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In Progress: One Month and One Year Challenges

 Happy New Year!


For all that I didn't start my 101 journey at the start of the new year, I did decide to start some of the challenges I'd set myself on January 1st.  It's easier to keep track of a month or a year of something when you have an easy to remember start date.  Granted, this is only day two, and I'm probably only going to update this weekly rather than daily.  (How often would you want to read "I read today, I logged it today, I wrote, I didn't eat fast food?  Seriously?)  


To start, here's a list of the challenges that I'm going to be working on daily for the next month or next year.


  • Read for at least 20 minutes a day
  • Complete a reading challenge
  • Log my reading for one year
  • Write something every day for a year
  • No fast food for one month
  • Take a picture every day for a year
The reading, so far, hasn't been too tough to do.  Between audio books, physical books and digital books, there's rarely an excuse for me to not read.  So far, I've finished two graphic novels and I'm listening to one audio book.  I'm getting into a read/reread of the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch so you'll probably see a lot of these in the following month or so.  I'm in the middle of Midnight Riot, which is the first book of the series.  It's a reread (or relisten) for me so it's a good way to slide back in.  The two graphic novels side stories in the same world; Action at a Distance (which happens to be the 7th graphic novel, but chronologically takes place before Midnight Riot) and Night Witch.  The graphics go very quickly, though I may have to hold back on reading some of them so I don't get spoiled for the older books.

I'm doing my book logging at The Story Graph. I like the system better than Goodreads.  It's also where my various reading challenges are housed.  If you're interested in a more real-time view of my reading and reviews (when I feel like reviewing), feel free to follow me over there.  And if you have one of your own, feel free to let me know who you are there and I'll be happy to follow you back there.

Speaking of the reading challenges, I'm actually signed up for 5 different challenges, plus my personal goal of reading 250 books for the year.  A lot of the challenges have overlap, so I'm not expecting it to be too onerous.  The challenges (along with the links to the challenge pages) are:


Writing every day... well, you'll see some of that here.  I'm not saying that I have to write something specific each day, but just writing in general.  So I may be writing a journal entry one day, a poem the next, a short story, then a blog entry.  I am aiming for writing at least 20 minutes every day.  Yesterday, I physically wrote a bit of a journal entry.  Today, this blog post is counting for my writing.

One of the harder ones for me is no fast food for a month.  Especially with me driving for Uber Eats, not getting food while on the road will be tough.  Thursday nights are usually fast food night since the kids have therapy and it's the easiest way, especially during the school year, to get everyone fed.  But there's no reason why the rest of the family can't have fast food and I can grab something from the house.  The only exception to the no fast food rule will be drinks.  There are some things that are just too tough for me to do. Yesterday was easy because we spent the day playing board games.  Today was a bit tougher because I was out on the road.  I was stopping for drinks and it was so hard to not add a french toast stick to my order.  Hopefully, I'll be able to keep this up.

Finally, the photo a day is somewhat easy because I always find something to take a picture of.  At the moment, I'm trying to take a selfie every day. It will help me see the changes in me over time. Other pictures will be taken (like all the board game pictures from yesterday or the picture of the frosted car this morning), but the ones I'm going to log here will be the selfies.

And speaking of logging those pictures, here are my two from the last two days.

January 1, 2025

January 2, 2025



More pictures and more writing coming soon!

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