situation etc), I feel a lot of guilt and responsibility, which makes the cycle worse. Not sure how to break it tbh. But for now, here is another raindrops raccoon drawn with this week’s goal…
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月: 70 wanikani reviews and did the daily 15 lessons too!
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火: 40 mango reviews in Russian and 30 wanikani reviews. Made banana bread
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水: 40 mango reviews in Russian and 30 wanikani reviews – funnily enough exactly the same amount as yesterday. Got lots of steps!
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木: mango reviews and set up TWO IN PERSON INTERVIEWS FOR TOMORROW WELP
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金: 176 wanikani reviews (how did it get that high welp) !! AND MASSIVE JOB UPDATE hehe
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土: 40 wanikani reviews and the daily 15 lessons. No Russian Mango today (except my bf speaking numbers with me haha), but the first time this year going to the beach !!! So lovely and I’m sunburnt haha
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日: 30 reviews of wanikani. Nothing else bc I realized I hadn’t read ANY of my chapters this week for my 2-man bookclub I do with my friend from Japan so I had to speeeeed read the living heck out of those pages haha! Here’s to the end of a good week!
Welcome year of the raccoon 
I got behind on the forums, so I’ve just caught up on yours since April. I’m sorry to hear about your dad’s passing
You’re really getting yourself out there with the running and language study and job search and and and 
I hope that all combines in a way that helps you through this
I have used that, it was so cute! I don’t remember why I didn’t keep it up, are you still using it?
thank you @mitrac for both the condolences and the good wishes 
you’re very sweet
I am still using finch! Tho I just lost my 40 day streak booo! It helpfully reminds me if I’ve actually completed a goal or not that day bc after a while the days blend and I literally can’t remember hahaa I use it for language study, getting steps in, and applying for jobs! (((This is my friend code if you wanted to add each other hehe: 5F5H5XH51E))
I hope you’ve been doing well too 
HELLO EVERYONE. The last month has been super productive on the job hunt front, and especially last week where I had several interviews and… offers! I have finally accepted an offer for a new place and will be starting in just over two weeks, handing in my notice today with my current employer. It felt like I was job hunting for ages but in reality - after actually committing to putting my Indeed Job page as visible to employers lol - it only really took a month or so for me to find a new job. Which, given the job climate rn, is pretty good and I should give myself credit for!!! So that’s been quite uplifting and I’m excited for a new environment.
As far as language studies go, I’ve been slacking on the Russian I won’t lie. But I’ve done my wanikani dutifully everyday! So here’s hoping this week I can get back into Mango reviews too. I also would love to potentially commit to buying a YMCA membership??? It’s a huge financial investment for me but I think it might be worth it? Especially if my boyfriend is serious about wanting to do a half triathlon next year cuz ya gurl is NOT ready. I’ll write up a 今週のゴール tomorrow, but as it’s past midnight I wanted to post this week’s raccoon hahahah and write up my blog post for the week ahead so here it is!
- 月: 99 wanikani reviews! My boyfriend made homemade ramen for dinner - even down to the broth!! It was so delish!
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火: 30 wanikani lessons and about 100 reviews over the course of the day. 44 Mango reviews in Russian (!!) after a 5 day break while I was busy jobbin-it-up with interviews n such! Walked 20,000 steps today after work to compensate for pretty much none yesterday oops
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水: a buuuunch of wanikani lessons and about 50 reviews. Leaving a tonne of reviews undone for the night bc I’m pooped! Ran my first run of the week (a 3 miler)
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木: 90 wanikani reviews (cheekily at work lol) and 6 lessons. Mango reviews and a lesson. I am finding numbers hard to pronounce
数字は簡単な単語のはずだな~~~~. 赤ちゃんも分かっても、ロシア語の数字は私にとって難しい！So I’ll have to make mneumonics for them. Starting with 28 (my soon-to-be age!)… 20 is Двадцать (dva like the word for two and then the sound is “sit”. Stress on the dva. DVAsit. I’m gonna say that people in their 20s like to sit down a lot hahaha. Then the word for 8 is восемь, sounding like VOsyim (this one is easier bc it’s the word for seven with a VO at the front aha but even so I’ll make a mnemonic that pictures eight voles swimming lol). Now I should be able to remember: Мне двадцать восемь лет. I am 28 years old!
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金: 84 wanikani reviews and 9 lessons available! 11 mango Russian reviews. GUYS. I was today years old when I learnt that the word “babushka” - which I feel is commonly known in English as the world for grandma/old woman - has the WRONG STRESS IN ENGLISH. For absolutely no reason at all
In English, we say baBOOshka; but in Russian it’s actually BABooshka. Why on earth would we change it ??? It’s literally just as easy to say it the correct way… anyway lol! -
土: just some wanikani reviews and lessons - finished the novel I’m reading in my two-man-bookclub hehe
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日: 101 wanikani reviews (with a hundred due this evening)
aaaah, and I tried to install it and was reminded for the thousandth time that my phone memory is too full and I keep deleting apps to try to make room but now all my apps are 100% functional and I need to either reset my phone to free up the memory or chuck it, which doesn’t feel very responsible 
. I wish that didn’t happen, like, why can’t I box back the space that apps just eat into without my knowledge or control rather than it just getting slowly taken up by things I don’t know what they are. I can clear everything I have control of on my phone, clear the memory from all apps, and my phone is still full, boo. sorry rant over
but someday I will do that and I’ll join FInch again!!!
love these 
congrats on the job!!!
This is such a justifiable rant – my sister also never seems to have any space on her phone to the point where it won’t even let her take photos anymore 
my conspiracy is the phone companies are doing it on purpose to make us dependent on cloud storage paid plans grrrr
Session 1: Sunday July 5
WE’RE BACK BABY! Halfway through the year and ya gurl is doing her first reading/translating session of Akira Volume II ((with a raccoon mascot drawn specially for these reading posts 
I think he is my favourite of the little guys yet!)) I’m pretty sure I already began this book on my old blog, but hey it’s easier to just begin from the start of the next book bc I don’t remember. Here are my notes:
Words I had to look up:
| 漢字 | 仮名 | 意味 |
|---|---|---|
| そいつ | That guy/he/she (derogatory) | |
| 負傷 | ふしょう | Injury |
| 一名 | いちめい | One person/alias |
| 救急班 | きゅうきゅうはん | First aid team |
| 待機 | たいき | Stand-by |
| 要請 | ようせい | Request |
| 尚 | なお | Well/In addition |
Funnily enough the majority of the words I had to look up were all in ONE sentence hahaha Some of them (like 要請 and 待機) I feel like I knew but not well enough to feel certain so I still included it on my look-up list.
One cool thing that happened during this first reading session of 2026 was coming across the phrase 訳 and literally referring to MY OWN NOTES on it from 2023 on my old study blog. Very very neat to have my own personal archive to look back on for reference 
Not sure how frequently I’ll do these reading sessions, but maybe I’ll shoot for once a week to start off?
And with that, let me include the habit tracker for the week ahead in this post since I’m already here:
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月: wanikani reviews throughout the day; on Sunday I had hundreds and today hardly any, not sure why!)
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火: 90 wanikani reviews, and about 30 lessons - levelled up to the first double digit since resetting!!! 22 Russian mango reviews
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水: wanikani reviews throughout the daaaay! Four mango reviews.
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木: 50ish wanikani reviews, 15 lessons. 44 mango Russian reviews AND a lesson! Learning ordinal numbers and it’s tricky
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金: woke up doing 50 wanikani reviews before I even left the house! Felt good. TODAY IS MY LAST DAY AT MY CURRENT JOB EEP. *Update at 11pm: did 149 more wanikani reviews and 5 lessons. 40 mango reviews with Russian ordinals kicking my butt again - I’m gonna have to take the time to write mnemonics for sure haha
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土: 80 morning wanikani reviews and 5 lessons!
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日: 30 wanikani reviews and 6 Russian mango reviews in the car
YA GURL IS 28 YEARS OLD. 
It was my birthday on Monday :3 I went to an art gallery and ate a bunch of hummus; a good day. Then, on Tuesday, I spent my first day at MY NEW JOB! Everyone has been very friendly and I’m excited to learn the ropes and be helpful! There’s a YMCA just two minutes from my new office so I decided to finally bite the bullet and sign myself (and my partner) up for a membership. It’s $110 or something a month, so I legitimately HAVE to go to the gym or else it’ll be a huge waste of money welp.
The first half of this year has been … a lot. What with my dad passing, my partner and I moving out into our own space, and searching for ages and finally starting a new job, it’s been a lot of changes. I’m cautiously hopeful for the remainder of the year, hoping it can only improve. Part of that is going to come down to my continued commitment to this study log. Like I mentioned, I began it in Dec 2025 and then my whole world derailed when my dad got the diagnosis, so I truly kinda feel like there was a pause and the study log is actually beginning now. Maybe that’s a cop out tho aha. In any case, here’s to:
continuing to use wanikani daily for Japanese (7/7)
doing one Japanese reading session a week (1/7)
continuing to use mango daily for Russian (7/7) — I discovered just this week that you can IMPORT your own words into the SRS flash cards page ??!?! So freaking cool. Naturally I’m therefore using Japanese in an effort to achieve my dream of 日本語ーラシア語 study notes; and adding the words my bf teaches me again and again yet I keep forgetting. Hopefully this helps!
doing my weekly drawing of a raccoon (1/7) lol I don’t know why this has become part of the whole thing…. I know historically I’m way more committed to these study logs if I can make them cute looking, so maybe that’s why??
going to the YMCA/gym at least 3 times a week (3以上/7)
I legitimately think if I can stick to these goals, my self image, assurance, and confidence will sky rocket. So, here’s hoping I can stick to it!
| 何日 | 日本語  |
ラシア語  |
運動  |
|---|---|---|---|
| 水曜日 | 162 wanikani reviews | 13 mango reviews | swam for 1/2 hour and 503 meters |
| 木曜日 | 22 wk reviews and 15 lessons | 17 mango reviews | combination of incline-walking and running for an hour |
| 週末 | Swam on Sunday w my bf! |
Happy birthday!!! 
Happy birthday raindrops! Have you seen Jimothy the raccoon?
Happy birthday!! and I was just about to mention Jimothy too, Seattle legend!
Happy birthdayjobYMCA!
Sometimes life raises up and decides it isn’t your time to do something you want to do for a little while until you can get yourself spinning at roughly the same rate and direction as the planet is so you can find your footing. But you found your way back which is proof that you’ve got this, hopefully the recent life progress is your level-up bonus for getting through a challenging time.
THANK YOU EVERYONE FOR THE BIRTHDAY WISHES you are all lovely! and yes hehe I have seen round boy Jimothy AND my very first raccoon in my garden outside !!! A huge week for アライグマ.
Last week was positive . My second week at my new job, I felt myself becoming more comfortable with the work itself / the new software etc. I did wanikani every day— I’m hoooooping once some more weeks go by at this job, maybe I can get away with sneakily doing more WK on the clock haha that’s something I miss a lot about working in Japan; whenever I was doing reviews at work, my Japanese coworkers saw it as working hard (whereas I just saw it as getting paid to do my hobby!) Stay tuned to see if I can do that in corporate America lol
After a few days neglecting my Russian mango reviews, the end of the week was better. You’ll recall where we left off
So I decided to dedicate some time to drilling numbers over my morning coffee this weekend:
Ordinals are next: I’M COMING FOR YOU 
For my raccoon this week, I made a little animation to reflect my 運動! He’s cute and I wanna do more; I’m so grateful for the websites that make converting your 5 or so drawings into little animated gifs so accessible! In any case, triathlon training went well this week! We are hoping to do the 70.3 Triathlon (otherwise known as a Half-Ironman distance) next year which is:
- 1.2 miles / 1.9km swim
- 55.9 miles / 90km bike
- 13.1 miles / 21.1km (half-marathon) run
This is insane lol and neither my partner nor I have ever done a triathlon let alone one so long hahaha buuuut we have over a year til the race we want to do so we’re hopeful! I did a full marathon in Japan, so have some experience with long-term training plans, but this will for sure be a step-up! This week I did:
- 火曜日 0.5 mile swim
- 水曜日 2 mile run
- 木曜日 6.22 mile / 10km run
- 土曜日 2.45 mile run
- 日曜日 0.12 mile swim with my bf who haaaates swimming and was running on 4 hours sleep after a bachelor party he went to the night before hahaha so the goal today was just to get IN the water to acclimatize and therefore, a success!
If my bf is most uncomfortable with the swimming portion, I am for sure most nervous about the cycling. Ideally, I think a good place to start with the training would be attempting to boost my numbers up until I eventually get to a weekly total of the race mileage. I.e. this week I ran 10.67 out of 13.1 miles which isn’t bad! But only 0.62 out of 1.2 miles swimming and ZERO for cycling Admittedly I don’t even have a bike yet lol buuut I can defo try some miles on the cycling machines at the gym!
So my goals for this upcoming week are to tackle ordinals and brave the bike!
wednesday august 5:
最近、仕事で働きながら、ワニカニの復習をしている。近日は仕事は忙しくなるはずだと思うから、出来れば、暇を楽しんでる。例えば今も書いてるハハハ！
トライアスロンのトレーニングって、とうとうに勇気を探せて自転車を乗ってしまった！先週は一回だったけど、何もないのより一回のほうがいい。30分間で6マイルできた。昨日も30分間また乗ったけど、今回は６．５マイル乗ったけでなく（同じ時間でもっと０．５マイル！）、さっすぐ後で1マイル走った！泳ぎ、走り、サイクリング：トライアスロンは各の運動のためにトレーニングが必要だから、次々に練習したほうがいい。それで、昨日のワークアウトしてよかった。
One thing that has been an adjustment is my sleep schedule. My new job requires an earlier start and my partner doesn’t get back from work til 10:30~11pm, so I’ve been getting around 6~6.5hours of sleep a night. That might be enough for some people but for ja boi it is decidedly not and I can physically feel it affecting my blood pressure :< I’ve even gained a surprising amount of weight in the last month (despite no change in diet and only an increase in exercise if anything?) which I’ve heard can be caused my lack of sleep my bf tells me it’s bc of muscle gain 
which would be cool if true ahahhah but I don’t think so. Soooo I’m kinda at a loss of how to navigate that. I want to stay up to 1) have time for triathlon training and language study and 2) to spend quality time w the boif buuuut sleep is also 大切 AS HECK. Any advice is appreciated as always 
hope everyone’s having a great week!
Aaah different work schedules are so frustrating I go to bed around 20-21 and need up to 9 hours of sleep 
I used to work evenings while my bf worked morning and ai hate how little time we got to spend with each other without neglecting sleep. No advice, sorry! But I really hope you figure out something that works
Are naps a possibility ? An hour long nap in the middle of the day offset a lot of fatigue…
@pandoravakarian thank you for your empathy 
! I know for sure I don’t wanna sacrifice the time we have together so I’m wondering if @YandrosTheSane has the right idea and I should try napping… maybe when I get home from work in that 6pm~10pm window 
?
maybe I’ll do some reading on ⋆｡°✩polyphasic sleep ⋆｡°✩
Today I went to the gym to do my swimming session during my LUNCH BREAK (!) as opposed to after work in an effort to feel like I had more rest time so we’ll see how that goes! It meant it was a shorter session than usual (just 0.28 miles) but it did make me feel very productive!
If you have trouble falling asleep at your target hour you can try melatonin spray (usually put you to sleep in under 20 min) and sleep for one or two cycles (a cycle is around 45 min for the average person). On hard days I can place this tactical nap during lunch break 