rowyn

Before starting my year-in-review, I figured I should check my resolutions from the start of the year. It turns out I had completely misremembered one aspect of the silly scoring system I'd laid out: I'd put in a "completion bonus" system, which I recollected as "10 points per entry", but which was actually more complex and generous than that. I added in the large bonuses that I'd missed (for finishing the tarot stories). The result is that I actually surpassed -- by 50%! -- my overall scoring goal of 50 points per day. Despite having skipped tracking on an entire month. (From April 24 to May 26. I wrote some journal entries in that period but no fiction, and I was too lazy at the time to reconstruct even the nonfiction stuff.)

So what did I do in 2012?

Creative Stuff
By far the largest amount of time was spent on the story ladyperegrine and I were working on over the summer. I had a blast on that project! ♥ I'm pretty sure I undercounted my score for it, but even so it beats out every other category; I am rather sorry it petered out before we finished it.

The runner-up is my blog, with 145 entries for the year (not including the fiction entries). Quite a few of these were book reviews, as I read thirty-four books during the last third of the year, after re-discovering the joys of the local library system.

Second runner-up is the tarot stories: I finished eight of these short stories (not including the short that I did for terrana's prompt.

Honorable mention goes to +terrible butterflies+, the RPG I was running for the first half of the year. I actually sunk a lot more time into this than I scored -- I only scored myself on "prep time", not "play time"; even so, I put a lot of time into preparing for the game. Similarly, I put some work into the World Tree game, even if it too is on hiatus now. Another honorable mention for delight_in_wt, which got a little attention in scattered pockets over the course of the year; I finished a few short arcs in it.

Everything else was pretty neglected. I did hardly any sketching all year, which rather surprises me. I think not having a working scanner hooked up to my PC is a major deterrent for artwork. :/ I did some work on Sign & Sacrifice but it still seems to be trapped in limbo along with Birthright. Which I keep thinking about but not working on. A couple of other projects won a little time but nothing finished.

Exercise

I joined Fitocracy this year; this did not significantly affect the average amount of time I spend exercising, but it did lead to my lifting weights again. My weight-lifting efforts are pretty sporadic -- two or three times a week, which would be reasonable except that my routines are split between upper and lower body, so I'm only getting 1.5 workouts per week per muscle group. This is not optimal. But probably better than not lifting weights at all.

I got a new bicycle and wish the weather were nice for biking year-round so that I could never walk anywhere again.

In general, I have been keeping at it with exercise, averaging 4-5 times of one thing or another per week, plus the 1.5 mile round-trip walk to work each workday.

Job

I've been working for Teenage Bank for six months now, since they purchased Toddler Bank at the end of June. It's different. I haven't really decided if I like it better or not. Better in some ways, worse in others.

Social

Since Contraception in November, I have been doing more socializing in than I have at pretty much any prior point in the last fifteen years since moving to Emerald City. If I'd realized that getting back into RL gaming would be as easy as showing up at one con and giving my email address to a couple of locals, I'd've done it YEARS ago.

Reading

I already mentioned this when talking about the blogging I did, but I wanted to give it its own bullet section. It's a little odd, because even when I've bought a stack of books I haven't been reading them as quickly as I've chewed through the stacks I checked out from the library. Some combination of unlimited supply, no cost, and mild deadline pressure, perhaps. Anyway, I've slowed down to about a book a week, but it's still nice to be reading books again.

Come to think of it, the read-book-count is actually higher than 34, since I didn't count books I didn't review. Off the top of my head, I remember reading one Jane Austen novella I hadn't read before, four Jane Austen books that I had, one or two new Pratchett novels, and Bujold's Shards of Honor and Barryar (which I'd previously read). I like blogging about the books that I've read; it helps me remember them.

Happiness

I use my activity log to track how I feel each day as well, using my happiness scale. This is not especially scientific or rigorous. I'll often go back and log a month's worth of activities in one swoop, and I doubt my guesses about how I felt three weeks ago are precise. Even trying to sum up a day's worth of ups and downs in one number is a bit silly, and I tend to discount my general malaise while at work. All this aside, my average was 7.4 on a scale of 1-10. This is up a little from 2011, when my average was exactly 7. (Spookily, exactly 7. I don't know how that happened.) My main takeaway from this is "I am not normally depressed". You would think this is something that I would know without having to keep track, but it's not. The first thing depression throws out the window is perspective, so if I have a black mood that lasts a couple of weeks, one of the lies I tell myself is "misery is your natural state". This log is my big FU to depression. "HAH! IS NOT! I have been tracking my emotional state for two years and contentment is my natural state! YOU ARE THE ABERRATION SO THERE."

...

I think it's quite possible that this is one of those cases where observation changes the observed. I actually do use the baseline, not so much to tell myself "don't be glum" but to tell myself "this will pass", and that helps it pass faster.

Overall, I enjoyed 2012. I didn't produce as much stuff as I would've liked, but I'm not sure what I would to do differently. I still have to think about what I want to do in 2013.