Happy Third Birthday!

Three years! Today marks the third birthday of this, the mitchenstein blog. When I started this blog, I was 22, an undergraduate, in England and sporting shoulder-length hair. Today I’m 25, a doctoral student, in the Faroe Islands and have an ever-increasing forehead. But still going strong!

This year’s been somewhat unusual – downright surreal at times – full of highs and lows, of course, and quite an adventure. In the past year I’ve spent six months in the Faroes, been on (Faroese) national TV, had a double-page write-up about me in a (Faroese) national newspaper, completed my first year of the mitchenstein365 project, completed the first year of my PhD, met Dr. Karl Kennedy and got a Gospel Choir going. Blog-wise, I also started doing some videos, which is kinda cool and fun to do – not sure how much fun they are to watch!

Usually, whenever this blog has had a birthday, I’ve done a huge blogging spree, blogging every day for a whole week. But not this year. This year it’s all in the one blog post!

I usually do a big thing about Mitchenstein in Statistics, but I think we’ll leave that this year too. All I’ll say is that I have written 181 posts on mitchenstein – 55 in my first year, 64 in my second year, and 62 this year, but that is an increase, because 4 of last year’s posts weren’t written by me! :)

Every year I look back at the ambitions I set for myself the year before, and see whether or not I’ve managed to achieve any of them. Last year’s ambitions were:

1. Keep this blog going.
ACHIEVED

2. Get a book published.
NOT ACHIEVED (but I hadn’t written one, so it was unlikely).

3. Raise some money for charity.
NOT REALLY ACHIEVED (I took part in some events that raised money for charity, but unfortunately I didn’t really achieve anything myself).

4. Get a piece of music published by The Salvation Army.
NOT ACHIEVED (But again, I didn’t write anything, so the odds were against me).

5. Learn to speak another language fluently.
ACHIEVED (Admittedly it wasn’t completely from scratch, but my Faroese is about fifteen million times better than this time last year. It hasn’t always been easy, but I’m so glad I insisted on doing everything in Faroese when I arrived here).

6. Start a gospel choir.
ACHIEVED

7. Read more.
MEGA-ACHIEVED (see here!)

8. Be tidier and more organised, and go to bed earlier.
NOT REALLY ACHIEVED

9. Learn Welsh.
NOT ACHIEVED (I’ve managed to pick up quite a bit from watching Gavin and Stacey with Welsh subtitles, but I wouldn’t really say that got me fluent... By any stretch of the imagination. But I can tell you that ‘What’s occurin’?’ is ‘Pa newydd?’).

So some new ambitions for this year are needed, namely:

1. Keep this blog going.
2. Learn the guitar. I don’t even really like guitars, but while I’ve been away I’ve realised how useful it is to be able to play chords on the guitar. If I could achieve this, it would be excellent.
3. Get a book published. Or just something.
4. Keep up my reading this year. At least 12 books.
5. Not lose the Faroese I’ve learned while I’ve been here.
6. Read a book in a language I’ve not read a book in before.
7. Be tidier and more organised, and go to bed earlier.
8. Write some music.
9. Be fitter.

Thanks to everyone who checks the blog, and the mitchenstein365 blog. Who knows what the next year will bring? But whatever happens, I’ll try to make sure I get the interesting bits on here. And I'll make those bits that aren’t so interesting a little more interesting than they are, and get them on here too.

And, because it’s tradition:

2006-2007

2007-2008

2008-2009