found drama

Q3 of 2012: wrapped up.

For those playing along at home: the original 2012 goals post, and the Q1 and Q2 check-in posts. And now… the Q3 check-in:

1. Exercise: ≥4 days each week. July was strong, August was one of my strongest months ever, ¹ but September went off the rails a bit:
   
   In August I tried out RunKeeper’s goals feature, and set out to run at least 30 miles. I made it, but barely:
   
   As for climbing… It’s turned into a “twice a month” kind of thing, sadly. At least ² I canceled my EFT membership:
   
2. Reading: ≥36 books. This is turning into a big year for me for books:
   

   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 3
   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 4
   Against a Dark Background	Iain M. Banks	3/21	Goodreads; Amazon.com
   The Joy of Clojure	Fogus & Houser	3/22 5	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 6	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 7
   Little House on the Prairie	Laura Ingalls-Wilder	5/15 7
   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 8	my review
   Web Workers: Multithreaded Programs in JavaScript	Ido Green	7/8	my review
   The Art of Agile Development	James Shore & Shane Warden	7/9	Goodreads 9
   A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius	Dave Eggers	7/10	Goodreads
   The Stars My Destination	Alfred Bester	7/19	Goodreads
   Team Geek	Brian W. Fitzpatrick & Ben Collins-Sussman	7/27	my review
   The Lost World	Michael Crichton	7/28	Goodreads
   Maven by Example	Tim O’Brien, John Casey, & Brian Fox	7/30	Goodreads
   Hyperion	Dan Simmons	8/14	Goodreads
   Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!	Miran Lipovača	8/17	n/a
   Python for Data Analysis	Wes McKinney	8/23	Goodreads
   Brief Interviews with Hideous Men	David Foster Wallace	8/25	Goodreads
   Regular Expressions Cookbook (2nd Edition)	Jan Goyvaerts & Steven Levithan	9/3	my review
   In the Country of Last Things	Paul Auster	9/4	Goodreads
   Learning JavaScript Design Patterns	Addy Osmani	9/15	my review
   I, Robot	Isaac Asimov	9/17	Goodreads
   The Caves of Steel	Isaac Asimov	9/26	Goodreads

   Lots of new books, and a good balance of fictions and non-fiction. ¹⁰
   

3. Reading: 10 new authors. This has been done for a while. I’ve read nine new-to-me fiction authors alone, and easily twice that for non-fiction.
4. Writing: ≥5 hours each week; 1000+ words per session. The fall saw a dip, but I’m still going pretty strong for the year overall. Pounded through July to finish a draft of my book. In August, I circulated it with some beta readers and decided to slow down a bit–and/but that also turned into working on revisions for another long-dormant project. September was… tough. I gave a talk, and so spent some nights prepping for that instead of writing. Can’t do it all.
   
5. Writing: Finish a draft of my novel-in-progress. REITERATED: This is complete. March 13th was when I “finished” that first draft. After a re-read and some notes, I sent it out to some beta readers in August; and I’ve been working on revisions. Slowly but surely.
6. Code: Write something (anything!) in Clojure. Still nothing worth counting. (And the clock is running out for the year!)

1. I count 31 discrete exercise sessions in August, including running over 30 miles.[↩]
2. Also: sadly.[↩]
3. Yes, it’s a kid’s book. So what? I read it for The Boy enough times.[↩]
4. Which, seriously, I know I don’t have my own review posted anywhere but… 5-stars. Really: go out and read it right now.[↩]
5. But I’d been working on this one since… July 2011? A good long while.[↩]
6. Though admittedly: that was a co-read with A., for H.; and A. did most of the reading.[↩]
7. Ibid.[↩][↩]
8. …or 7/1, depending on how you figure the fuzzy end on this one, for me.[↩]
9. Also: “Agile for the Introvert”.[↩]
10. Although a lot of the non-fiction are technical books; and a lot of those are through the O’Reilly blogger review program.[↩]

About Rob Friesel