I am somewhat obsessed with methodologies for goal-setting, performance measurement, tracking, and motivation.
When I kept seeing an interesting clip from the movie, Rebel Ridge, starring Aaron Pierre and Don Johnson, I had to watch the whole movie. In the film, Pierre is trying to get his cousin out on bail, not realizing that the system is rigged and nothing he does will work. When he does realize it, he goes to the police station to talk to the Chief. In the clip (attached below), we learn that he is a military instructor who has to deal with a lot of acronyms. The one he’s most interested in is PACE, which he explains was originally designed for Comms systems — priority, alternate, contingency, and emergency.
And it is relatively easy to understand for Comms, even without a military angle. Say, for example, that you are looking after your aging parents and need to stay in regular contact with them. Your primary communication method might be a cellphone if you’re in a city. Your alternate method might be a landline, your contingency might be email or text, and your emergency option might be in-person. Easy-peasy.
However, Pierre’s character notes that it can be used as a planning methodology for various purposes, including his specific goals. In the movie, the Marine’s primary means of retrieving his cousin was to take cash to the courthouse and pay his cousin’s bail. Except the cops intervened and confiscated his cash, at least temporarily. His alternate was a special deal with the Chief, who basically reneged on the deal and f***ed him over. Contingency was an alternate way to replace his cash through other means, but the Chief messed that up, too. Which has the Marine “burning through letters” and they don’t want to see what happens when he gets to E (emergency). As an aside, I keep seeing references to how Rebel Ridge is an homage to First Blood with Pierre as Stallone’s Rambo character, and Johnson in the role of Gault; while the movie’s okay, it’s no First Blood.
Here’s the clip of the scene:
Understanding the elements for planning
While the acronym is a plot device for the film, it is actually a real planning methodology. In the example I used above, there are four methods for communicating with the person’s aging parents on a daily basis:
P: Primary — Cellphone
A: Alternate — Landline
C: Contingency — Maybe email or text
E: Emergency — In-person
For the movie, it was:
P: Primary — Cash in backpack
A: Alternate — Deal with chief
C: Contingency — Alternate cash being wired
E: Emergency — The second half of the movie
You can easily see how that would/could also apply to a military or rescue system for communications. Essentially, sliding down a scale of expected utility and effectiveness to what may be a last-ditch method:
P: Primary — Top of the line encrypted comms
A: Alternate — Cellphone
C: Contingency — Public systems
E: Emergency — Short-wave radio
In different scenarios, the order might change or there might be totally different options including walkie talkies, flags, etc.
It seemed awesome and fairly robust as a tool. When I searched online for other examples where it was being used, I found a bunch of suggestions, with probably the most likely one being fitness. One example of this use is shown below.
P: Primary — Full gym workout + fully controlled diet for all meals and snacks
A: Alternate — Home workout with hand weights + pre-prepared meals
C: Contingency — Rest day + healthy meal choices for take-out
E: Emergency — Minimal activity + multi-vitamins
Again, it looks good. And with its focus on “other options”, it would work well where goals might have multiple paths to achieve them on any given day. Scalability seems baked in, hierachy/priority preference, etc. And if the military is using it, that’s an added plus — not because it’s the military, but simply because they can test it with people of different mental attitudes and approaches, and see if it works.
But can I use PACE for other types of goals? Let’s start by recasting previous examples into an easier-to-compare tool.
(example)
P Primary
A Alternate
C Contingency
E Emergency
(comment)
Comms
Encrypted state-of-the-art system
Cellphone
Public system
Short-wave radio
Can vary by circumstance
Bailing out cousin (movie)
Cash in a backpack
Deal with chief
Money being wired
The rest of the movie
Popular exercise example online
Full gym workout + fully controlled diet
Home workout + Prepared meals
Rest day + Healthy takeout
Minimal activity + Multivitamins
It starts to look like you CAN, indeed, use it for other goals. Except when you start looking at rows 1 and 2 against 3, you notice some differences.
First and foremost, the goal is changing from something concrete and discrete — communicate with someone, bail out cousin — to something more general like “exercise”.
Second, while all three have hierarchical levels between P, A, C and E, the exercise ones are not quite replaceable choices. With Comms, it doesn’t matter whether you use a full in-house solution for Comms or a cellphone or even short wave radio. While encryption and privacy were nice to have, they weren’t critical to the goal — the goal is communications. Any of the four options meet that goal. Similarly, for the movie example…any of the four options can get the cousin out of jail. While P is easier than A, C or E, they all accomplish the goal.
When it comes to the exercise goal, though, the solutions are not equal. A full gym workout is great, and is the primary method **if you can do it that day**. If you can’t, for whatever reason, you move to alternate which is a home workout with hand weights. It’s not as good, but sure, if your goal is exercise in general, it meets the criteria. But then you come to C being perhaps a rest day or D minimal activity when your body needs to heal. Neither of those are meeting the original goal. They are hierachical, definitely, but they are NOT equal alternatives. Similarly for the food, the first option is to do full diet control for proteins and minerals, and carbs for fuel. And moving to A or C could arguably be listed as “fuel without ingesting crappy food” that might work against your health goals. But by the time you get to E, and you’re down to just multi-vitamins, that is not an equivalent method to achieve the same thing. Or, more pointedly, you could take MVs on ANY of the four options too.
For the food, it might be more like Primary being fully self-prepared meals from healthy ingredients + portion control + healthy recipe; Alternate might be pre-prepared healthy meals that use organic ingredients + portion control, more steaming / less frying, etc.; Contigency might be that it may not be completely “healthy” eating, but it was all prepared at home, less processed foods, etc.; and the emergency food fuel might be takeout, but at least healthier takeout choices. They are NOT all the same, but at least they are meeting the goal of portion-controlled healthier fuel. If you want to add MVs to all four options, great, although that is no longer really a “goal” that is suitable for PACE as you are in a binary world — you either take your MVs or not.
So, while it looks like you CAN use PACE for multiple options, you may have to alter your goal or your alignment of options to the goal so they are all equivalent. Which is not often the way personal goals tend to work.
Now I have to figure out if it will work for MY personal goals. Wish me luck.
As you can see from the last four posts, I’m using already-established headings that work well for me to handle goal-setting for the year. Unfortunately, now I come to the mother of all categories which is basically all my hobbies on a computer in a digitally-enabled life. The list is so extensive or pervasive that it normally takes up a whole separate whiteboard for me. Let’s parse it into more manageable chunks.
Computers
It likely seems odd that the whole area is about computers, and then I make the first sub-category “computers”, but generally, I’m talking about the setup of a computer — hardware and software. This area isn’t generally big or complicated, it’s a nice manageable chunk of sorts.
First and foremost, I have to do regular backups. This includes my computer, Andrea’s computer and Jacob’s computer. Sometimes those lists are pluralized for Jacob and I, but at the moment, not so much. We generally are only using one desktop each. He has a PC upstairs but never uses it, and I migrated all the components over to his gaming laptop for files. One system, one backup. Andrea has only ever had one, so no issues there. For me, I have usually had a second device, a laptop for streaming, and I’m not running that currently, so it is just my main PC. I am a bit out of date since my last backup, so time to do another. My main fear of things missing from the last backup are photos and ensuring proper storage, a recurring, nagging worry, even once backed up. What if there’s a fire? I want all the photos on off-site cloud storage, but not quite there yet.
Second, I also need to do some basic security upgrades to various devices, including Andrea’s and tweaking of Jacob’s. I’d also like us all to use the same password manager, if possible.
Third, I mentioned I don’t have a streaming PC setup downstairs, and I want to fix that situation to a more powerful setup than my basic laptop. I have an extra old PC, easy enough to upgrade and tweak to make suitable for the need. Equally, I have a few extra monitors I need to configure.
Finally, my desktop PC needs a tweak to the setup for both potentially an extra monitor (which I’m resisting) and a better webcam/microphone setup (that I really need for trivia hosting).
Website
In the same way that I feel odd having a whole section about computers with a subheading for computers again, I have this one for the website when the next few are also about my website. But, as with computers, this is more about the setup while the others are more about content.
For my website, I launched my design for PolyWogg 5.0 this past year, and overall, I’m pretty happy with it. It includes all new Featured Images, restructured layouts for consistency, and everything is in one place. But in the same way that a strength can also be a weakness, the co-location of both PolyWogg (personal) and PolyBlog (writing) content and a single theme for all of it does create some branding challenges.
For example, when I create the layout for my site, I can do pages or posts as my default content. When it is a one-off blog topic, my musings so to speak, it’s a post. If it is more part of some more static content that I’m building, they are pages. But each page, normally, has the same header image and menu as the rest of the site. I like my theme, I’m not looking to change that, it works really well for me, but as I do more writing and building of content in a few areas, the default images and menus are not always the best combo for a page that could have a different message/branding than the default.
My basic menu structure would benefit from four separate options at the present time. For general blogging, I can do my Main Menu easy enough. It’s the one that I have been doing all along — my default menu. But if I look at a second area, my photo gallery, right now it is a single vertical menu item in the horizontal menu with lots of nested pages. It makes the main menu a bit big and unwieldy (plus slows down load time a bit). So, if instead, I had a site that was JUST my photo gallery, I would change the header image of course but I would also make those vertical menu structures more horizontal, spreading the years out differently. Maybe grouped in five year chunks, maybe current year would be separate. For my PolyWogg Guides that I’ll be doing more of in the future, I already am not entirely happy with the menu structure for the HR guide and want a better one for the new Astronomy guide. As I write more in the future, that problem will exacerbate the pressure on the menu structure. And it wouldn’t hurt to have totally different branding for the header. Finally, I have been wanting to get my trivia game going, and that is a totally different look and feel than the rest of the site. I say “finally” but I could group all my reviews together too, or a site for quotes, or a site for humour. Lots of “options” where the overhead wouldn’t be worth the separation, but for the four areas that I have already identified for growth? Absolutely there might be a worthwhile investment to be made in another structure.
So I could reconsider my decision to co-locate them, separate them into multiple sub-sites or run WordPress as a multi-site option, including merging my brother’s site that I host as well as Astropontiac. But the truth is that I really don’t want separate sites though, I want it all together. And my theme is designed to allow that, sort of at least. But when I tried it previously, it was a crapfest. Nothing I did seemed to work the way it was supposed to work.
In theory, I can create four different header images (done) and four different menus (done), and go into a page say for my PolyWogg Guide to Astronomy, tell it to replace the main header image with the Guides image and the main menu with the Guides menu, and voila, I should have a separate branding option like a sub-theme within my site. Except, as I said, when I did it all previously, it didn’t do it. The header didn’t change, the menu didn’t change. Same old, same old.
So I went on the support site for the theme, typed in what I had tried previously both within the existing theme and using other plugins, and asked, “Is there a combo of a good plugin with this theme that will do what I want?”. I pressed submit, aaaaand I broke their support site. Not completely but it somehow corrupted my account with them. Nice. While they were trying to fix that so I could ask my question, I went back to playing with my theme options, doing exactly what I tried six months ago and twelve months ago and even eighteen months ago, same general settings, and BAM! This time it worked. Son of a fudgsicle.
Which means I CAN do it. I can have separate branding for any of the pages I want. Not for posts, that’s a more complicated structure that doesn’t quite make sense with what I’m doing, but pages? No problem. Yay!
Or is it a yay? I had already accepted that it couldn’t be done in my site, I was really just doing due diligence, and considering moving my blog back to ThePolyBlog.ca, and leaving just my PolyWogg guides at PolyWogg.ca. Now I don’t have to do any of THAT change, but the other changes? They’re relatively easy enough, and in fact, I’ve already created the prototype headers and basic menus. I just have to tell those pages which header and menu to display when those pages are shown, as well as include an option to get back to the main menu. I like it, I just haven’t completely wrapped my head around it. It’s a significant change to my branding, so I want to be sure that it is the way I want to go before I do it. I think so, but I need to test a few things first.
But assuming it all tests out, I now have three significant sub-designs to figure out:
Main menu (done)
The Panda Family Photo Gallery
PolyWogg Guides to…
PolyWogg Trivia
When I get that done, it will definitely warrant a PolyWogg 6.0 classification.
In addition to all that structural work, I also want to tweak my backup settings, chron setup, and optimization settings with caching. I’m not obsessed about SEO or speedtests, but I’ll do the basics. Really what I want to do though is to uninstall Piwigo sometime soon, my “alternate” gallery setup, but I’m not ready for that big step yet.
Blogging
I call this section blogging, but it goes way beyond simple blogging. Many bloggers have a goal which is to “blog regularly”, basically to deliver regular new content. That’s not my goal. I blog when I have something to say, not say something just to meet a word count. And I have lots to say. I have itches to scratch for:
Book reviews: I have almost 200 on the site, but I need to update some links so they all show in the index page, and add some reviews from the last six months that I haven’t written yet;
Movie reviews: I have about 5-6 six on the site, another 100 or so written but not uploaded yet, and another 10-15 that aren’t even written yet.
TV reviews: I have 10-12 seasons of various shows reviewed and on the site, and probably about another 500 I could do as I’ve already reviewed the individual episodes. It’s just a time issue, and relative priority. I like writing them, but they take time away from more pressing issues in life. More just a “nice to have” at some point.
I have a big giant gaping hole in my plan for recipes. I know generally what I want for them, have a decent layout, can do them generally like my reviews for structure and internal web admin. But I don’t have a great workflow for including pictures of recipes or even getting the recipes up on the site fast enough after we make the dish and decide it’s a “keeper”, so by the time I get around to writing it up, I’ve forgotten which photos go with which recipe, or even WHEN we did it. I have photos of dishes from last February and I have no idea what they are. In an ideal world, I would have taken a picture with it of the recipe title so I’ll remember in future, but I didn’t. Was that the chicken with pasta dish and an unique sauce or was it the special noodle dish with Asian seasoning? Was it one we liked or we thought was only so-so? Eleven months later, I don’t remember. And after mentioning above about branding, I need to decide if I even want this as a blog post with everything else, or I want to make it into a page that I could style like a separate subsite for different types of recipes. Or is it both? A page for the recipe, a blog for the experience of cooking it for the first time? I haven’t figured that out, but I need to at some point. For now, it is just a general “Figure out the plan for recipes”.
I have another sub-area that isn’t quite figured out either: music reviews. Unlike the book / TV / movie reviews, the music reviews have a natural structure to them. For example, if I review the year 1943 (as I already have), should that be on a separate sub-site? Should I have separate pages for discography reviews too, such as all the albums by Elton John? I know I’m going to do the yearly reviews, but beyond that? Are they posts? Is it another PolyWogg Guide? Or is it a PolyWogg Guide of enough uniqueness that it should be a separate site on its own? And if it is, should HR and Astronomy be separated too? Enquiring minds want to know! And it would be far better to decide NOW before I get too far in the initial structure. I just need to decide.
Once I get past various forms of reviews, I have a bunch of other topics itching for me to write about them. Lots of them are one-offs, and I have a folder called Bloggable in my Gmail where I’ve saved articles, etc. Things that excited me. Like the Drake equation for predicting the likelihood of finding sentient life in the universe. Or a comparison of prices at grocery stores. Certainly I have a long list of topics as preparations for retirement. I started to write a series of posts about “Who do I owe in my life“, and I want to get back to that, as well as a series of posts about “What I learned in school” for various academic outings.
I also am way behind in some other topics I started and would like to get back to at some point. My spiritual journey and 12 questions, Being Jacob’s Dad, even a bunch related to photos like different day activities on our honeymoon. Plus finalizing a draft I did of a version of “grace” to say for dinners that is a bit non-denominational.
Writing
The main focus of my writing is usually my HR guide and the need to finish the damn thing. That remains true, of course, but I also mentioned above that I want to play with how it is laid out on the website. Maybe just a stalling tactic, with the perfect being the enemy of good enough.
Early in 2020, I started posting some of my personal writing, including the start of a story about a detective I have in mind for a series of stories. It was a prototype of a series of novels, and while I like the basic structure, I find myself throwing in too much backstory that I intended for prequel novels. It’s a bit of a rookie challenge, more experienced writers know not to do it and only throw it just enough to whet the appetite while letting the reader fill in the blanks. But I realized that in my mind, those are full-fledged stories. And quite frankly, it would be easier to tell them in sequence. So, I’m going to go back and redirect my story to start where it should have began. With the main character in law school. I have several other stories to consider in there too for the same character, and some with his friends. The big ones will likely have to wait until retirement, but I might be able to start working on the first novel this year.
In addition to that “detective universe”, I have an idea for a sci-fi novel, with a bit of an Expanse feeling to it, maybe a bit like Artemis. And I am years away from feeling ready to start my ultimate series combining mythology, Gods, challenges, and quests. But it’s on my list and I could start some of the research, plotting and outlining.
Media
I don’t know what to call this category, honestly. It’s a mish-mash of things. Up first is simply media watching, with Jacob and I working our way through the Marvel Universe, Star Wars (with Andrea), and Lord of the Rings, plus a number of other series as we come to them. Just passive stuff.
More active though is getting our music streaming everywhere in the house for iTunes and/or Amazon Prime. Some of that starts with managing my music collection on my PC and doing uploads, but the goal is streaming everywhere.
And finally there is some organization and purging to be done for VHS tapes, DVDs, and CDs.
Photos
Remember back at the beginning that I said the list could be overwhelming? Well part of that was easily just all the website redesign stuff I want to do. And that by itself is daunting. But the over-the-top, drive me crazy and call me anal, item is the photo gallery on my website.
So, the explanation of what I want to do is simple. I want to upload all my photos and videos to my website as a gallery so that I can share them with friends. I don’t want to put it on Facebook, I don’t want the videos on YouTube, I don’t want to pay for SmugMug or Flickr. I want to use my OWN site. In WordPress, not Piwigo.
In theory, that’s not a lot to ask. I have the website, check. I have WordPress, check. I have a site that will let me display photos and videos, and enough space to save them, check. I have the know-how to get them up, check. So what’s the problem? The workflow is detailed and extensive, and if I want them to be consistent across the gallery, I pretty much have to do the same workflow each time properly. Except that a few things have changed since I first started, leaving inconsistencies that I probably could live with, but I don’t want to do all this work to not have it the way I want.
So the first overall step is to develop a single, universal workflow that gets me the first gallery up and running exactly as I want it to be setup. Then I just need to replicate it for an additional ~240 galleries spread across 16 years of pictures.
The tracker for the galleries and sub-galleries is long and detailed. And as I have done a few serious tests and prototypes, just before WordPress changed the way it handles certain media types, I now know that the 240 galleries may in fact grow to be about 400 galleries to make some things way easier to manage. Which means that the first thing I have to do is fully confirm the workflow for each gallery from start to finish. Some of the galleries are already up and running in the site, but I’ll need to tweak them a bit to the new layout and functions. I’m close to the final gallery layout, I just need to ensure a couple of functions work the way they are supposed to in 2-3 different configurations. But the workflow needs to be tweaked on the front end for filenaming for photos from Andrea and from Jacob, as well as scanning sources and/or importing into Mylio, plus for the back end for storage and creation of things like PhotoBooks.
The other thing I need to do is finalize the tracker for “all” the types of galleries. This includes:
standard PandA Family monthly galleries;
special galleries for trips, etc.;
monthly galleries of extra photos for blogs, recipes, etc;
an option for PolySpring sharing of photos;
special content galleries for products like reviews, PolyWogg Guides or PS Transitions; and,
a special layout and tagging option for Astro photos.
If I put the whole workflow and tracker on the whiteboard at once, it takes up a whole whiteboard. For the next round, I think I’ll just put up the area for the workflow and an area for a couple of galleries that I’m working on at any one time. My separate e-tracker can maintain the ongoing tracking.
What am I going to do in January?
So that’s my big list for the year. What am I going to include for January?
Better webcam/microphone setup
Web: Branding: Main
Web: Branding: Photo gallery
Photos: Workflow with sub-options for monthlies, specials, blogging, reviews and special products
Photos: Workflow and basic tracker to whiteboard
Photos: Full tracker in e-form.
This is an area that is important to me and I spend a lot of time on it as a result trying to get it where I want it to be. It might be anal but it is part of my choices. I choose to do this work, I choose to share the photos and videos as part of my sense of identity.
And that completes my to do list update for 2021. Now I just need to triage January’s list as I can’t possibly do them all, alas.
As I set my goals for 2021, I’m using already-established headings that work well for me. This grouping is mostly about learning, regardless of the actual sub-headings.
Learning
The first category, learning, is the catch-all when I don’t have something else broken out. Way back when I was in Grade 6, I had a teacher introduce me to origami, and I’ve been fascinated ever since. I have books, instruction sets, links for online stuff, and I never get around to doing it. My goal for the year is to find ten things that I like to fold and can learn to do well. I’m hoping to try 50 or so designs, and there’s even a paper folding penguin I listed earlier under activities with Jacob. But I’ll settle for even being able to easily fold a penguin, a panda and a frog. I just have to be able to remember how to do them for the future when I’m sitting somewhere and bored.
I did a Writers Digest tutorial, and I would be open to doing other writing sessions. Not quite sure what those would be, there’s a set that are offered by two online people that I respect and admire but they run $300 per class. A little rich for what is mostly a hobby for me still. That may shift, as you’ll see in a future blog post, but for now, it’s a hobby.
I completed my Video Games course a few years ago, and a Meta-Literacy one last year. There’s an advanced metaliteracy but I have kind of lost interest. In the end, though, they were mostly tests to see if Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) work for me, and they do. There are tons of courses on Coursera that I could do, including perhaps how to program an app. I’d love to make PolyWogg Trivia into a game app. Equally, I could consider a laundry list of “classes” from either Masterclass or The Great Courses.
I even have options in case I want to take an intro course in Psychology.
Photography
This category is both all-inclusive and greatly missing some key features. Let me explain.
If I start first with “image capture”, I do have some ideas for learning more. There is an option (in a non-COVID) world where a local photographer puts together photography shoots for budding photographers where he hires some models who are looking to build their portfolio, pays them in minimum cash and guaranteed professional shots from him, and also offers them any good shots from the amateurs. In exchange, the amateurs get great models, some guidance on the session for learning, and we pay the host. In other words, we pay to learn, he gets paid to teach and partially take photos of the models, and the models get some cash and a whack of free photos. Everybody wins. I want to do it, just for the experience really, even though it is not something that particularly interests me. I’d be willing to do photo shoots for friends for example, if they want some basic shots of their family in a park, whatever, just for free and fun, not something I’m looking to turn into a business. And in return, I get practice taking shots of people so that when I do want something really special, I’m already experienced.
I also have some links for free photography classes, some “tips” cards that I bought and want to put to use and design my own flash cards, a MOOC course to finish (National Geographic), summaries from a paid photography class through Henry’s, and I’m considering a potential new lens for wide-field astrophotography.
If I then move on to “image management”, I have my tool, Mylio, but I haven’t put all my photos into it yet. I’m still slowly integrating them as I process a given month, for example. While I have some 30K photos over 15 years, the extra challenges are old photos that are in photo albums to scan as well as managing photos that belong to my mother’s estate. I even have a few posts to do about past scans, like a birthday card collection. I’m not very good at editing though, and while I understand the basics, I’d love to learn the basics of photoshop techniques with programs like GIMP. I even have two images that I have to work with — one from my friend Roula and one of my wife Andrea on a merry-go-round. Both are great shots except for some stains in the photos that don’t look right. Someone with better expertise than me could process them in an instant…I took a few cracks over the years, but I have never quite nailed the technique.
Lastly, I have a grouping around “what do I do with my photos?”. The biggest thing is put them on my website but that’s something I track under my website commitments. It’s a huge commitment of time and energy, and it is what is “missing” under photography as it is more about the website than it is the photos. Instead, my activities are more around putting a backup copy on Amazon Prime (included in my membership), creating photobooks of special events and years (although Andrea is taking the lead on those), and putting a copy on an e-frame that I’ve never had setup properly. I’m also considering trying to make a video file for each year, the equivalent of a video photobook set to music, but I haven’t seen anything that inspires me for that yet. And I’ve considered but not yet implemented the possibility of uploading some of my pictures for sale on microstock sites. Long-term, I have to find options for storing the hard copies of some of the prints I have and disseminating old estate photo collections, but I also want to work on choosing high-quality shots that I can print on metal and put up around the house.
Astronomy
Sooooo, lots of people who know nothing about astronomy think I’m some expert. I’m not. My astro hobby is a bit of a maelstrom of potential, possibilities, impostor syndrome and failure. I have a lot of information across a spectrum of topics that lets me understand the basics of most astro topics, but not in any great depth. And while I am not entirely sure this is the best way to group this section (hence the impostor syndrome), let’s start with “understanding my own telescope”.
The first five years of ownership taught me a pretty good set of lessons in what not to do and how to avoid it in the future. I am now a regular online advisor for newbies on my type of scopes, including experiences, options, etc. My blog post about my alignment process is one of the most viewed pages on my site, second only to my HR guide. But even with my scope, I don’t have everything tweaked properly. I’ve read an after-market owner’s guide, and there are 14 telescope tweaks that I want to try to my setup to see if it improves operations. Some may do nothing at all; others may give me a slight gain in performance. I just want to try them so I know that I’ve done everything to get every last ounce of performance from my scope.
The next area is not so much about the scope itself as learning more about the history of telescopes and astronomy. I’ve started a project whereby I’m going to read all the back issues of Sky and Telescope all the way back to the 1940s. I have already read one year, and I plan to do the others, just got a little side-tracked with a basement reorg. As I go, I’ll write up reviews for my blog and the local astro newsletter.
In a similar vein to my setup for my scope, I also want to look at setup for binoculars. I bought a pair, and they work well for me, but I want to get used to using them. I want to do a deeper-dive so that I could teach someone else if I had to do so. Which is a major part of the theme for this section that I’ll come back to…the idea of teaching myself so I can teach others.
I have a cheap telescope that I got for free and some parts from binos to make some custom eyepieces. It’s part of my “creative / crafting / maker” heading that appears spread out through my list between stuff I do myself, stuff with Andrea, stuff with Jacob and potentially stuff with outside people. I would like to make a maglite to replace a green laser pen option to see how viable I can make one. I also have two old battery supplies I’d like to repair and upgrade.
But as I said, part of my interest is teaching it to others as part of my volunteering duties below. And while it is a chicken/egg situation of which came first, I realized that one thing I bring to astronomy that a lot of experts don’t is an ability to help newbies understand the basics. I’m pretty good at taking complex subjects, boiling them down to their essentials, explaining them in plain language, and onboarding people to a new subject in a way that gives them a good base for future understanding. In effect, I can frame their entry into the world of astronomy in a positive way. My blog post about alignment proves that, it is highly popular despite there being way better experts out there and I’ve done almost no promotion of the page. I wrote it, I shared the links in a couple of fora, people liked it and continue to share it, while my hit count grows. People regularly email me to say “Finally! An explanation that made sense and that ACTUALLY HELPED me”. And they’re off to the races again.
I have done that for an HR guide about federal government competitions, and now I want to do it for astronomy. I am going to write a PolyWogg Guide to Astronomy. Unlike my HR guide, where there are few natural competitors, it is the height of arrogance to think I’m going to offer something better than some of the giants in astronomy writing for amateurs learning how to work a scope and see the cosmos. And yet. I’ve already written some parts of it, and I’m taking a similar approach to my scope. Testing it out, figuring out what works, coming up with a good workflow, and then finding a way to explain that workflow in a manner that makes sense to people in context. The biggest section that I’m going to work on early, and that will reinforce some of the volunteer work, is a guide to choosing a telescope. There are tons of online resources I can use to help build that guide, some of that not even “bad”, just not the way I would explain it. I have materials from an online virtual astronomy course, and I took a course in astrophotography, I have multiple adapters for connecting a smartphone to a scope. I even have an adapter that will let me attach a point-and-shoot camera to my scope. But I also have materials from RASC itself including target lists, a new yearly Almanac, the 2020 Observer’s Handbook, and a guide to native peoples’ constellations. Plus, for the year? Jacob and I are going to do the Explore the Universe kit from RASC. I might even be able to get Andrea to join in. All grist for the learning and writing mill.
But I have other projects or activities in mind. I started working on an astrolog that can run on my phone, and it will take some time to finish and get in the right format. I’d love to make it a full app, but that’s beyond my abilities so far. For the astrophotography side, I’m hoping to take some photos of the moon, planets, DSOs, and constellations. Maybe even some sets worth sharing. In terms of milestones, people often recommend doing a Messier marathon at least once in your life — every Messier object (110 of them) in one night. At least, all the ones you can see that night. This is often combined with an “all-night session“, and that’s on my list too. It would be nice to hit the astronomy lottery and combine both with an astro-themed trip somewhere like a dark-sky site.
Volunteering
My volunteer work falls into three simple headings: astronomy, computers, and GCWCC.
For astronomy, I am a member of the Ottawa Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, and I help out with the club. For the last three years, I’ve been the star party coordinator. Except this past year, I had almost nothing to do. There WAS no star party option. And while I fully intended to give it up for 2021, there’s no one stepping forward to take on the role. Which likely would be the case until we open up again, why would anyone volunteer to do something that can’t happen and if it does, where they may not be comfortable saying yes in advance? Soooo, I’m likely to suggest that I’ll keep the title / role until we get going again. For most of 2021, there won’t be much to do.
In the same vein, I stepped up to take on one of the roles in the Centre as the Ottawa representative to the National Council. Again, it isn’t an onerous role again, attending virtual meetings four times a year and conveying views back and forth, and if / when they hold an annual in-person general meeting somewhere in Canada, probably attending. I can be down with that I guess. Oh, and part of that duty is to feed into manuals, guides, handbooks, etc. for the administration of the club so I’ll likely draft some text regarding two of their publications. I also attend the bi-monthly Ottawa Centre Council meetings as well as the monthly meetings.
And there is a weird role which is they need someone to audit the Centre’s books once a year. Since I’m not an elected member of council, and thus not a voting member for spending decisions, there’s no conflict of interest for me to audit the books for the year. And they don’t need a formal accountant to do it, just someone who can exercise due diligence. Okay, I can do that, I suppose.
However, I have recently inherited a much bigger project. One of our project partners reached out to us and piggybacked / dovetailed with some ideas we already had about teaching people how to use different types of scopes. They want a video on how to use a new scope that they got, and so I’m going to produce it with some other people in the Centre. Yay us. The first one has a bit of a deadline while the others can take all year, if we want.
Continuing the astronomy theme, I am a member of the Board for Astropontiac and I maintain the website. Like RASC, there’s not much happening in a lockdown world, but my role will continue. Pretty low demands, 99% of the time.
Beyond that, I’m wrapping up my involvement last year in the Government of Canada Workplace Charitable Campaign as one of the co-coordinators for our branch of 600 people. I’m running a trivia game on January 21st, working on a report, and other than that, I’m pretty much done.
In checking my to do list, I realized that I still have administrative access to an old website that I was helping with web duties for at one point. I’m not sure they’re even using the site anymore, but I feel like I should make sure SOMEONE has admin access before I delete myself completely. I asked at one point previously and never heard back, so maybe it’s moot. But I need to close that out.
What am I going to do in January?
So that’s my big list for the year. What am I going to include for January?
Integrate photos in Mylio
Develop outline for PW Guide to Astronomy
Read and write about one year of Sky and Telescope
Plan year for Explore the Universe, Almanac, and Observer’s Handbook
RASC monthly meeting
RASC Ottawa Council meeting
RASC Ottawa auditor download
RASC Ottawa SPC confirmation
RASC Ottawa video
GCWCC trivia
GCWCC report
Do you have any plans this year for learning or volunteering?
I am setting my goals for 2021, and I’m using already-established headings that work well for me. First up for today’s post? Finances.
Finances
Overall, I would say I feel a bit guilty about our financial situation. Survivor guilt in a way, particularly given where we work and what we see some of the clients having to deal with during the pandemic and how badly certain sectors are decimated. Working for government, we’re probably immune to the cutbacks for some time since it is our groups that are responding to some of the needs, but a few years after, everyone expects the cuts to take effect then to get deficits under control. In the meantime, our finances are in pretty good shape. The down-side of the pandemic is we are not going anywhere or doing anything; the upside is we are not going anywhere or doing anything that costs much money, so we have some extra money saved for when the world does open up again. And overall, it’s not a big category. Things are going relatively well for us on this front, no “big” concerns.
But each year, I tend to do some pretty advanced social planning for attending potential plays and shows around town. Multiple theatres, multiple types of shows, etc. And when COVID hit, I had a lot of shows that were cancelled, leading to refunds and credits. For the credits, once the world opens up again, I can book new shows. Obviously not a short-term priority, but it’s on my list.
I also have some minutiae to handle under a general heading of “clean-up”. This includes a credit from Rogers that didn’t get processed properly. How excited do you think I am to deal with THAT mess, even though it means money for me? There’s also an old health claim where something “bounced” in the claim process, so I have to resubmit, and of course, some new health claims to submit for 2020. I also want to go through and clean up some credit card consolidation. We don’t owe anything on them, it’s just that we use one that gets us grocery store points (PC) but if I never really use them these days, is that really worth it? And why have other cards we never use? Eventually I’ll request an updated credit report and see if there are any gremlins in there. Two other areas for clean-up are updating my will (mainly for catastrophic loss if all three of us are killed at once) and better coordination of various gift cards that I haven’t used yet.
The real “work” to be done in this area though is retirement planning. We have a bunch of RRSPs, we have our big pensions with the government, but we haven’t done much else for sophisticated planning. We did a plan a number of years ago, and it was fine for what it was and for the time we did it. More about cost planning and general revenues than investment vehicles. But I also have a pension buyback to do so that I can retire in 2025. There are a number of ways to process that, including financing it through payroll deduction or transferring it from my RRSPs, but we’ll see which is a better configuration with some other options. We need to do a meeting with a new financial advisor, and while we did some initial reaching out at the start of the pandemic, we stalled back in August.
The reason was pretty silly, in a way. One of the obvious questions for retirement planning is what are we going to do in retirement, and so Andrea and I had a conversation during our vacation in the summer about a whole bunch of places we would like to go and live for a week, 2 weeks, a month, maybe 2-3 months even, during our retirement. Possibly while keeping our house, maybe renting it out, maybe selling it and being homeless while we rent in multiple short-term places. Some of it depends on when Andrea retires, our overall health then, etc. But we made a list. Or rather, I wrote down the list, put it away safe, and promptly forgot WHERE I PUT IT! Kind of hard to submit the forms to our financial advisor if I’m missing the major “abnormal” expense from our plan.
I couldn’t find it. I was convinced I wrote it in a notebook that I had with me at the time, but it wasn’t there. Andrea remembered me writing it on loose paper, so I thought maybe I stuck it in as a bookmark in some books. Nope. Not in 2-3 other notebooks that are frequent companions. Not in my big shoulder bag, not with my laptop, not with my obvious loose planning papers. Not with my financial stuff. WHAT THE **** did I do with it? Well, I put it away somewhere safe. I folded it over, small piece of paper, and put it in my small shoulder bag. The one that use when I go shopping or to a coffee shop. You know, the things I am not doing now. And I put it in a small pocket that I never use. Because that was a safe place to put it where it wouldn’t get lost or destroyed or misfiled. Well, I was right. It didn’t get any of those things. But I was cleaning out the bag the other day for pens or highlighters and things that don’t need to be in there since I’m not using it, and Bam! There it was. Son of a fudgsicle. Okay, back on track.
We can do the retirement planning and fill out the docs. We can have a retirement planning meeting. And I can decide how I’m financing my pension buyback. I even have a great book about types of activities in retirement to help me refine my thinking (The One Thing), with a nice cross-walk to the type of fitness needs that go along with them.
Organizing
So you often see a joke about to do lists that the first thing on the to do list is to make a to do list. And some of this category is simply that…a category for getting organized that lists how I’m getting myself organized. Not competely, but somewhat. In some years, it has literally meant doing this big list for the year. Doing my review of last year, focusing on the future for my goals, communicating my intentions to the universe. But that’s done as soon as I press publish, so hardly worth mentioning.
For those who are friends with me on Facebook, you have likely noticed that I regularly share some of my favourite comics. I get most of them through one specific site, and I never really feel like I’m well-organized for those feeds. I can make it highly personalized, even deleting or adding on a daily basis if I wanted to, or reading online instead of through my email, but I like getting the email feeds. And so I went through and reorganized them recently. It’s done, but officially I guess it was part of this year’s plan. To the extent it is a continuing item, the “to do” portion is that I continue to share them and file the old ones away in my computer. Just cuz I can, not because I need them per se. Although I did get behind at one point in my feed, and so I have a bit of a comics reading backlog sitting there that I can go through at some point too. I may just delete them, haven’t decided yet. Not exactly a priority.
Activities
This is a slightly weird category. It doesn’t particularly fit anywhere else, and it is about various activities that I want to do on a pro-active basic but more almost one-off things than tied to a category. I could count it as a “medium-term bucket list” of sorts, but perhaps more like “superficial bucket list”.
For example, I bought a Raspberry Pi kit awhile back and I am hoping to turn it into a portable gaming system or something cool like that. I bought a bunch of parts, but I never really made time to do it, thought perhaps J might be interested but he isn’t really. Instead, it is just a project for me to do by myself. Part of a new focus on crafting. I also have a robot to assemble, but I’ll do that one with Jacob.
Before COVID hit, I was thinking about taking archery lessons or trying axe-throwing. Not so much right now, obviously. I also want to learn how to play the piano, but I suspect that will be more online stuff with YouTube and books than taking formal lessons. It would be a good activity for the pandemic, just haven’t got around to it yet.
I mentioned above that I have a drone stored in my alcove, and I’m hoping to fly it properly at some point. The main challenge is getting it going without banging into a tree. I’ve tried 3-4 times, and what I really need is a bunch of open space to get the controls properly balanced. I have a friend who apparently flies drones and I’m hoping he’ll take me out some time to show me how to fly it. After that, the world will be open to me. Or at least within the range of the drone. It has a small camera in it, so I’m hoping to use it for practical things like checking out shingles on the roof as well as taking pics of the cottage and lake from the sky, or even some observing sites.
One thing in the list that seems almost silly to have on a list but I added it a long time ago from a list of activities for fun you could do in winter. It’s NOT complicated, requires almost no planning at all, and I hadn’t haven’t done it — make a snow angel. Stay tuned for an update on this one.
So what else is in this category? Plant something and grow it, possibly flowers, possibly vegetables. I’ve never really purposefully planned to plant something and grown it. Not really, little things here and there. More as a lark than a plan.
Way back when I got married, I tried to do indoor go-karts for my bachelor party, but the plan didn’t work out. So it’s been on my list for coming up on 13 years.
Another item is partly for interest and partly for research for writing, but I’d like to do a ride along with police for an evening or two.
A last one to include, and I’m not even sure what I mean exactly, is to run a 3D printer. I have an idea for some astro gear that I’d like to print, the files are available online (some free, some not), and I’d like to play with the files and print them. The reason I am not sure what I mean by doing this is I don’t know if I want my own 3D printer (which would allow me to print a whole bunch of parts for board games for Jacob as well as astro tools, some other crafting things, etc.), or if I just want to go commercial (I’ve printed a focus knob for my scope at a small industrial shop in Nepean, although not likely to be able to tweak it much nor do stuff on the fly), or if I want to get set up at one of the maker spaces. Sure, I would love to have my own 3D printer, and I *know* a guy with a 3D printer, I just don’t know if I would use it enough to make it worthwhile. I’m tempted when everything is all over to call the guy with the printer, go for an afternoon with some design ideas, and see how it all works.
As a small aside, I find the business model for 3D printers somewhat amusing. You can buy them all ready to go, OR, just for fun, you can buy a kit and assemble it yourself. I think this is one of those tests for irony. If you aren’t buying the kit to put it together yourself, maybe you shouldn’t be thinking about buying a 3D printer to make a whole bunch of things to make yourself. And yet, I’d rather buy it preassembled and ready to go than to futz around with leveling and particle nozzles the first few times.
I have a few other projects on the go too, but they fall under other categories I think.
What am I going to do in January?
So that’s my big list for the year. What am I going to include for January?
Start filling out the retirement planning docs
Sort out my comics feed
Make a snow angel
Do you have any plans this year for finances, organizing yourself, and/or one-off special activities?
As mentioned in my previous post, I already have much of my goal-setting broken down into various categories, so I’m using my well-established headings that work for me.
Family
I always struggle with this category from a philosophical perspective. “Family”, as a category, is not particularly amenable to goal-setting. But some parts are, and it those parts, i.e., organizing myself better, that I am targeting. This year, most of the effort is going to focus on five areas.
First and foremost is emotional, mental, and physical support for Jacob. We’re working on some potential surgical options for him for later this year, and while the surgeries are relatively straight-forward, they are hard for him to understand and process in advance. He’ll need help and guidance with that so that he’s comfortable with the decisions and the process. However, far more importantly, the potential rehab activities afterward can be quite extensive for some of the options. It’s a potentially tough road ahead, or at least some serious bumps, and he’s going to need every ounce of support we have to get through it in a positive mindset. On the more mundane side, we also need to set up an appointment with a new dentist for Jacob.
Secondly, I think there is a grouping of activities around “projects with Jacob”. We certainly have new Lego kits to build, including a couple of large ones. Other projects include assembling a robot, fixing J’s remote control car, constructing a paper penguin, some “Sonic Dad” projects to do with Jacob, and Jacob has a new paper airplane calendarthat looks fun. I’m also hoping to do some monthly challengeideas with him. Andrea does jigsaw puzzles with him, so I think those are “covered”, as they have a bunch to do. I have a bunch of Kiwi kits for Andrea and I to do, but I suspect those will be awhile.
The third area is grouped around the games we like to play as a family, as Jacob has been wanting to teach me Fort Nitefor awhile and we do have Pokémoncards to try at some point. And we want to design some new cardsand cheat sheets for a couple of our existing board games (Dice Forge, Q of Q). But Jacob has also taken board game design at summer camps and we want to transform two or three of them into actual printed games. Overall though, I think I might start blogging about board games too, based on perhaps a series of in-house family game tournaments we might play throughout the year.
The fourth area is larger, more about our family events. Most of them depend on a vaccine letting us return to travel, but we’ll likely take a decent trip once everything is “over”. Depending on surgery outcomes and recovery, of course.
The fifth and final area is about larger family stuff. I’d like to do some ancestry stuff that I’ve been putting off, and miscellaneous family stuff here and there.
Home
This area is huge. In fact, it is so massive, I’m not even sure sub-categories help me weed through. I’ll separate it from large-scale “home” changes requiring contractors vs. internal reorganization of various rooms by us. I’ve blogged before about feeling overwhelmed, and well, now you’ll see why.
a) For outside, we had initially planned some landscaping work before COVID. Some better setup at the front of house, edging perhaps, maybe some flower bed-type edging in the backyard. We also need to fix our fence (it hasn’t been replaced since the original build, 20+ years ago), and while the back is in good shape, the two sides need a lot of refreshing. We’ll likely just replace the whole thing. We’ve talked to the neighbours already, and one asked us to wait until Spring as they have some stuff just inside the fence they didn’t want disturbed before Winter. Since they’re also willing to pay half for their section, it’s all good.
Then COVID hit, and we’re considering a pool. The pool, though, is the easy part to design. The real challenge is the location of the heater and pump, in relation to the existing deck, fences and house. We can do “a pool”, but keeping all the other dimensions in play may make for a smaller pool than we might want. If we can’t get it done, we’re likely to go with a trampoline for Jacob and back to an observatory for me. Farther out, we would also like to redo the main bathroom upstairs plus the ensuite, but that also has some implications re: surgical rehab, so not sure how we’ll get to that soon. Two other things that were on my list were xmas lights (we didn’t get them up early enough this year so just gave up on them) and additional roof vents (identified as beneficial way back in our home inspection). We’ll likely have to redo our roof at some point, so we might be able to combine the timing for those two things.
More simply, we are also looking forward to eventually getting back into havingcleaners come to the house, even if just for the bathrooms and kitchen primarily. And be more engaged to do this frequently ourselves in the meantime.
b) That first area ranges from minor (trampoline) to major (pool). This second area is about a massive reorganization in the house, with changes in contents for the basement, first floor, second floor, and even the garage & shed. Some of it is already done, but the huge list is intimidating.
Basement: As I mentioned early, I now work out of the basement. I have the basics of my office organized for work, but I’m still tweaking the setup for my home PC as well as filing (two things to be moved from the top floor and one to be assembled), lighting, hanging pictures, and curtains. Mixed with my office is a built-in crafting space. Adjacent to the office is my “fitness area”, with a Bowflex and an exercise bike to be assembled. I have my old stereo sitting in a cabinet, ready to be hooked up and configured so I can stream from my phone, but haven’t got to it yet. When I get to my media area, i.e., the TV room part, I don’t currently have my internet running to the VMedia box nor a PC set up to stream to it. I also have multiple video game systems to attach, although at least I have the TV stand already assembled from earlier in the summer. Somewhere in there I have to purge a bunch of old electronics, set up one of the Amazon Echoes that are waiting to run, sort through my movies, get rid of all our old CDs (once the library takes donations again), and clear off an area where we / I can display our various projects that we’ve built, aka a trophy area.
Laundry room: Our laundry room doubles as our basement storage area, and we have some camping equipment in there, some housewares, some basic household maintenance stuff, and long-term storage of some older electrical and computer equipment. I have a bunch of books in there to purge, but at least I’ve started on that, even though it is a longer-term project (3-5 years). Two things are hiding in the back area, hinting at larger projects. First, we have a replacement sink for the laundry tubs. Something a bit cleaner than the older one that looks like it was used to clean paint buckets at some point. In an ideal world, I’d love to have BOTH hooked up, one clean and one utilitarian, but that’s probably overkill. I’ll need a contractor at some point to do that, and we’ll likely use whoever does the upstairs bathrooms. I also have a small project to do, likely myself. Jacob and I bought Andrea a Christmas carousel last year (or the year before???) and there is “some assembly required”. Basically a bunch of pieces need to be formally glued in for the thing to work safely. We just have never got to it, nor even had a space for it. Oh, and I almost forgot. There’s a small access panel / window into the laundry room from a hall, and I have a couple of parts to install on it to stop the door from falling off. 10 minutes work if I can get all the parts and tools in the same place at the same time!
Garage: My garage is currently a disaster zone with a ton of dominoes to fall in order to finalize the layout. I had a small brain-fart earlier today that may upset half my design, I have to do some measuring first. But WHEN I do decide on the final layout, I have to store some sports equipment and tools (we already have the bookshelves assembled for those), and I have some decent options for my astronomy equipment (although a future observatory option would solve most of that dilemma, while ANYTHING is better than it currently sitting in the playroom). But what is outstanding is a decision about the workbench that I have that was a gift from my in-laws. It’s a great workbench, just can’t decide if I use it enough to justify the amount of space it takes. And I could put it in the basement instead but I’m loathe to do that and lose use of it for woodworking projects (I wouldn’t want to blow sawdust everywhere down there).
Shed: My backyard shed is relatively straightforward, I mostly use it to store my snowblower in the summer and my lawnmower in the winter. Plus various seasonal things that don’t have other places to go (like bicycles and sometimes golf clubs). Jacob has new golf clubs and unfortunately, I have three mixed sets spread between the shed and the garage which need to be consolidated and sorted. Plus for fun, my summer tires are stored in there during the winter.
Front hall with a small alcove:Back inside the house, we want curtains for the front closet, I have to relocate my drone to somewhere more appropriate, and come up with a new storage option for the bookshelf that is there (I’m thinking an old-fashioned desk of some sort would be really nice there. Maybe a roll-top? Not sure I can sell Andrea on that config). Oh, and I have a new e-deadbolt to install when I remember.
Living room: Our front room is not spared from the list. Most of the basics are covered, but we need to hang some pictures and paintings, I’d like new curtains for the bay window that will go close to full dark, and then just for fun, we probably need some new seating (couch or chairs) along with a new coffee table, and potentially an end table.
Playroom: The room next to our kitchen is where Jacob does his daily schooling, it’s our home for our annual Xmas tree, it houses all of our game collection (which is still growing), and a table for ongoing crafts and projects like puzzles or Lego projects. It needs a good vetting of content, as well as improved lighting, hanging some pictures,regrouping of games and trivia collections, an Echo set up for the first floor, and new window coverings for it plus the adjacent kitchen (either curtains or blinds that match).
Andrea’s office: While the basics are covered with a decent design, the room would benefit from hanging some pictures, setting up an Echo for her while she’s working, hanging a map, and getting new curtains for the West window and potentially the East too.
Guest room: The GR is functional, but would benefit from hanging some pictures, and adding new curtains. There are also two projects hiding in the room — one to repair a Casio organ whose speakers are dislodged, which should be an easy fix, and a much larger clothing purge for some of my old clothes.
Main bedroom: Like pretty much everywhere else, I need to hang pictures and curtains. We also need to come up with some sort of reading chair option for Andrea, purge some contents from bookshelves and then move them elsewhere in the house, and purge more clothing.
Stairwell: You might be forgiven for thinking the stairwell escapes modifications, but I’d like to hang some pictures on the walls.
Yep, that’s a really long freaking list. No wonder I’ve been overwhelmed.
Reading
With that long to do list, who has time to read? I do! I do! 🙂
At least I hope I do. The main “thrust” for my reading for the year is my own PolyWogg Reading Challenge, and for January, the books are:
A. Reader’s choice – any book
B. Category: Humour
Book 1: Any book by David Sedaris (Amanda Graham’s suggestion: When You Are Engulfed In Flames)
Book 2: Any book by Harlan Coben (My suggestion: Deal Breaker, the first in the Myron Bolitar series)
C. Challenge books
Book 1: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Book 2: A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
I’m reading Harlan Coben at the moment. We’ll see if I get to any of the challenge books. I also have a bunch in my TBR pile, including some gifts. So those are on my list. A separate list, but “on the list” nevertheless.
I’ll keep the Reading Challenge alive for the year too as it provides a small measure of socialization too.
Other reading include lots of things I’ve saved in my email in a “bloggable” folder about a variety of topics. I’m hoping to curate those saved files over the course of the year, but maybe that is more about “writing for my blog” than simply reading.
And I should also mention I’m running the Penguin and Penguee Book of the Month Club for Jacob and Andrea all year.
What am I going to do in January?
So that’s my big list for the year. What am I going to include for January?
Start a medium-sized Lego kit with Jacob
Paper airplane calendar with Jacob
First monthly challenge — memorization
Play Fort Nite
Cheat sheets for Q of Q
Clean house more regularly
Finish organizing garage
Finish organizing office area of the basement
Make a list for curtains and blinds
PolyWogg Reading Challenge
Book of the month club
Do you have any plans this year for family, home or reading?
