found drama

Phew… a few days into Q3 before I realized that I hadn’t taken a moment to reflect. A reflection on the pace of things, perhaps?

For those playing along at home: the original 2012 goals post, and the Q1 check-in post. And now… the Q2 check-in:

1. Exercise: ≥4 days each week. Considering we had a new baby in April, and then… well: that other surprise in May, it’s actually kind of amazing that I managed to get in any exercise at all. Still, I managed some:
   
   Not actually too bad of an April and May. And by June I’m more/less back in it. Breaking it down to just the running and walking:
   
   I’m actually keeping up with my desired total mileage each month. As for climbing:
   
   I resigned my monthly membership and moved to a punch card. I was sad to do it, but I just couldn’t justify it any longer.
2. Reading: ≥36 books. Kicking ass this year? Goodreads is telling me that I’ve already read 29 books this year (this being out of my goal of 36). We’ll skip the graph this quarter. The table tells the tale.
   

   Book	Author	Date	Links
   Neanderthal	John Darnton	1/2	Goodreads; Amazon.com
   The Cardinal of the Kremlin	Tom Clancy	1/15	Goodreads; Amazon.com
   Animal Farm	George Orwell	1/19	Goodreads; Amazon.com
   We Are in a Book!	Mo Willems	1/21	Goodreads; Amazon.com 1
   Grendel	John Gardner	1/24	Goodreads; Amazon.com
   Embassytown	China Miéville	2/12	my review; Goodreads; Amazon.com
   Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal	Christopher Moore	2/22	Goodreads; Amazon.com
   Quiet	Susan Cain	3/1	my review; Goodreads; Amazon.com
   The Intuitionist	Colson Whitehead	3/6	Goodreads; Amazon.com 2
   Against a Dark Background	Iain M. Banks	3/21	Goodreads; Amazon.com
   The Joy of Clojure	Fogus & Houser	3/22 3	Goodreads; Amazon.com
   Running Lean	Ash Maurya	3/25	my review; Goodreads; Amazon.com
   Mobile Design Pattern Gallery	Theresa Neil	3/29	my review; Goodreads; Amazon.com
   Little House in the Big Woods	Laura Ingalls Wilder	3/31 4	Goodreads; Amazon.com
   jQuery UI	Eric Sarrion	4/9	my review
   Code Simplicity	Max Kanat-Alexander	4/26	my review
   Infinite Jest	David Foster Wallace	4/29	Notes
   Farmer Boy	Laura Ingalls-Wilder	5/1 5
   Little House on the Prairie	Laura Ingalls-Wilder	5/15 5
   Clojure Programming	Chas Emerick	5/19	my review
   Maintainable JavaScript	Nicholas C. Zakas	5/23	my review
   The Wise Man’s Fear	Patrick Rothfuss	5/27	Goodreads
   The Little MongoDB Book	Karl Seguin	6/1	Goodreads
   The Invention of Hugo Cabret	Brian Selznick	6/4
   Kanban and Scrum: Making the Most of Both	Henrik Kniberg	6/9	Goodreads
   Player Piano	Kurt Vonnegut	6/10	Goodreads
   The REST API Design Rulebook	Mark Massé	6/12	my review
   Imagine: How Creativity Works	Jonah Lehrer	6/17	my review
   Alien Contact (anthology)	Marty Halpern	6/21	my review
   Developing Web Applications with Haskell and Yesod	Michael Snoyman	6/30 6	my review

   …and those are the books that Goodreads is telling me I have finished in 2012 so far. Also: five more irons in the fire, as it were. And months to go before the year is out.

3. Reading: 10 new authors. Most of the books have been new, and many of the authors have been, as well. At least half, by my count.
4. Writing: ≥5 hours each week; 1000+ words per session. Remember when I mentioned the new baby? and “the other thing”? back when I was talking about my total exercise? It’s basically the same story here:
   
   This suffered from those incidents. March and April were both strong though, and July is already a better month than both May and June. So there’s a chance for recovery.
5. Writing: Finish a draft of my novel-in-progress. This is completed. March 13th was when I “finished” that first draft. Been working on a re-read and revisions. Slowly but surely.
6. Code: Write something (anything!) in Clojure. Remember that little Groovy program to generate the 2011 reading timeline? I thought maybe I’d write a version in Clojure.

1. Yes, it’s a kid’s book. So what? I read it for The Boy enough times.[↩]
2. Which, seriously, I know I don’t have my own review posted anywhere but… 5-stars. Really: go out and read it right now.[↩]
3. But I’d been working on this one since… July 2011? A good long while.[↩]
4. Though admittedly: that was a co-read with A., for H.; and A. did most of the reading.[↩]
5. Ibid.[↩][↩]
6. …or 7/1, depending on how you figure the fuzzy end on this one, for me.[↩]

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