Each week, I’m sharing a quick star rating and one-sentence progress report for how I’m doing on each of the seven goals I’ve set to change my life over the next seven months, and then tell you a bit more about one of the seven goals.
Saturday was a fun - but tiring - break from my routine. I picked up a car club rental car at 5.45 am, drove around Bristol picking up other members of my university Quiz Society, then drove to Warwick Uni (which is actually on the outskirts of Coventry) for a day of competitive quizzing. My team came … *checks notes* 14th out of 17 teams, but we had a fun time and each of us got some great answers in to questions.
You’ll see some of the quizzers I was with on Saturday on this evening’s University Challenge, and some of my friends from Bristol Uni’s Quiz Society next on Monday’s episode. 8.30pm, BBC Two, be there!
Training for the half-marathon: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
I made it out for five runs last week, covering 12.2 miles. I did diverge from Garmin’s training plan though; first when it wanted me to do a third speed workout in three days, and secondly to postpone yesterday’s long run to this morning. I was exhausted after Saturday (I parked the car back up just before midnight) so definitely needed to take it slow yesterday!Master’s dissertation: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Last week’s goal was to start getting words on the page - and I did it! It feels great to have actual progress. I was getting blank-page-paralysis and now I’m over that hump a bit I’m chipping away at the total bit by bit.Look after the space I live in: ⭐️
Another £50 of Vinted sales mean I’ve made my £250 goal! I’ve split that between my investment account and covering the cost of some jazzy new running shorts.
As to cleaning and decluttering… it was another bare-minimum week. This week’s aim therefore is to do a couple of ‘blitz’ sessions and to take a bag to the charity shop.Screen time below 3 hours: ⭐️
3 hours and 44 minutes - definitely going in the wrong direction here…Read the books I already own: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Finished four books this week! One paperback, one new hardback, one ebook, and one hardback from the library. The hardback was Omar El-Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This, which snuck into my basket when I took advantage of Waterstones’s 25% off preorders sale. More on that below…Draft 1 of the Unhinged Fiction Project: ❌
Nothing doing here. The dissertation is more important at the moment.Knitting progress: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
During my ‘potato day’ yesterday I binge-watched the first three episodes of Destination X on BBC iPlayer while knitting away on Baby G’s blanket. The first episode enraged me in that the ‘destination’ was a good few hundred kilometres away from where all the clues were pointing, but I enjoyed the next two a lot more.
Weekly Focus: Read the books I already own
I talked about this in some detail in last week’s roundup of everything I read in July, which I’m linking below. As a mini update to that, I’m now at 518 unread books on my Kindle, for a total of 559 digital unread books.
As I said in last week’s post, I have no idea how many physical unread books I have, and that fills me with fear.
But I’m trying to look at this positively - it’s about reading what I have, not so much about a book buying ban. I have access to the university library and to multiple libraries’ ebook collections on the Libby app, so there’s very little that I would need to buy. The massive exception I have made is that there are some books I do need to read for my academic research (for my job, effectively), which aren’t available on any of the library platforms, so I have ordered a few of those lately, and I’m not counting that as breaking the promise I’ve made to myself. For example, I was trying to remember what Rob Eastaway wrote about “spurious precision” in Maths On The Back Of An Envelope, and the review I read of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s More and More and More told me that it would be incredibly useful for my research (ad - both are commission links). Similarly, I’ve pre-ordered Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (ad - commission link).
Because I’ve stemmed the inwards tide of new books into my flat a bit, I’ve been able to start tackling those new additions within days or weeks of them reaching my desk. Historically, I have a problem where I buy hardbacks and then they just sit and marinate on my bookshelf for so long that I could have bought the paperback and saved my money - so for recent purchases, I’m making a real effort to not let this be the case.
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I fell foul of Waterstones’s 25% off pre-orders sale. The books I ordered have release dates scattered over the next six months or so, so as long as I keep reading my way through my existing shelves, I’ll still end up with a smaller to-be-read shelf than I have at the moment. Some of them are hardbacks, so, again, the goal is to make sure I prioritise reading those as soon as possible.
There is one dilemma I have about this goal of reading [only?] what I already own. I never owned my own copies of the Hunger Games books, and earlier this summer, I started a project to buy the beautiful new collectors’ editions of the series, one at a time, to read my way through them. Given that this is a project I had already started… I think it’s fine to get the next few in the matching editions? Part of me is very aware that this is textbook ADHD-dopamine seeking… but on the other hand, having given up alcohol, this is perhaps the least unhealthy habit out there…
Summer Reading, Had Me A Blast
We had some very, very hot days in July which reminded me of the downside of my very warm and well-insulated flat. I spent a lot of afternoons reading a book in a cool or barely lukewarm bath, just to bring my body temperature down and stay sane in the heat. (My water bill has just gone up by £10 per month, which reflects my absolute dedication to takin…
Best
Lily