Sunday, 01 January 2012

Jennifer and I rang in the new year by finishing up our office slash playroom:

I know what you’re thinking – “office slash playroom” is a lousy name for part of the house, right? Yeah, we’re still working on that. The problem is, we have so many areas of the house, I don’t know what to call them all. For example, we have a deck AND a porch. Worse, we have this area by the circuit breakers (down in the basement) and I’m never sure how to describe that area. It’s kind of a utility room, but not really.

We also have three landings. We’ve only ever had one landing before: in our townhome. For those who don’t know, a ‘landing’ is aplace in a staircase where it flattens out for a bit – usually to turn a corner. In our townhome, we just called that spot “The Landing.” But in our new mansion, we have three of them. What to call them?

We named them (in descending order from highest elevation to lowest): The Kent, The Tudor, and the Windsor. This allows us to speak with greater precision, as in, “Owen, pick up your toys and set them on the Tudor so I can vacuum,” or, “Hey, the cat just threw up on the Windsor.”

Other things requiring better names are the two car stalls of our garage (the East and West Wing?), the three ‘spaces’ in our basement that are not the bathroom or the laundry room, and, of course, that pesky office slash playroom. I’m also pushing for a name for our entire estate, too, though the main issue with that seems to be that Jennifer and I can not agree on a suffix: Shall it be a Manor? A Dwelling? Just plain Home? A Castle? Or (my favorite) a Compound?

Clearly, we have our work cut out for us.

Saturday, 31 December 2011

Here at the end of the year, let’s examine four areas of my life: the books I read, the money I found, my word of the year, and this blog itself.

1) The books I read

I finished reading 58 books this year. Well, actually, I probably read more like 100 books – but I don’t count those little kid books, and I am not including books I’ve already read.

Fifty-eight is the most books I’ve read in a single year since 2000, when I read 71 books. Last year, I only read 35 books, so this year is a 23-book improvement.

Many of the books I read this year were read aloud with my son. I decided shortly before his 6th birthday that I would begin reading him more mature books, so we read Black Beauty, Stuart Little, and the Mouse and the Motorcycle (all books I have read before). We also read several books that were new to me, including many of the A to Z Mysteries, the Harry Huggins series, and the Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane.

I read a few books for school, including a reread of Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass. New books I read included Bartleby and Brokeback Mountain.

My choice for the best non-fiction I read all year is a tie between The Disappearing Spoon and The Matter with Us. Please check them out – they’re both worth your time. The biggest waste of time non-fiction I read was Ice.

My choice for the best fiction I read all year is The Knowledge of Good and Evil. The worst novel I read this year was Pride and Fucking Who Cares, by Jane Austen, which I read for a class I took last spring.

2) The Money I Found

As I noted back at the beginning of the year, I decided to keep track of the money I found lying around this year. Back on Wednesday, I found me a penny at the local Chipotle and, well, that happened to be the last bit of money I found this year, bringing me to a grand total of $13.68.

The most money I found at a single time was $1.00. The most money I found in a single month was in June ($2.03). The least amount of money I found in a single month was March (40 cents). The biggest gap between finding any money was the 13 days between August 16th and August 29th. Conversely, the most consecutive days during which I found money were September 9th through 13th (five days). The longest it took me to make it to the next whole dollar was a tie: it took me 46 days to get to the $3 mark, then another 46 days to get to the $4 mark. Howver, it only took me six days to go from $10 to $11 dollars.

I surpassed minimum wage ($7.25) on August 3rd, when I found a dime and my total racked up to $7.34.

My plan is to keep track of this again in 2012 and see if I can best this year’s record.

3) My Word of the Year

I’ll write more about this later – but look up at the top of the page. There’s a new tab labeled “Words of the Year.” Click on it, and you’ll have somewhat of an explanation as to what I’m talking about. I’ll drop in the actual words, and announce my selection for my personal word of the year, sometime next week.

4) This blog

Well, I didn’t quite meet my goal of writing about every day of the year here in 2011. In 2010, I heartily wrote about all 365 days. But this year, I copped out twice. First, I only wrote about 9 of the days in June (1-5, 11, 28-30), and just last week, I purposely mashed two days together since they were both the Zombie-god holiday and I had written a lengthy post. So, I only wrote about 343 days this year. Sorry about that. I’m gonna try harder in 2012, even though the goal this leap-year will be 0.273% more challenging.

And that’s my year.