I've been silent on my blog for a while. Mostly because I've been a
slacker lately and watching way too much TV on Netflix. I was watching
Merlin the other day on Netflix and realized I was bored out of my mind
watching one of my all-time favorite shows. So the day after watching
the last episode of Merlin, I decided to take my mind back and canceled
my Netflix instant account, and my Hulu Plus account. Tomorrow I'll be
canceling my cable. I plan to keep my Netflix DVD account, and I have a
pretty decent DVD collection. I'm not completely crazy. But now all
my TV/movie watching will be completely deliberate.
So what am I going to do instead of watching TV? Workout, read, cook, quilt, and I'm sure I'll think of plenty of other things.
Here are a few workout goals to accomplish by the end of the year:
Run another 5K
Bench Press 100 pounds
Squat my weight (note to self - lose some weight...again. That will make it less weight to squat)
Deadlift 200 (minimum)
And
my books. Tonight I looked through all the books in my living room and
dining room (note that this does not include all my unread books in the
other rooms of my apartment) and made a list of all the books I need to
finish or need to start reading. Here they are in no particular order:
- Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
- The Book of Lights by Chaim Potok
- The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos by Brian Greene
- Cooked by Michael Pollan
- Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain
- The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
- Once a Runner by John L. Parker, Jr.
- Again to Carthage by John L. Parker, Jr.
- The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
- My Antonia by Willa Cather
- O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
- Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by John J. Ratey, MD
- Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (I only have about 100 pages left in this book. I've been avoiding the sad ending)
- Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
- Doughnut by Tom Holt
- Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks
- Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
- East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart by Susan Butler
- Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- Emma by Jane Austen
- Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
- The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
27 books that need to be read just in my living room and dining
room. That reading list should keep me busy for a long time. And I've
been trying to find a copy of
The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton. Might be time to check a used bookstore.
Must start cooking more, eating out less. I bought
Happy Herbivore Abroad
the other day and everything in it looks really good. It's about time I
found an interesting vegan cookbook. I'm not vegan, but I think vegan
meals are a good thing to have. Maybe some day I will make that switch
to vegan, but not yet.
My mom and I and 2 of my aunts
and 2 of my cousins have been working on a quilt for my mom. My mom and I started working on it in the
mid-1990's. We take our time on our big projects. I can identify the
parts of the quilt that I worked on while watching the 2008 Presidential
Debates. We're finishing up all the little pieces that need to be
appliqued onto the quilt. Our goal is to have the quilt ready to send
off to a friend to finish by the end of July. I totally think we can
get this done.
I'm getting really excited about this list. Feel free to let me know your thoughts on any of the books you've read.