Month of Thanksgiving 2018, Day 6

Today Mr. Sean is thankful for

The right to vote

Since I am not in a position of political power, it's challenging to get my voice heard in government. Being able to vote and partaking in voting helps with getting my voice heard. If you haven't gone out and voted today, you still have a couple of hours left. Local elections matter too!

Month of Thanksgiving 2018, Day 5

Today, Mr. Sean is thankful for:

Microwavable Curry Rice

Apologies for the hastily put together post. I promise I'll have a better thing, person, people, or idea that I am thankful for tomorrow. Although I always want my mom's curry, sometimes I have to make do with Thai curry and/or Indian curries. Thanks to microwavable rice packs from Japanese grocery stores and microwavable curry sauce, I was able to enjoy Japanese curry in a few minutes and a long way from home. 

Month of Thanksgiving 2018, Day 4

Today Mr. Sean is thankful for:

His mom's cooking

Thanks to my mom, I've enjoyed many a home-cooked meal, especially Japanese favorites such as Curry Rice, Oyakodon, and Yakisoba among others. Though I goofed in choosing this photo as the middle third of the photo is not my mom's cooking at all but Drunken Noodles from a local Thai restaurant. Anyways, I hope I can cook my favorites at least half as well as my mom can.

Month of Thanksgiving 2018, Day 3

Today Mr. Sean is thankful for

Kaitlyn Hernandez

Although she was supposed to be the drum major I feared and respected, once I learned about which instrument she played, we became fast friends. I'm thankful that our friendship has managed to withstand the test of time so far and I hope that time keeps being friendly to friendship. Thank you Kaitlyn for listening to me, being so kind to everybody, and just being awesome!

Month of Thanksgiving 2018, Day 2

Today, Mr. Sean is thankful for

Books!

Words bound together, whether they serve to entertain or educate the reader, books are cool and I am thankful for all the knowledge I've gained by reading books. Stay tuned as I'll try to post what I'm thankful for daily for the month of November (or at least until Thanksgiving).

Goals for November

Since I did a post for goals in October, I see not much harm in doing a post for November, but depending on how things go, I may or may not continue posting about my monthly goals after this month. This time I'll focus on five goals as eight goals was too many for October.

1. At least ten blog posts on the Mr. Sean 2001 blog.

I want my blog to not appear as dead as it did earlier in the year and I like writing when I did not have to write in a specific way to satisfy some not so logical whims of a high school English class. I haven't completely decided what will be included in my blog posts for this month, but this one, the goals reflection post, and what and who I am thankful for posts are definite shoo-ins.

2. Achieve at least 80 percent mastery in Khan Academy Algebra 2
3. Achieve at least 80 percent mastery in Khan Academy Precalculus

These two goals are grouped together as they have Khan Academy in common. In October I completed Algebra 1 and the Trig course and now only have Algebra 2, Precalc, and Calc AB and BC to complete my math mission there. Algebra 2 and Precalc represent the last math courses I found easy to do well in as the problems in those classes were still pretty much plug and chug rather than the proof focused math courses in college.

4. Listen to five different podcasts each week

What I mean by this goal is that in any given week that I listen to five different podcasts rather than five episodes of the same podcast. An example would be I try to listen to Podcasts A, B, C, D, and WeatherBrains rather than five episodes of WeatherBrains in a week. This is one of the easier goals as a lot of the podcasts I listen to have short episodes, but the goal here is variety rather than habit. There are podcasts for pretty much any subject that exists in the world, but I'll stick to weather, math, music, video games, Mike Rowe's The Way I Heard It, and the Art of Manliness podcasts for now.

5.  Not listen to Christmas music until the day after Thanksgiving

To end this blog post, I decided to pick a topic that is not supposed to be so divisive yet it is anyway. Some of my friends will insist that Christmas music is okay all year, others say after Halloween, some say 1 December. I've yet to hear a scrooge say that I can only listen to Christmas music on December 25th. I chose the day after Thanksgiving as it suggests I was patient enough to wait until after a major holiday but is forgiving in being a few days before the first day of December. I will need to get me a new pair of earphones if I can't fix the issue with my Bluetooth headphones by then (long story short, my laptop and my headphones ain't playing nice with each other).

Anyways, I've got some work to do, so I'll see y'all in the next post! Also to start the thankful series: I'm thankful for this blog allowing me to put words to e-paper and for all the readers out there who take time out of their lives to read this blog.

Reflecting upon Goals for October

Sometimes you have to aim high with the goals you want to achieve.

At the beginning of the month I posted about the goals I had hoped to accomplish this month. This post will discuss why I did not accomplish some goals while other goals were accomplished.

1. 90 percent or more mastery in Khan Academy Algebra

Although I thought it was going to be a forced grind of waiting, turns out I was able to rise from 77 percent mastery to over 90 percent mastery in a couple of days and I managed to get 100 percent just before the month ended. It helps that I'm really only doing Khan Academy math to review my math skills at every level they can offer. The next step will be completing Algebra 2, then Precalc, then Calc 1 and 2 (or AP Calc AB and BC). Somewhat off topic, it appears that Khan Academy follows the same order as AACPS does for Algebra 1, Geometry, and Algebra 2, but that may just be coincidence.

2. Complete Khan Academy Trig

The hardest part about completing this part of Khan Academy math was solving for x as there were multiple answers unlike basic one to one algebra as answers start to repeat after 2*pi radians/360 degrees. Thankfully I had everything else complete before the month began.

3. 3100 XP in Duolingo Japanese

The hardest parts about trying to accomplish this goal were the fact that I skipped some days and had to catch up and that some of the exercises I'm working on were repetitive in a poor manner. One "lesson" essentially consisted me of answering "I am a student" whether the exercise was a type the translation down, choose word and sound chunks, and other methods. Hopefully the team working on the Japanese course can improve the course in general. In the meantime, it appears that I have some grasp on Japanese grammar, including the use of particles such as wa, wo, and mo.

4. Mario Kart: Double Dash! 100cc All Cup Tour Perfect Score

I could have completed this goal if I spent less time on my computer, but this was more of a goal for having goals sake rather than anything of importance or growth. Wario Stadium so far is my biggest roadblock to getting the 160 points needed.

5. 30 day plank challenge

I actually was doing quite well on this challenge until I had to do the plank for two minutes (somewhere in the middle of the month). I tried the first day I was scheduled to plank for two minutes and I only made it 90 seconds. I conceded defeat as it was late in the day and I wouldn't be ready for another try that day. I'll try again next year.

6. 500 tiny origami swans folded
7. 250 tiny origami swans folded

These two weren't achieved simply because I chose to watch YouTube instead of listen to podcasts in my spare time. Also, I'm not as motivated to fold the tiny cranes as I've already folded one thousand of them before. Though I will still try to fold some tiny cranes and swans before year's end.

8. At least five blog posts posted this month

This was numerically a success, but there were some caveats. Two of the blog posts were basically re-writes of short stories I wrote on paper and two are related to goals for October. Only the math post and the Pusheen cross-stitch post were not thematically related. No matter, I have a more ambitious goal for November and December regarding this blog, so stay tuned! November goals will be posted tomorrow.