TV, Books, Workouts and More

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:

1. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
2. The Book of Lights by Chaim Potok
3. The Hidden Reality:  Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos by Brian Greene
4. Cooked by Michael Pollan
5. Quiet:  The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain
6. The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
7. Once a Runner by John L. Parker, Jr.
8. Again to Carthage by John L. Parker, Jr.
9. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
10. My Antonia by Willa Cather
11. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
12. Spark:  The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by John J. Ratey, MD
13. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry  (I only have about 100 pages left in this book.  I've been avoiding the sad ending)
14. Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck
15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
16. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
17. Doughnut by Tom Holt
18. Musicophilia:  Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks
19. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
20. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
21. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
22. East to the Dawn:  The Life of Amelia Earhart by Susan Butler
23. Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
24. Middlemarch by George Eliot
25. Emma by Jane Austen
26. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
27. 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.