Some statistics for 2011

The population of the southern part of Cyprus was determined by this year's census to be at just under 839,000. Interesting, I suppose, but the most interesting part to me was the following quotation:

Georgiou noted that the increase in the population was also due to the number of foreign nationals, which reached 21.4% of the total population, compared to 9.4% in 2001. A total of 179,547 foreigners were recorded, of which 62.6% from EU countries and 37.4% from third countries.

My question is this: how were we counted? Eight of us live in this house, all of us "foreign nationals", seven of us from an EU country (Germany), seven of us from a third country (USA). We are by no means an unusual representation. I'm pretty sure that I know more people with dual nationality than with just one. I imagine that for the state of statistics, anyone with Cypriot nationality was counted only as a Cypriot, and non-Cypriot Europeans counted only as Europeans, which would mean that our family consists of seven non-Cypriot Europeans and one U.S.ian, but I couldn't find anything to confirm that. And of course, there's the little issue that after nearly three years here, I'm still not actually legally registered here. I'm also not illegally here, my paperwork is officially "in process". For that matter, it just occurred to me that we haven't bothered to get Elisabeth a residence permit, either, so only six members of the family have their yellow slips. So maybe we were counted as six Europeans and two non-residents?

Of more interest to me personally are a couple of other statistics that are of no interest whatsover to the rest of the world. One is that 2011 was the first year since 1985 that I was not in an airplane, not even once, and the first year since 1987 that I haven't traveled internationally. The furthest away I went the entire year was to the Troodos mountains, less than two hours away by car, and my guess is that 2011 was the first year of my entire LIFE that I spent every single moment within two hours of my home.

Another milestone to me was that, at near as I could calculate, in April or May of this year I passed the 50% point and have now spent over half of my life outside of my birth country. That is calculating both the times that I spent outside of the U.S. while I still actually lived there (to Japan with my family when I was three, to Japan as an exchange student when I was 15, and to Costa Rica as an exchange student when I was 17) as well as all the visits back to the U.S. since I left. However, I won't have lived in Europe for half of my life until the end of February 2012, and that still won't have been half of my life actually IN Europe.

2011 was also the first year since 2000 that I didn't spend any part of the year pregnant. There have been some years in there that I didn't spend very much of pregnant, but I had been pregnant at least part of every single year since 1996 except for 2000, and now 2011.

Another topic: December 26, 2010 I set a goal of breaking a particular habit and have kept track throughout the year. There have been about 15 days in which I slipped up, but compared to probably more like 360 the year before, I guess I should be pleased.

One goal I set for this year was to get caught up with photos, not too happy with being well over a year behind. In October, very briefly, I was just under a year behind with putting photos in albums, but as time marches on, I was quickly behind again. However, I have continued with sorting and editing on the computer, and as I write this post, I am in the process of uploading the photos from the second half of November 2010 to kodakgallery.de, already did December 2010, and have May 2011 ready to upload and will then be able to place an order today. I've already gotten January through April 2011 printed, so as soon as my November-December 2010 photos arrive, I'll have six months' worth of photos to put in albums. (I couldn't do November-December before because I was waiting on copies of my sister-in-law's photos from our last visit to the U.S..) I plan to spend January continuing the sorting of 2011 photos and hope to have June through December ready to order by the time I receive the order I place today, and don't want to be more than a month or two behind after this. Yes, I'm probably slightly OCD in this area.

I don't think I'm making any "New Year's Resolutions" for 2012, just continuing on with some of my goals, which aren't tied to a particular year. I guess I figure that if a particular habit is a good one to start or a good one to stop, then today is the best day to start/stop it, whatever the date. But I don't want to write about any of those goals in such a (theoretically) public place, even though the only person I know for sure who reads this probably knows all of them anyway.