2011 personal goals round-up
¶ by Rob Friesel2011 is all over! Happy New Year on our way into 2012!
Now in my annual tradition of evaluating my personal goals (“not resolutions”) let’s take a look at 2011’s outcomes…
- Exercise at least four days each week. Often true, often not. Most of the year I managed to fit in at least four sessions each week. Fell off the wagon a bit during November and December; the holidays always throw in a few interruptions.
Good year for walking and running (vide supra); not as good of a year for climbing (vide infra):
Finish the “Orin” WordPress theme.Orin was released to this blog on February 13. May its tenure be as long as Ortho’s. Which is looking quite promising, considering I’ve kept it in semi-active development and just released version 0.5.- Get to know Groovy/Grails. Still far from mastery but also: “I’m getting pretty good at this thing.”
Photography: a 365 project.Gave this up almost as soon as I’d started. Then I managed to get myself talked into joining another photo club… which also kind of fell off-step. But photos remain a favorite (if sporadic) activity in this house.- Reading:
≥36≥40 books. Hit 36 — the first time that I met my annual reading goal since the H-bomb was born. Boom. So bumped it to 40+; my Goodreads.com 2011 shelf shows 44 books:- Shadow & Claw
(1/18);
- Holy Fire
(2/2);
- All the Pretty Horses
(2/6);
- all five of the Prydain Chronicles
(3/1);
- The Name of the Wind
(3/10);
- The Trouble With Physics
(3/19);
- The Word for World is Forest
(3/21);
- The Gunslinger
(3/30);
- White Noise
(4/7);
- The Stars Are Also Fire
(4/16, abandoned);
- How the Universe Got Its Spots
(4/24);
- The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
(4/30);
- Seven Languages in Seven Weeks
(5/7);
- Blind Man’s Bluff
(5/15);
- Ventus
(5/30);
- Motherless Brooklyn
(6/8);
- A Wrinkle in Time
(6/14);
- Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto
(6/26);
- Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories (7/4);
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (7/21);
- The Restaurant at the end of the Universe (7/23);
- Life, the Universe and Everything (7/27);
- So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (8/1);
- Mostly Harmless (8/7);
- Whiskey: A Global History (8/12);
- Burning Chrome (8/14);
- Jack London in Paradise (8/31);
- The City & The City (9/14);
- Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories (9/25);
- Chthon (10/7);
- Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings (10/20);
- Jurassic Park (10/29);
- Darwin’s Radio (11/20);
- The Year of the Flood (12/7);
- Program or Be Programmed (12/11);
- The Untouchable (12/26);
- The Joy of Clojure (re-reading, ongoing);
- Hadoop: The Definitive Guide (more/less “for work”; ongoing);
- Professional JavaScript for Web Developers (3rd edition) (off/on throughout the year); 1 and
- closing out the year by starting Neanderthal
- Shadow & Claw
- Writing: ≥ 2 hours per week. Always a tough one. Always a personal one. Always one that winds up being subject to flux. I hardly wrote at all during the top half of the year. But toward the end, I changed some of my thinking about how I wanted to write, and why I was writing. I went back to writing for the sheer personal pleasure of it, and stopped thinking about my own ridiculous “five year plan”.
Granted: who am I kidding? The thing that motivates me to plow through NaNoWriMo and commit to 5+ hours each week of writing is the same desire to see my name mentioned in some review somewhere, or perched up on some independent bookstore’s shelf. Hopes remain strong there.
I’ll get 2012 goals posted in a couple of days, though I’m not feeling any particular rush to do so. 2012 is going to be full enough as it is without the artificial pressures of made-up personal goals. A couple of nominal reading, writing, and exercise goals… maybe a few more.
- Full disclosure: I had the privilege of assisting with some of the proof-reading and technical editing. That was a fun and educational experience and I urge everyone to try and get a chance to do something like that.[↩]
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