not a wrap-up!

That was a lot of lists. I always wonder if, in the absence of religion in my life, I find some sort of meaning in assiduous data collection. The good news is that if I decide I don’t care, no one smites me.

I have been having an okay 2008 all things considered. I spent the New Year’s Day after a really fun party hanging out in bed with coffee and later tea and later cocoa catching up on reading and email and setting the mp3 player to play every favorite song I have (about seven hours worth, totally worth the time). Then I vowed to try to not do that again in 2008. There is value to staying in bed, but I’m into working on the things I can accomplish after putting on pants, this year.

This week has been about snow and snowshoeing and shopping (spending holidaytime money — I got magnets and a swim towel and gloves and showshoes and a necklace and something else I can’t remember) and getting back into the world of work and schedules, at least in theory. Next week I get into work and schedules in earnest so this weekend I’m taking some time off to screw around in the political wonderland that is New Hampshire with a few friends and maybe get some bowling in.

Yesterday I went showshoeing for the first time in my life with my friend Kelly who is a great person to do these things with because she pushes but not so much that it’s unfun. My resolution, for today, is to do this again.

what was swum – the last wrap-up post for 2007

I apologize in advance for the extreme wonkiness of this post, again.

swimming 07

So, swimming the length of Lake Champlain didn’t quite work out, but I did pretty okay. As of June, I was ahead by about ten or fifteen miles. However I pulled my shoulder swimming a little too much and then took to my bed for about a month. Well, not exactly, but I didn’t swim in any case. September saw another few weeks out of the pool when I tried to get tricky and do that breathing-out-of-both-sides thing I hear is so popular in freestyle nowadays and pulled some muscle I didn’t know I had. In any case, by the Autumn it was clear that I was either going to have to go full-out towards completing my goal and risk further injury, or go walk around in the leaves some. I made the obvious choice. I still managed to put in 82 miles this year which is less than I’d hoped but pretty awesome in my opinion.

I swam 111 days this year for 82 miles total which is about 3/4 of a mile per swim.
I swam 130 days last year for 79 miles total (it says 80+, I don’t know why I said that, wishful thinking?) which is about 3/5 of a mile per swim.

This year I was away from home even more than last year. I’m calling this all a success. I got special swimmers’ shampoo from my sister for holidaytime and I’m on my fourth swimsuit since this all started way back in Summer 2005. I am also a lifeguard, though it doesn’t come up much. That is the year in swimming.

2007 reading list, a year end summary

My apologies to those who have already read this on librarian.net. This is the exact same post except for this paragraph right here. I track a bunch of data but usually only report on books, travel and lately swimming. It’s weird, I also watch a lot of movies but I just write them down on a long boring list, for some reason they lack the impact or import in my life of books and beds. In any case, here’s the reading list. If I were a New Yorker cartoon I’d be the one where all the guys are in the boardroom and they’re pointing to an arrow that is falling off the righthand side of the chart. It’s okay, time for a minor adjustment. I had a “watch more TV” resolution (in addition to the other ongoing resolutions) last year to get me off the laptop and maybe it’s time to change that to a Read More Good Books resolution. I’ve been enjoying a lot of genre fiction this past year but it can make deeper reading harder and/or slower. That said, I find both kinds of reading rewarding but the pendulum has to shift more towards at least the middle.

Here are previous year end lists: 2006, 2005, 2004. As you probably know, my booklist lives in a separate blog and it has its own RSS feed. I’m not a voracious reader and I’ve been heavy into genre fiction this year, but here’s the wrap-up of what I read in 2007.

number of books read in 2007: 53
number of books read in 2005: 86
number of books read in 2004: 103
number of books read in 2003: 75
number of books read in 2002: 91
number of books read in 2001: 78
average read per month: 4.4
average read per week: 1
number read in worst month: 1 (November)
number read in best month: 9 (March)
percentage by male authors: 78
percentage by female authors: 22
fiction as percentage of total: 63
non-fiction as percentage of total: 37
percentage of total liked: 89
percentage of total ambivalent: 11
percentage of total disliked: 0

It was not a good year for reading, to put it mildly. I did more travel than ever before, but I spent more time on planes either working or watching back-of-seat movies or just sleeping. Last year I felt like I got a lot of reading done on planes.

This year I also had a new time-consuming hobby which was (and is) swimming. In an attempt to meet a pretty ambitious goal — one which I did not wind up meeting, but boy did I try! — I spent a lot more free time swimming, driving to the pool, showering, etc. And then of course when you swim you sleep like a log, which means less fidgety before sleep time for reading which was a standard reading time for me. I like swimming a lot, but the impact it has on my reading is, to me, quite clear.

So, it’s interesting to do this every year to see how the years compare. I read a lot of genre fiction — six books by John Lescroart, two by Greg Bear, two by Henry Petroski, four graphic novels — and that will probably continue. I read a few books that I enjoyed but which took me weeks to work through, 1491 and Men of Tomorrow, which really put a damper on other reading. I did less parallel reading this year and more serial reading, so when one book bogged me down, I was less able to pick up something else. In any case, I believe that every single one of those books was a loaner from a friend or family member, a library book or a library booksale book and to me that’s a decent accomplishment. Happy reading to everyone in the new year.

Here are some other reader’s lists: Anirvan, Ruby.

My year in cities and towns, 2007

There have been a few of these annual lists before this one — 2006, 2005. My guess, if I had to make one, is that this year marks the apogee for me travel-wise and I am likely to get closer to my own home in 2008, maybe. Then again I thought I’d make another post in 2007; I do know that “penultimate” does mean “second to last” and not “best.”

I travelled out of the country five times last year and out of North America twice. I stayed in 38 locations in 45-ish guestrooms and I took 59 photos of them. I was away from home 95 nights, it looks like. This is why I do not have a cat. I did manage to have seventeen houseguests though; charming, every last one of them.

I didn’t do what I did in 2006 and set up a home away from home for the purposes of hiding out. This year was largely work travel, but mostly pleasant work travel at that. Here’s the list for 2007 of places I stayed that were not my house. As before, stars indicate multiple visits to the exact same place. Numbers indicate number of distinct guestrooms at each location. If you’re a frequent business-type traveller too, or any type of traveller really, you might want to check out Dopplr a sort of social software type site for people who move around a lot. I’m on it under my usual name.

Somerville, MA * (2)
Hooksett, NH
San Francisco CA (2)
Manhattan, KS
Perth, AUS
Adelaide, South AUS
Robe, South AUS
Port Fairy, VIC
Geelong, VIC
Melbourne, VIC
Sydney, NSW
Randolph, VT
Kittery, ME
Brooklyn, NY *
Crystal City, VA (2)
Baltimore, MD
Dodge City, KS
Washington, DC
Suffern, NY
Sturbridge, MA (2)
Burlington, VT *
Barre, VT
Boxborough, MA
San Juan, PR
Ann Arbor, MI
Antrim, NH
Manchester, NH *
Westport, MA *
Portland, OR (2)
Seattle, WA
Tatamagouche, NS
Halifax, NS (2)
Antigonish, NS
Truro, NS
Victoria, BC (2)
Lansing, MI *
Dubai, UAE
Abu Dhabi UAE

Thanks as always to the people who put me up or came to visit or had a beer with me on the road or here.