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goals for 2007: quarterly check-in

by Rob Friesel

Back in January, we put forth a few personal goals for 2007. Let’s see where we stand, eh?

  1. Write another draft of my novel. We’d written this up as “another draft of at least 80,000 words with at least 40,000 words worth of new material.” To date, I’ve written 6,475 words. Maybe 3,500 of those are new. So the proportions are right. But I’m about 13,526 words behind pace:
    2007 novel-writing goal
  2. Run or walk at least 10 miles every week. Mostly motivated by a desire to stay committed to my “walk to work and back”, I’d thrown this one on there. I’m surprised at how this hasn’t fully worked out thus far. I blame the cold for this one; it’s tough to get out there on foot when the air temperature is -3 (and feels like -17). The good news is that on days where I am walking, I’m averaging about 2.25 miles. The bad news is that I’m missing the overall mark:
    2007 walking/running goal
  3. Hike 10 new trails/mountains in 2007. Ahead of schedule here. Didn’t really expect to do any of these until the spring came. But we managed to hit Rattlesnake Point on snowshoes. We’ll take that for one:
    2007 hiking goal
  4. Mix at least 1 hour every week. Dodgy, this one is. January was definitely on. February, not so much. March, we’re back for the month’s total — though that whole “every week” part may/not be wholly accurate:
    2007 mixing goal
  5. Read 12 new books this year. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, 3 novels by Dashiell Hammett (bound as one, so we’ll count as one), Magic for Beginners, The Postman, Siddhartha, Demian, and The No Asshole Rule. Oh yeah:
    2007 reading goal
  6. Master CSS. Still vague and still unable to quantify. I suppose we could call Ortho the first real evidence that I’m working toward this. (Since rolling your own variation on Mike Davidson’s MySpace hack probably doesn’t count.)

Where to from here? We’ll have to see what happens with the novel-writing. Fitting all that in this year so far has been tough; priorities seem to be elsewhere and my heart hasn’t been fully in that story when I have sat down with it. So we’ll just have to see. Otherwise I feel on track. It’s getting warmer, so it’ll be easier to get my walking/running goals back on track and we’re doing fine with the “hiking new trails” bit thus far. Regardless of if it’s actually “1 hour every week” or not, I’m mixing more than I have in years. And did I mention I’m way ahead of pace for the reading goal?

Perhaps I should add in a new challenge or two…

About Rob Friesel

Software engineer by day. Science fiction writer by night. Weekend homebrewer, beer educator at Black Flannel, and Certified Cicerone. Author of The PhantomJS Cookbook and a short story in Please Do Not Remove. View all posts by Rob Friesel →

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