Thursday, June 30, 2011

The Midway Point

I posted some New Year's Resolutions for 2011 at the beginning of the year, and as we're halfway through it's time to check in on them:

1) Playing music.  Mostly things have been going well.  White Mountain Murder Circus released its first album, which I wrote several songs for and played several instruments on (mostly fiddle).  I took three classes at Passim and have been progressing with my fiddle playing.  I'm still working on fundamental things like tone and the nuances of the fiddle; I still feel like a mandolin player trying to play fiddle.  I stopped working through Hot Licks; with Passim out of session for the summer I should pick it back up.

2) I'm killing this one.  My grand total for books read this year is 24, including The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft, Jim Tressel's The Winner's Manual, the twelve novels of Anthony Powell's A Dance To the Music Of Time, Red Harvest, Rework, Blood Meridian, True Grit, Popular Crime (by baseball writer Bill James), The Big Sleep, Shackleton's South, Naked Lunch, I Am Legend, Ubik.  That knocks six off my Time 100 list, bringing me to 35.  I think I can average a book a week for the year (meaning I need to read 28 more), including at least 10 Time 100 books (which will get me almost halfway to my goal).  Unexpected problem: my rapid reading rate is causing me to spend too much money on Kindle books!  I'm trying to temper this by reading some free ones, such as Edith Wharton's The Age Of Innocence.

3) I set a goal of 1.5 posts per week, which would be 39 posts so far this year.  This is my 36th post of 2011, so I'm a little behind, but I've averaged two / week over the past couple months, so there's plenty of time to get on schedule.

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