Monday Progress Report: 101 in 1001
Mood
Frustrated
Well, the first week of my attempt to make 101 goals and start towards completing them in 1,001 days was... very hectic. I think maybe this week I will just focus down on to, "this is what I need to try and accomplish first" and worry about the other goals later.
Towards that end, this week I think I will only focus on reading unread books (as that pretty much has to be ongoing) and unpacking from the move. I will also try and get my pedometer to work properly in time for next weekend's hike. If I have more time on my hands next weekend I will worry about working out what goals I need to work on then.
35) Read all unread books in personal collection (not including reference, text books, supplemental).
One of the things I discovered this week was this goal was going to be one of the hardest of the lot. I knew there were a lot of books I hadn't read thanks to brown bag book sales. A whole grocery bag of books for $5? How could I resist? But, doing the math, I found that my unread books totaled 210, which would have meant reading one book every five days. Then I unpacked several more books since. At least another half shelf of which I haven't read.
That being said I am still being stubbornly positive. I did a bit of a test run before this started and in two weeks managed to read seven books. So far I have read ten books towards this goal, though I haven't reviewed them all yet. To check my progress and see what I have just finished reading and my thoughts, check out my book blog Fabula.
Only 200+ books to go! I'll have an exact number once I get around to cataloging and indexing the lot.
53) Finish unpacking from the move.
We made great progress on this over the weekend. The office is mostly unpacked save for one box and all of Matt's art supplies which are currently taking over the dining room table. We also took all of the stuff destined for the basement down to the basement and I reorganized our holiday decorations into neatly labeled boxes instead of just in a variety of crates strewn about with most of it not fitting in them. Stuff continues to disappear nicely and I am very glad we are now in a much larger apartment. This place is a perfect fit for us.
Pictures will be posted as soon as the last of the office disappears to their away places and as soon as those people from Freecycle kindly take the stuff we don't want off our hands. The porch, also, is nearly clear. I have been looking forward to having tea out there since day one, hopefully that can happen soon before it gets too cold!
42) No TV or computer the first weekend of every month.
The first weekend could have gone better. The problem was we had so much work to do and it was in the way of doing anything fun (unless it involved the computer) so when we finally pooped out there was nothing to do to pass the time until we worked again. We did end up doing a lot of reading. I finished reading When You Are Engulfed in Flames and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to Matthew, both books which I had started a while ago with him. I also started reading Strength to Love to him and we got about half way through.
We also broke out a card deck at one point and played for awhile. Hence the reason there is a new goal to learn three new card games. Matt doesn't like Speed, or I Declare War and neither of us are too fond of Fish, which leaves Kings in the Corner and Crazy Eights, and the later is too much like Uno for us to enjoy with a limited deck.
Hopefully the next weekend we do this we will have a clear dining room table so we can work on one of the puzzles, play RISK or break out some other board game. Without a mountain of boxes to bog us down the next weekend might be more fun that the first one was.
27) Learn to cook five meals from start to finish more or less from memory and have them turn out consistently.
Ugh. This one crashed and burned pretty badly this weekend. At least not literally. For my first recipe I decided I wanted to do spaghetti. Problem, none of our extensive collection of cookbooks has a recipe for just spaghetti in it. So, Matt decided to teach me how to do it his way. The big issue with this is our respective learning and teaching styles are in direct opposition to each other.
Problem one, I am a visual learner. If I don't see it in writing I can't retain it worth a darn. Problem two, Matt is an oral teacher. He expresses himself so much better in speaking than in writing, and the timing of switching teaching styles and deciding to write the recipe out while I'm in the middle of trying to cook it and need supervision the most probably could have been better. Problem three, the fact that while he may know I know nothing about cooking I don't think he realizes I know nothing about cooking. Like he has been in denial this whole time, or perhaps, more sweetly, he doesn't think I can possibly be that stupid about something he can do so amazingly well. I can and I am. It was doomed to failure.
At one point in the proceedings I was told to brown the meat for the sauce. At my blank look he gestured towards the pan vaguely and made a chopping motion with his hand. As I continued to look at him blankly he got frustrated and said, "You know... like you do when you brown chicken!" I love the man, but sometimes I honestly think he has no idea who he's talking to.
Matt's mounting frustration made my pride take even more of a battering and finally we both gave up and he finished the meal by himself. Yes, I'm really that bad. I think my next attempt will be out of a cookbook and I will find explanations for all the words I don't know well in advance. That was the large problem. Telling me to do something and then realizing he needs to explain it without using cooking terms and that he needed to often demonstrate it, like how to stir with a spatula and how to throw noodles. It was quite an eye opener I think.
68) Finish and organize this list.
Towards this end I now have made six new goals last week, bringing my total up to 74, you can find the list here. If you have any other ideas for goals that I could do feel free to leave a comment or drop me an email or an IM.
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