Time to say goodbye to 2011. Bye 2011!

This year was one where I broke some long standing personal records and achieved some challenging goals. For strength related personal records: I made a PR for Bench Press, an exercise I sucked at pretty bad, pressing 215lbs once (30% over my body weight). I set a PR for deadlifts just last weekend, lifting 265lbs once. I did a hanging clean of 145lbs once yesterday as well, another PR. For calisthenic related goals, I did my first Muscle Up early this year, followed up by reaching a PR 7 consecutive last month. I completed the 100 Days of Burpees Challenge and managed to make 75 Pullups in under 5 minutes. I also did a lot of running to train for the 5KM Run for the Cure, which I did while wearing a 20lbs training vest in just under 25 minutes total time.

This year was also very beer heavy. I believe I made over 20 beers this year, plus a couple ciders and wines. I made the switch from extract brewing to all grain this summer and began to produce vastly better beers. My last 12 or so batches have all been from grain to glass and I have no intention of switching back to extract. Ever. Through time saving brewing techniques such as no-chilling and BIAB I have cut my brew day time down to under 4 hours. I also tried a few money saving techniques such as yeast harvesting, yeast washing and bulk buying grain (which I believe I still have around 100lbs of in my basement…). Don’t even ask me how much of that beer I drank.

As for my Japanese study… Well… I could have done a lot more this year. I studied quite a bit of low level kanji and can recognize around 200+ characters now (well if I reviewed them again over a week). I know my vocabulary has gotten a smidge larger and my ability to write (on a computer… I can barely write in English on paper anymore) has improved. Overall though I don’t think I made very much headway in the area of Japanese in 2011.

I do not know what 2012 will bring, but something tells me its going to be a very amazing year.