found drama

With the first quarter wrapped-up, we should check in and see where I have landed for our personal goals, eh? Back in January, I posted five personal goals to this site. With some varying degrees of success, I have been chipping away at these goals January through March. Let’s see how well I weigh in thus far:

1. Write for at least 2 hours every week. A variation on what appears to have become a perennial challenge for me. I decided to measure in hours this year instead of “words written” because I realized late last year that much of the time I spent writing was spent journaling, outlining, brainstorming, or else in other writing-related activites but not “strictly writing”. With that in mind:
   
   Just barely kept pace.
2. Run or walk at least 10 miles every week. This has turned into a tough one for me during these early months of the year. Oh, I have my excuses: car-pooling with A. each morning, the cold winter mornings, the snow, the closure of that path that I like to take… But what it boils down to is:
   
   Yeah, that’s pathetic.
3. Hike 10 new trails. No progress. For understandable reasons, we have restricted our winter hikes to Philo sledding runs. The snowshoes saw no action this winter. Perhaps we can find a few “easy” trails for the early parts of the spring. But as of March 31st:
   
   Well, at least I’m not behind pace here.
4. Go climbing (or bouldering) at least once each week. Lots of success here. I am probably averaging about 2 visits to the rock gym per week. I’m certainly getting my money’s worth from my membership there:
   
   Doing very well indeed.
5. Read at least 24 new books in 2008 (with at least 6 non-fiction titles). The list: Jose Saramago’s Blindness; P.K. Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth; Levitt & Dubner’s Freakonomics (non-fiction); David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten; Dr. William R. Uttal’s The New Phrenology (non-fiction); Adams’ collection Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse; Max Brooks’ World War Z ¹; Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think (the original edition, non-fiction); D.F. Wallace’s Consider the Lobster (absurd but non-fiction); Iain M. Banks’ The Algebraist; Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick; Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World ²; Max Barry’s Jennifer Government; and the J.D. Salinger classic The Catcher in the Rye ³. Currently reading: Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal. Our graph shows:
   
   Looks like I’m already more-or-less up to July levels already.

Alrighty…  Let’s check back again in three months!

1. Though filed under non-fiction at our local library, this was decidedly not non-fiction.[↩]
2. Actually, I’ve read this one before (and relatively recently) but we’ll count it. For now.[↩]
3. Which I’ve also read before but it’s been so long it may as well have been new.[↩]

About Rob Friesel

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