UPDATE Summer Challenge

You may remember I set myself a small set of Summer Challenges. They were:

1. To do 20 mins of walking each day (this challenge was issued by someone else, not me)
2. To run 5kms
3. To finish my correspondence course
4. To read all books I own but havent read yet.

Basically, epic fail. Epic. The rundown is thus-

1. Sort of. I walk to work and home again most days which is 30 mins each way. This doesnt happen on the weekends. So, on average it is 20 mins a day, just not done every day.

2. *cough*. argh...... I can run 2kms straight. Its a work in progress. I've also lost almost all motivation but this weeks goal is to get that back.

3. hmm. I did 1 assignment, and when I was halfway through I realised that instead of their being 10 assignments and me almost being halfway through (at ass. 4 and totally achievable) there is in fact 12. I am a third of the way through. And since then i havent done any more. So still just a third finished.

4. I tried so hard not to buy any books. But I got given a couple, and then lent some more, and then there were just these BARGAINS, really, and blah blah..... this is what I ended up reading:
6 books. In my defence the bottom 3 were absolutely amazing historical type non-fiction killers. It took me almost a month just to read the Marie Antoinette. And again for the Nin/Miller. Instead of having 17 books to read I now have a pile almost twice that size and 2 new books on my list of ones to buy-when-i-find-them-cheap.


This is what my bedside drawers look like now. But I am halfway through the Katharine Mansfield and Norwegian Wood on the top there and also the Rufus Wainwright bio.

New plan is to go through this pile and get rid of the ones I will honestly never read eg, Crime and Punishment. I had given up long ago on keeping an "impressive" library and will not keep any books like this just to look like I am thoroughly literary and important. And then I'll just keep working through the others. I thought this challenge would make me lose all interest in every single book there and long for exciting new ones but instead I can hardly choose which one to start next, they all hold such promise. Except C+P, but we already know that will end up at Booktalk.

In conclusion, Summer Challenges, while providing fodder for avoiding boredom, did not work. Most of the time I forgot I was meant to be improving my running stamina or doing assignments, and still moped around wishing I had things to do. The walking was only partially successful because I resent paying so much for a train trip into the city that is literally 1 stop, when I could walk in the same amount of time. And the book pile will keep growing, although I will have to have a moratorium on purchasing so I can at least try to focus on getting through these.

In the end, my Glorious Achievement of Summer was finding, buying, waiting for, and then building the Fallingwater House, in Lego:


Took about 9 hours, worth every second. 811 pieces! For ages 16+!!