My Frivolous Goals/Resolutions for 2011 are:
- Read a ridiculous amount of books (more than 31)! Goal: 50
- Do some writing...I'm always chastising myself for making excuses...not this year?!??
- I have a little art hobby I'd like to start up (time o time, where for art thou, time?!)
- Play indoor soccer
- FINALLY start AND finish a recipe book that's been in the works, well in my head, and all over different torn out pages for perhaps years now?
Let me start by telling you what I did NOT do. I did not do any writing, or play indoor soccer, or get that recipe book finished. I did get my torn out recipes into a binder though not quite the "book" I had envisioned. I take back my goal of playing indoor soccer. It's never going to happen. Games start at 9pm and later. I DO have a plan to write a novel in a month, more on that later!!
As predicted, we took the year off from any house renovations and phew! what a welcome change that was. Next stop kitchen remodel but not until at least 2013!!! We did get to take our October vacation for our 10th anniversary which I won't go into because it's well-documented on this blog already! We have little weekends planned for 2012 and a week to FL for April vacation with the kids.
NOW for the lofty goals I DID accomplish this year. I'm proud to say that I upped my gym workouts!! In 2010 I went to the gym on average 3.5 days/week and this year I made a solid 4 days/week. Not bad considering I took a couple weeks off for vacation and when Seth had his tonsils out!
I also finally finished an art project that I'd been working on forever. It was a collage for Cal, as seen in the pic below, and I loved doing it. I've been waiting to have more free time to pursue a collage-frenzy endeavor. Looks like it might have to wait...tell you why soon!!
This year we got our arts fix! We made it to a bunch of plays and decided to subscribe this year and got out to a few concerts - Rhianna, Diddy, and Big Time Rush (opener Hot Chelle Rae) with the kids! More amazingly though I surpassed my goal of reading 50 books this year and read 52!! Yup, that's right, an average of 1 per week! I can totally thank those gym workouts because I read while on the elliptical machine. We watched a whopping 71 movies this year as well. Since I plowed through that many books and movies I thought I'd give you my top picks (Keep in mind these are only out of the ones I read this year. It's quite possible there were better books or movies that I didn't get to).
KADY'S TOP 10 MOVIES
- The Fighter
- Black Swan
- Inception
- Waste Land
- Win Win
- The Ring
- It's Complicated
- Dinner for Schmucks
- Love and Other Drugs
- 127 Hours
WORTH MENTIONING
- Marwencol
- Paranormal Activity
- Conviction
- The King's Speech
- The Tillman Story
I will write a disclaimer that after reviewing all the movies I watched this year...a ton of them sucked. I struggled with the Top 10 even.
And now my best/worst of books....
KADY'S TOP 6 BOOKS
And now my best/worst of books....
KADY'S TOP 6 BOOKS
- Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
- A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
- The Red Garden by Alice Hoffman
- Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
- The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom
- The Informationist by Taylor Stevens
DECENT RUNNER'S UP
- The Writing on My Forehead: A Novel by Nafisa Haji
- State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
- The Call: A Novel by Yannick Murphy
- The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
- Minding Frankie by Maeve Binchy
- Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen
MOST THOUGHT PROVOKING
- The Shack by William P. Young
- Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
- House Rules by Jodi Picoult
- Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
BEST NONFICTION/MEMOIR
- Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua
- Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton
- Lit: A Memoir by Mary Karr
- Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield
- Bossypants by Tina Fey
BEST SERIES
- Sookie Stackhouse (#1-11) by Charlaine Harris
- Hunger Games (#1-3) by Suzanne Collins
- The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (#1-3) by Stieg Larsson
WORST BOOKS OF 2011
- Little Bee by Chris Cleave
- Swamplandia by Karen Russell
- Girl by the Road at Night by David Rabe
Ok, well, with that out of the way...I hope at least someone gets to read a good book by reading this!! I definitely had a better year with books than movies. It sort of renews my faith in reading and knowing there are a lot of good ones out there, too many to read!! I track all my books at GoodReads and you can find me on there if you ever need a book recommendation. I rate them all after I read them and I tend to be a tough critic!
Now on to my new endeavor for 2012!!! Let me give you some background first. I'm reading a little book right now called "No Plot, No Problem!" by Chris Baty. He is the founder of the NanoWriMo in November. What is this, you ask? Well, it's where people all over the WORLD try to write a novel, as defined by 50,000 words, in one month! The goal is to get quantity and not quality and his idea is that writers get stuck and tripped up trying to write perfectly the first time around. Also, his big thing is that everyone needs a DEADLINE. I hear that!! Amen, hallelujah!! SOOOO, I have decided to do my own Nano in February (February 1 - March 2nd). You are allowed to do it in a 30 or 31 day month. Since February is a leap year this year there are 29 days and I'm giving myself until March 2nd because 1) This is my first time damn it, I'm going to need that 31st day and 2) The kids start vacation on the 27th and that may seriously cut into my writing time!
So what does this mean? This means that I have finally decided to DO SOMETHING! Woo hoo. The thought is both terrifying and exhilarating. I'm determined not to be a "one day" writer as Chris Baty says in his book....as in "One day I want to write a book". I can't tell you how many times I've said that!!! He encourages people attempting to write a novel in a month to tell everyone they know. Ahh...that's daunting. What if I don't do it?! Then I'd have to tell people, they're going to want to KNOW! I guess that's the point. The fear of not doing well, of NOT finishing will propel me to keep going when the going gets tough (as I've heard it does get!). If you are wondering, I have discussed this with Eric and he has given me his full blessing to try it out and agreed to give me extra time away from the kids if I need it!
I plan to spend the rest of January preparing for my month-long writing craze! I'm going to make and freeze lots of dinners and do anything I can to get ahead around the house. I have a proposed "writing plan" of WHEN I'll be writing to try to make that enormous 50,000 word count. I get a week to plan and research my novel (Baty says it's a bad idea to do more than that because then you just get bogged down when it's time to write and that's the last thing you want!) so I'm going to wait to do that until the last week of January but in the meantime I got a book by my favorite author Elizabeth Berg. What I like best about her is that her novels are simple, slice of life type stuff. She usually uses a lot of dialogue (something I think I'm good at) and has minimal characters (which I probably need the first go around). So I am going to read her book and try to get a sense of the style I want.
I know what you're thinking - you want to know what I get at the end? Right?! A rough draft of a NOVEL, of course!! What could be better than that? Also, I get to do something I've wanted to do for a long time and never forced myself to start and at the end I'll know if it's something I love to do or not. Maybe I'll make some surprising discoveries about myself, maybe not, but either way I'll know. Plus I'm thinking this one-month frenzy would be good to do anything! It's almost genius. Maybe this will be the year that I have a one-month cooking craze, a one-month flurry of collage making, a one-month obsession with exercise, the list is endless!
I'm going to keep my goals few this year but higher-reaching than ever!
Goals for 2012 are:
Now on to my new endeavor for 2012!!! Let me give you some background first. I'm reading a little book right now called "No Plot, No Problem!" by Chris Baty. He is the founder of the NanoWriMo in November. What is this, you ask? Well, it's where people all over the WORLD try to write a novel, as defined by 50,000 words, in one month! The goal is to get quantity and not quality and his idea is that writers get stuck and tripped up trying to write perfectly the first time around. Also, his big thing is that everyone needs a DEADLINE. I hear that!! Amen, hallelujah!! SOOOO, I have decided to do my own Nano in February (February 1 - March 2nd). You are allowed to do it in a 30 or 31 day month. Since February is a leap year this year there are 29 days and I'm giving myself until March 2nd because 1) This is my first time damn it, I'm going to need that 31st day and 2) The kids start vacation on the 27th and that may seriously cut into my writing time!
So what does this mean? This means that I have finally decided to DO SOMETHING! Woo hoo. The thought is both terrifying and exhilarating. I'm determined not to be a "one day" writer as Chris Baty says in his book....as in "One day I want to write a book". I can't tell you how many times I've said that!!! He encourages people attempting to write a novel in a month to tell everyone they know. Ahh...that's daunting. What if I don't do it?! Then I'd have to tell people, they're going to want to KNOW! I guess that's the point. The fear of not doing well, of NOT finishing will propel me to keep going when the going gets tough (as I've heard it does get!). If you are wondering, I have discussed this with Eric and he has given me his full blessing to try it out and agreed to give me extra time away from the kids if I need it!
I plan to spend the rest of January preparing for my month-long writing craze! I'm going to make and freeze lots of dinners and do anything I can to get ahead around the house. I have a proposed "writing plan" of WHEN I'll be writing to try to make that enormous 50,000 word count. I get a week to plan and research my novel (Baty says it's a bad idea to do more than that because then you just get bogged down when it's time to write and that's the last thing you want!) so I'm going to wait to do that until the last week of January but in the meantime I got a book by my favorite author Elizabeth Berg. What I like best about her is that her novels are simple, slice of life type stuff. She usually uses a lot of dialogue (something I think I'm good at) and has minimal characters (which I probably need the first go around). So I am going to read her book and try to get a sense of the style I want.
I know what you're thinking - you want to know what I get at the end? Right?! A rough draft of a NOVEL, of course!! What could be better than that? Also, I get to do something I've wanted to do for a long time and never forced myself to start and at the end I'll know if it's something I love to do or not. Maybe I'll make some surprising discoveries about myself, maybe not, but either way I'll know. Plus I'm thinking this one-month frenzy would be good to do anything! It's almost genius. Maybe this will be the year that I have a one-month cooking craze, a one-month flurry of collage making, a one-month obsession with exercise, the list is endless!
I'm going to keep my goals few this year but higher-reaching than ever!
Goals for 2012 are:
- Write a novel - Goal: 50,000 or more!
- Make a portfolio of collages - Goal: 10
- Keep working out - Goal: 4.5 days/week
- Read - Goal: 30 books (Paring back this year, it was hard work to read 52!!)
Best wishes for everyone in the new year in whatever you may do!!!
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