The Fruits of Resolve

[rowyn]

1. Exercise at least five times a week for at least 30 minutes per session (20 of which must be aerobic or weight-lifting).
Let's see, looking back at previous updates:
January & February: Over 5 times per week.
March: Barely 5.
April & May: Over 5
June: Close to 6
July: 6
August: a little under 5
September: Over 5
October: 4 or less
November: 5
December: 6

So, overall, only blew the minimum in two months and handily exceeded it in five. So the average for the year is definitely over five times per week. It's also worth noting that I very rarely do the minimum time-wise. My usual time for a session would be: 30-40 minutes when lifting weights, 25-30 when doing dance, plus 10-20 minutes of stretching. Plus 30-40 minutes of walking to and from work each weekday. On my more ambitious days, I even do all of this. On a minutes-per-year basis, I totally kicked butt on this one.

Lut would also like to note that he has to exert himself to wrestle me around now, too. >:)

Grade: A

2. Read twenty-six books this year.

January: Zorro, Isabel Allende; Witch's Business, Diana Wynne Jones
February: Elantris, Brandon Sanderson
March: Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
April and May: In Our Hands, Charles Murray; The One-Armed Queen, Jane Yolen; Dhampir, Barb and J.C. Hendee; Resenting the Hero, Moira Moore; Emerald Sea, John Ringo; Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein
June: Against the Tide, John Ringo; Waifs and Strays, Charles de Lint
July: Paint Your Dragon, Tom Holt; The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, The Hallowed Hunt, all by Lois McMaster Bujold
August: American Gods, Neil Gaiman; Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold
September: The Doppelganger, Marie Brennan, Truckers and Diggers, both by Terry Pratchett
October: Tapestry of Magics, Brian Daley; Wings, Terry Pratchett; two "Dark-Hunter" novels (I don't remember the titles and, well, it doesn't really matter) by Sherrilyn Kenyon; The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diane Wynne Jones (thank you, John! <3 ); Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming, Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley; The Spirit Ring, Lois McMaster Bujold.
November: Moon Called, Patricia Briggs, Pride of Chanur, by C. J. Cherryh, Dance with the Devil Sherrilyn Kenyon
December: ...

I didn't finish any books this month. I started reading Sir Apropos of Nothing, which I got for Christmas from koogrr <3 but didn't finish it. For most of December I haven't been reading anything at all. I have a dozen books from the Seattle trip that I still haven't read, but I've not been motivated to read them, either. I started the next Chanur book but couldn't get into it. I'm not sure why this month was so bad for reading.

On the other hand, I did exceed my goal, even discounting the romances. So:

Grade: A

3. Collect six rejection slips for fiction this year.

Umm. Yeah. I got one.

...

I have some theories about why I didn't get my act together on this one, but this no matter how I look at it, this was a failure on my part.

Grade: F

4. Pet the cat.

*asks Ash for her grade*

Grade: A+

5. Put more money into savings in 2006 than I did in 2005.

Oh yeah. Handily.

Grade: A

6. Keep track of any other productive things I do.

General:
I tried out three different desktop wikis this month, and settled on one of them that I liked best (wikidPad).
Started using a eMusic and have been listening to lots of new music as a result.
Got a new iPod with 80 gig of storage (it's bigger than my harddrive! ... now I need a bigger harddrive) and have been ripping more CDs so we're listening to more old music, too.
Got a membership at Blockbuster Online and have been watching gobs of movies with Lut. Hunt for Red October, Cowboy Bebop, Pitch Black, Toy Story 2, Ice Age, Crimson Tide*, Over the Hedge and Ghostbusters 1 & 2**. None of these were outstanding, but I enjoyed them all to a moderate degree (some more than others). Much as I love the look of animation, I think the repetitiveness and predictability of children's movies is starting to get to me. I actually like the two submarine movies and the horror flick better than most of the animated films. Anyway, nine movies in the seven or so weeks since I started using the service. Not sure if I'll stick with it long term, but it is rather nice to always have a new movie or three lying around to watch.

* Amusingly, I put this on my list thinking it was Hunt for Red October and Lut and I were five or ten minutes into it before we realized the error. Still a reasonably interesting film.
** I'd already seen Ghostbusters, but never the sequel. Not bad.

Housework:
I've done a little more this year than in past years, and am going to try implementing a new resolution for next year to help with the perenial "my place is kind of a dump" problem. Sort of optimistic on this front.

Writing:
Although I didn't do a lot of story-writing in December (3 entries on Birthright and two on Nightmare Waking, I did put together notes on a new story idea (and organized them in the aforementioned wikidPad). 4500 words' worth of notes. This may or may not go anywhere, but the idea has been fun to play with.

My totals for the year are:

149 entries on Silver Scales (representing over 90,000 words)
14 entries on Birthright (the sequel to Scales)
18 entries on Nightmare Waking

In addition, I finished writing Silver Scales (yay!) and started editing it, albeit not very effectively (sigh). I also wrote a short story at ConQuesT this year, wrote out notes for a new story (working title: Angels Will Fall) and started a story about Koogrr's Reema.

I feel meh about my performance in the last quarter, writing-wise. Even so, it's been a good year overall. I finished a book! I don't do that every year, y'know. (Although perhaps I should).

Role-playing:

I re-started "Game of October" in March, and have run 40 logs since. Ironically, this is just one more log than I ran last year, where in my year-end post I classified the game as "dead". Despite this, I am much more optimistic about the game's progress this year. I lost one player before the restart, so I'm down to five and 40:5 does represent a better log-to-player ratio than last year's 39:6. Moreover, everybody played this month, and I've averaged more than one session per month for most of the players in most months. So it's moving along. This campaign consists of events in October of 1868; the in-game date is now 10/25/1868 so there're only seven days left to play out. The game will wrap up in 2007, one way or another.

Art:

Not a bad year for art. I did seven finished color pieces with backgrounds, a couple of which I even like fairly well. I also did a few nice pencil sketches that I may finish someday, an icon for Floosh, and the cover for the Room WorldCon program book.

I'm not feeling ambitious enough to do a 2006 Art page as I did for 2005. Maybe later.

That's all the productive stuff. Interestingly, this resolution did not require me to do X amount of productive things, only that I keep track of what I did. Which I have. So ... guess that's an A.

Grade: A

7. Clear out my email inbox at home.

It's ... um ... empty.

Completely.

This feels wrong somehow. Not that I'm complaining.

Grade: A

9. Do at least one post per month tracking my progress on each of these.
Eleven of twelve. I missed April.

Grade: B

Even with the failure on #3, I've still got a solid B GPA for the year. Not bad.

I haven't settled on my resolutions for 2007 yet. I may get more ambitious next year. Maybe I'll add some more of those "hard to measure" goals from earlier years back in; it's good to keep those in mind even if I can't track my progress on them very well.

Here's to better things in 2007, for all of us!

Comments

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

You rock! Congratulations on both your resolve and your excellent planning/organization in carrying out these resolutions.

I give you an A+ on all counts, fwiw. :-)

[rowyn]

And from a real teacher, too! *^_^* You're too kind to me. :)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I have made a similar mental mistake in mixing up The Hunt for Red October and Crimson Tide at least once or twice. Even though according to IMDB, Red October came out in 1990 and Crimson Tide came out in 1995, for some reason I've mentally paired the two movies as having come out at around the same time. Oh well.

Maybe it could be because both movies involve the color red in the name of the movie and figure prominently in the movie poster (both are colored only in a red-white-black scheme), and both involve submarines. Boy! =) (And I think my parents have both those movies in their collection.)

Hey, and I didn't know this before checking IMDB, but Viggo Mortensen was in Crimson Tide! Cool.

Er ... anyway, congrats on the good progress! I don't think I'm going to be much of a sport this year: I hope to accomplish things, but proclaiming a "resolution" seems to have little to no bearing on my ability to fulfil it: It just makes me somewhat more depressed when I don't.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

*hugs the resolved Rowyn* You did great!

Wow, I'm impressed!

[krud42.livejournal.com]

I've never known anyone to meet their goals as well as you did this past year! And one rejection slip is infinitely better than zero.

I have mixed emotions about the Sir Apropos books... they can be largely depressing at times, but their endings tend to be... apropos. (Which is more than I can say for a lot of books' endings.) I've read all three (the first one, Woad To Wuin [probably the darkest of the three], and Tong Lashing. I can't decide whether I would ever read through them again, but if he wrote another one, I would definitely read it. (They are almost the tone I was aiming for in my "Chikken Strider" novella... don't know that I succeeded, though.)