Magpie's List Without a Clever Title

I seem to have a thing for extremely long lists... this one is not quite as long as last year's (yet), but still quite long.

Writing
1. Write on at least 333 days this year
2. finish “Goblins”
3. do Camp NaNo at least once
4. do NaNo (duh)
5. read the Bible (research)

Reading
6. read at least 11 books each season, at least 6 of them new to me.
7. read everything currently in my TBR pile
8. sell/give away some of the books/magazines I’m not reading any more
9. start going to the library again
10. update book list

Plants
11. update plant list
12. earn money by selling houseplants – more than last year
13. grow an even better balcony garden than last year
14. earn back the expenses for the balcony garden

Blogging
15. start German balcony garden blog and post weekly
16. post weekly about my writing progress (on my English blog)
17. post brief reviews of all the books I’ve read, at least once a season (on my English blog)
18. buy a new camera

Social life/getting out of the house
19. go to at least 3 medieval fairs
20. go to medieval dance at least 6 times
21. visit my friend in the UK/finally use that travel agency coupon
22. decide whether I’ll go to World Fantasy Convention in 2013
23. get out of the house to do something besides work and grocery shopping at least once a week

Needlework
24. knit another sweater
25. sew something

Apartment stuff
26. fix living room table
27. buy a shelf for next to the toilet
28. repaint kitchen wall

Other
29. 11 days without internet each season
30. sort through boxes of story-stuff/old school things
31. work on one of my half-learned or half-forgotten languages (Latin, Spanish, Dutch)
32. walk barefoot more

So far I have:
- worked on "Goblins" for three days (out of four)
- read 8 books (4 new) - the count starts at the winter solstice here, so more than four days ago.
- started to read through the old Mickey Mouse comic magazines to pick out the ones I'll keep (the first box appears to be the oldest part of the collection, some of them older than me - I'll definitely be keeping those. Quite amusing to read, too, for various reasons.)
- discovered the closest library is actually open long enough that I could go there after work
- written a blog post about the books I read in autumn

For #7, it'll probably be useful to list the books in the TBR pile or scattered around the apartment - mostly half-read books that I once thought I'd like to (re)read and then wasn't in the mood for after all.
- Das Labyrinth der Träumenden Bücher
- Tibetische Mythen und Legenden
- De Innamorati
- Onkel Dagobert - Sein Leben, seine Milliarden
- Winnetou 1-3
- Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
- The Sword in the Stone
- Verloren Stad
- Kim
- The Lays of Beleriand
- Feenlicht
- The Hobbit
Wow. Now I'm up to three languages mixed together.

Another look at that list:

1. So far, I skipped two days - New Year's Day due to killer headache, and one other because I felt icky and dead tired and fell asleep right after dinner.
3./4. I have enough (vague) ideas for NaNo and both Camps. Augh.

6. Already hit my reading goal for winter. Gonna keep reading, of course.
7. Out of the 14 I started with, I've finished three (Labyrinth der Träumenden Bücher, Tibetische Mythen und Legenden, Sword in the Stone), one even though I had more tempting books waiting, and I've made progress on Lays of Beleriand, Innamorati and Kim.

15. Two posts for the German blog so far. I had a couple of ideas for getting more people to read it, but I kind of want to see how well I'll do at weekly posting and meaningful content first.

29. Two days so far for winter.

Good work, Magpie. You're going well. Keep it up!

Thanks, Dragon Gal!

One month is over, time to look over the list again.

1. Missed 3 days during January. I hope I'll do better this month!
6. Currently at 23 books since the winter solstice, 12 of them new. I wonder if I can beat my own record - the most I ever read in a season was 32 in the summer of 2009. Can I reach 33 before the spring equinox?
7. Finished another one
11. I think my personal list is more or less up to date, though I'll check again when I water tomorrow. The list on the blog is halfway done - I posted the lists for the kitchen and bedroom today, but the living room is the biggest chunk. I was a little ashamed to notice I hadn't updated the list since before I moved.

15, 16 & 17: going well so far
18. I'm no longer sure I want a new camera. Part of that is that I don't want to spend the money, and part is that I feel uncomfortable and insecure when I have to ask store employees for advice (isn't that silly? I'm not shy in the slightest when I'm at work, and I'm the one giving the advice, but asking for it is nearly impossible.) But another part is wondering if I really want/need one. I mean, yeah, my camera is rather big and heavy, and by now there are smaller ones that take the same quality pictures, or even better ones, and sometimes it doesn't work all that well any more either. But then, I can usually get the pictures I want, in a more or less satisfying quality, so why spend money on a new one? And the biggest factor is that my camera works on batteries, and if I'm travelling and I run out, I can just buy new ones. Almost all the cameras I've seen in the stores have to be charged - and how am I meant to do that if I'm cycling and camping for a week? I know they've got good intentions, but I don't want to be stuck with a dead camera I can't recharge in the middle of a beautiful landscape or interesting town.
24. I've got about 1/4 to 1/3 so far.
29. 5 for winter so far.
30. Started. Found some interesting stuff, some stuff I'd forgotten about, stuff that absolutely didn't belong in the box, silly stuff, stuff I can't make sense of....

I actually laughed at 30.^^

I've got a chest under my bed where I put stuff I'm not sure I want to keep, but can't quite bring myself to throw away. It goes in there, I usually forget about it, and when I look inside after months, I sometimes don't even remember where the hell that stuff came from in the first place.
Out of sight, out of mind, I guess.

Interesting TBR pile by the way. The Lays of Beleriand is on my list, too. I hope it's worth while...

My story-stuff box has been standing in the living room for about a year - one of the last moving boxes, waiting to be unpacked - and every time I had something I didn't feel like putting away, I just chucked it into that box. Which was why I couldn't find my tiger nuts when I wanted to plant them - they were down at the bottom of the box. And post-its, post-its, post-its, scribbled in the middle of the night without turning on the light.

There's actually more in the TBR pile now - but most of these books have been there for months, and I keep putting them off. I've read the Lays of Beleriand before, but some time in the summer I decided it would be a good idea to reread them... and I still haven't finished. Though it's fun to stand in line at the grocery store with the book in my hand and mutter alliterative verse to myself...

Progress on # 7: Finished Winnetou I and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The first one constantly made me crack up because of its Gary-Stu-ishness, and the second bored me to death. I don't even know where, when or why I bought it, but I never want to read another word about fish!

How can Jules Verne be boring? I loved Jules Verne as a kid. Of course, I haven't read it in some decades now....

I was just so bored by the endless lists of fishes and stuff that I couldn't concentrate on the plot at all.
I've never read him as a kid, so I don't know how I'd have liked it then... I read Around the World in Eighty Days a couple of years ago, and had no such memories about it, so I was actually surprised about how much it bored me.

They do say that the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12. With some things, I think you just have to hit them at the right time.

It also occurred to me last night that it might not be the fault of the book so much as the fault of the internet - that's a problem I keep running into: since I started using the internet, my attention span has gotten much shorter. For a while, it was a real struggle to sit down with a book and just read for a few hours.

I was also pretty bored by Winnetou this time around, which was not the case the first time I read it. And I'm pretty sure that was pre-internet for me. Similar reasons, too much description.