{"id":2562,"date":"2012-01-03T22:05:51","date_gmt":"2012-01-04T04:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/?p=2562"},"modified":"2012-01-03T22:05:51","modified_gmt":"2012-01-04T04:05:51","slug":"2011-in-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/2012\/01\/2011-in-review\/","title":{"rendered":"2011 in Review"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Saturday, 31 December 2011<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Here at the end of the year, let&#8217;s examine four areas of my life: the books I read, the money I found, my word of the year, and this blog itself.<\/p>\n<p>1) The books I read<\/p>\n<p>I finished reading 58 books this year. Well, actually, I probably read more like 100 books &#8211; but I don&#8217;t count those little kid books, and I am not including books I&#8217;ve already read.<\/p>\n<p>Fifty-eight is the most books I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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 <em>Black Beauty<\/em>, <em>Stuart Little<\/em>, and <em>the Mouse and the Motorcycle<\/em> (all books I have read before). We also read several books that were new to me, including many of the <em>A to Z Mysteries<\/em>, the <em>Harry Huggins<\/em> series, and <em>the Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>I read a few books for school, including a reread of <em>Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass<\/em>. New books I read included <em>Bartleby<\/em> and <em>Brokeback Mountain<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>My choice for the best non-fiction I read all year is a tie between <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/story\/story.php?storyId=128588187\"><em>The Disappearing Spoon<\/em><\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/mnatheists.org\/news-and-media\/book-reviews\/680-book-review-the-matter-with-us\"><em>The Matter with Us<\/em><\/a>. Please check them out &#8211; they&#8217;re both worth your time. The biggest waste of time non-fiction I read was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Ice-Great-Moments-History-Water\/dp\/0873516281\"><em>Ice<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>My choice for the best fiction I read all year is <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.kleier.com\/DisplayPageContent.aspx?PageID=24360\">The Knowledge of Good and Evil<\/a>.<\/em> The worst novel I read this year was <em>Pride and Fucking Who Cares<\/em>, by Jane Austen, which I read for a class I took last spring.<\/p>\n<p>2) The Money I Found<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/2011\/01\/stuff-that-happened-last-week-part-ii\/\">As I noted back at the beginning of the year<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>I surpassed minimum wage ($7.25) on August 3rd, when I found a dime and my total racked up to $7.34.<\/p>\n<p>My plan is to keep track of this again in 2012 and see if I can best this year&#8217;s record.<\/p>\n<p>3) My Word of the Year<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll write more about this later &#8211; but look up at the top of the page. There&#8217;s a new tab labeled &#8220;Words of the Year.&#8221; Click on it, and you&#8217;ll have somewhat of an explanation as to what I&#8217;m talking about. I&#8217;ll drop in the actual words, and announce my selection for my personal word of the year, sometime next week.<\/p>\n<p>4) This blog<\/p>\n<p>Well, I didn&#8217;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 <a href=\"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/2011\/06\/\">9 of the days in June<\/a> (1-5, 11, 28-30), and <a href=\"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/2011\/12\/why-this-photo-demonstrates-that-im-the-luckiest-man-on-the-planet\/\">just last week, I purposely mashed two days together<\/a> 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&#8217;m gonna try harder in 2012, even though the goal this leap-year will be 0.273% more challenging.<\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s my year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Saturday, 31 December 2011 Here at the end of the year, let&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2562"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2565,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2562\/revisions\/2565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}