Sock it to Me

Anyone have size 6-6 1/2 feet? I think my socks are a little bit too snug, but I'm not one to pull out half the stitches and try to make it any longer. Maybe I'll sell them on Etsy.com when I'm done with the second one.

This one took a while, but was really fun. I think I might do another pair, but with chunkier yarn and bigger needles next time. Turns out that small yarn takes WAY too long to finish. Knitting at the registration table and on planes definitely gets you attention, though, which can be a very good thing. ;)

Again, and Again...

Why would I start again on a goal that is a set up for failure? However fast 12 months seems to pass these days, taking a photo a day, writing every day, doing art once a week... it seems like a long time, rife with opportunities to stop. I'll have to play catch up at some point, I'll have to stop and snap or scribble something in a rush, I'll probably fail.

But there's a chance I won't. And so 2009, here we go... With a list that is slightly behind (I managed to fiddle some things and cross off a good number that I'd forgotten I'd finished), it's closer to being on track than I expected. I even finally gave it up, 10 inches up, and did Locks of Love. I surprised myself and almost cried as she cut. I got almost none of the goals finished that I thought I would finish, but I'm doing okay. My first sock is coming along, and there's plenty of time to keep working.

This year I have it easy with only 365 photos. I might try to start off each month with a photo of myself (no promises here...), and here I am as of January 1, 2009. Let's see how I change, shall we?

Short List: Christmas Break

Aside from the obvious holiday clatter, I'm going to need a mission for my break this year, since I am going to have nothing to do! Here's a list of 12 things to try to get completed by January 5th, when I fly out:

To Complete:

97. Go through goals, re-evaluate, and add #97 by December '08.
90. Go to the Pioneer Square first Thursday art walk. (If there is one on Jan 1st)
83. Make time for a Sister-Bonding event and stop acting like a know-it-all.
70. Make bed every day for a week. (0/7)
65. Create a Lulu.com book of my LJ entries.
63. Knit a cabled scarf.
45. Subscribe to a literary journal.
38. Sell snowboard and coat on Craigslist.
28. Make homemade bread (with yeast, no beer bread!).
31. Eat no take-out or restaurant food for 2 weeks straight. ??????
15. Donate to Locks-of-Love. ?????
37. Cash in change jar only when completely full.

And some things to work on:

94. Buy 10 CD's rather than downloading. (3/10) [Barcelona, Helio Sequence, Death Cab for Cutie]
89. Attend 5 plays before I turn 25 (and have to pay more). (2/5) [The Imaginary Invalid, 3-16-08] [A Marvelous Party, 7-11-08]
88. Go to 5 new restaurants in Seattle. (2/5)
82. Send thank-you notes for all gifts from Christmas and birthdays. (C07, B08, C08, B09, C09, B10)
80. Send a "Just because..." note 1x a month for 6 months. (0/6)
59. Complete a visual journal.
67. Back-up hard drive 1x a month for a year straight. (2/12)
95. Increase my list to having seen 50 of the AFI top 100 films. (26/100)
57. Write a blog post a week for 3 months straight. (5/12)
17. Take a spa day once every 3 months (Hot House, Massage, Facial, Manicure/Pedicure, or Bubble Bath work!) (3/11) [Massage, 9-26-08]

That didn't really shorten the list much from it's 101 state, but hopefully it'll help me figure out what to do when I'm hopelessly bored (and prevent me from catching up on season 1 of Gossip Girl). ALso, since I'll be heading into year two I want to try to catch up to pace a bit more than I'm at. If I can cross off twelve things I should definitely be much closer than without them.

Piece of Cake Pizza

Yeast scares me. I don't know what to do with it outside of a bread machine. So I took a page from the Joy of Cooking (and from my roommate who's amazing with all things baking) and made some pizza (#27 complete!). Turns out, it only takes about 2.5 hours total... not too bad for two large pizzas!

Pizza a la Adrian

Dough:
1 packet Active Dry Yeast
1 1/3c Warm Water
3 1/2c Flour
2 tbsp Olive Oil
1 tbsp Salt
1 tbsp Sugar (optional)

• Mix yeast with water and let disolve for 5 minutes.
• Add remaining ingredients and mix until the dough combines and is smooth.
• Form it into a ball and drizzle with olive oil. Place dough ball into a bowl and cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let rise until it doubles in size (about 1-1.5 hours) in a warm place (75-80ºF).
• Punch down dough and divide in half, wrap each half in plastic and let rest for 10-15 minutes. Meanwhile, grease and dust 2 baking sheets with olive oil and corn meal and preheat oven to 425ºF.
• Stretch dough carefully (I did this both in the air and then on the cookie sheet) to fill baking sheet. Fold and pinch edge to form crust. Brush with olive oil to prevent it from getting soggy and dimple it with your fingers to prevent it from bubbling.

Sauce (make while crust is rising):
2 tbsp Olive Oil
1 small Onion, diced
3 cloves Garlic, crushed
1, 28oz can of Crushed Tomatoes
2-3 tbsp Italian Seasoning (dried)
1 tbsp Parsley (dried)
3 stems of Basil

• Saute onion and garlic. Add tomatoes and seasonings.
• Simmer for 10-15 minutes minimum to thicken.
• Allow to cool. Spread over prepared crust.

Toppings:
1lb Mozzarella Cheese
chopped basil
sliced garlic
sliced tomatoes
chopped onion
chopped red pepper
sliced kalamata olives
...really, anything goes here

• Sprinkle toppings over pizza, cheese goes last.
• Place Pizza in oven and bake for 12-15 minutes until cheese is bubbly and melted and crust is slightly browned.
• Devour... but don't burn the roof of your mouth!

A Book List to End All Book Lists...

I don't know that this is comprehensive or even a good list, but it's a compilation of multiple lists I found online along with suggestions and books I've wanted to read for a while. I went by the criteria of "Have I heard of it before?" to slice off some of the chaff, then tried to get a swath of women writers and some international writers (sadly few of each really...) and I tried to cut down on repeat authors. Faulkner, Joyce, Fitzgerald, and Lawrence could probably fill a list all on their own if some of the "100 best" editors online had their way. I personally banned Joyce and Fitzgerald (Except for The Great Gatsby, out of guilt) due to taste reasons, and my personal opinion that Ulysses and Fitzgerald's books are greatly overblown. So here it is, a list to start pulling from, in no partiular order:

1. The Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger)
2. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
3. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. The Color Purple (Alice Walker)
5. The Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
6. 1984 (George Orwell)
7. The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
8. Lolita (Vladmir Nabokov)
9. Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)
10. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
11. A Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
12. Animal Farm (George Orwell)
13. For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemmingway)
14. Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)
15. One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey)
16. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald – begrudgingly)
17. Slauterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
18. On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
19. The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemmingway)
20. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
21. Portrait of a Lady (Henry James)
22. The World According to Garp (John Irving)
23. A Room with a View (EM Forster)
24. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
25. The Jungle (Upton Sinclair)
26. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D.H. Lawrence)
27. A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)
28. My Antonia (Willa Cather)
29. In Cold Blood (Truman Capote)
30. The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie)
31. Ethan Frome (Edith Wharton)
32. Bonfire of the Vanities (Tom Wolfe)
33. Cat’s Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut)
34. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
35. Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)
36. Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)
37. The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias (Gertrude Stein)
38. The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett)
39. The Naked and the Dead (Norman Mailer)
40. Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller)
41. The War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells)
42. Kim (Rudyard Kipling)
43. Rabbit, Run (John Updike)
44. Of Human Bondage (W. Somerset Maugham)
45. Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather)
46. Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
47. The Prince (Niccolo Machiavelli)
48. The Inferno (Dante Alighieri)
49. The Richest Man in Babylon (George Samuel Clason)
50. Dracula (Bram Stoker)
51. The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith)
52. Moby Dick (Herman Mellville)
53. Peter Pan (J.M. Barie)
54. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
55. All the King’s Men (Robert Penn Warren)
56. A Town like Alice (Neil Shute)
57. The Call of the Wild (Jack London)
58. Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
59. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
60. Circle of Friends (Maeve Binchy)
61. Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi)
62. The Agony and the Ecstasy (Irving Stone)
63. Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
64. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
65. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
66. The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan)
67. The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri)
68. The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)
69. Beloved (Toni Morrison)
70. Madam Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
71. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
72. The Shipping News (E. Annie Proulx)
73. Little Women (Lousia May Alcott)
74. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou)
75. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
76. The Diary of Anne Frank (Anne Frank)
77. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)
78. The Illiad & The Odessey (Homer)
79. Middlemarch (George Elliot)
80. Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)
81. An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser)
82. Tess of the D’ubervillies (Thomas Hardy)
83. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
84. In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust)
85. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
86. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
87. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Attwood)
88. Walden (Henry David Thoreau)
89. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbra Kingsolver)
90. The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder)
91. The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
92. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
93. Hamlet (William Shakespeare)
94. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
95. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carrol)
96. The tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu)
97. Bleak House (Charles Dickens)
98. The Red and the Black (Stendhal)
99. The Golden Notebook (Doris Lessing)
100. The Trial (Franz Kafka)

Please, Let me know in the comments if I've duplicated a book, left out a priceless gem, or listed a book that is completely not worth my time. For most of these, I am going by hearsay since I've only read a select few. But, that's another one off the list at least!

Short List: September 21, 2008

I need to get some shit done! I'm oh so very close to getting a new leaser for the apartment, and I did some really fun spreads in my journal today (see below to get a glimpse of my mental landscape), but there's more to be done. Packing and moving doesn't take as much time as it sometimes seems like it will. I'm going to pack up a lot of stuff and take a load down on Tuesday, then I've got a shared U-Haul with BL on Saturday, so I think I'll be containing moving to those two days. So then, what else to do?

Short List for the week of 9/21/08:
(yes, I want to get these things done this week, by 9/28/08)

• Take a yoga class and sign up for yoga podcasts. (#2 in progress)
• Get a massage. (#17, in progress)
  
• Drink no soda. (#32, last soda was 9/12/08, and I'm going for it this time...)
• Buy produce at farmer's market. (#25, to complete at the end of September!)
• Make pizza from scratch (and maybe some quick bread too...). (#27, to complete)
• Make/find list of 100 classic books. (#49, to complete)
• Back up hard drive and make note to back up in late October. (#67, in progress)
• Buy another CD (or two). (#94, in progress)
• BONUS: Develop a filing system. (#69, to complete)

If I succeed, I'll have 3 (or 4 if I challenge myself...) things crossed off and many of my in progress items better underway. I think this is reasonable, considering how much time I have to kill. Yay for to-do lists!

Re-evaluating, and #96

So, I guess I was counting on life getting in the way of getting things done when I put in the last few goals on my 101 list. Either that or I was copping out of thinking of four more goals. I've been really bad about getting around to re-evaluating the list, which I was supposed to do in June, but here's my changes:

• 4. Bike to work every day for a month. No longer an option, so it's going to become "Go on a 30+ mile bike ride."
• 6. Take a tap class once a week for three months. I don't see myself doing that, but taking a single tap class will be feasible, and will likely make me want to take more.
• 7. Do a stretch routine every night for a month. and 9. Do an ab workout every night for a month. and 13. Floss 1x a day for a month straight. These are simply not working because i seem to not like to do things on a daily basis (surprise). I'm going to aim for 3x a week, and make the flossing for two months straight because that's a habit that I need to really get into.
• 46. Read Popular Science to see if I'd ever want to write for them. I need to scope out more magazines than just the one, so I'm changing it to "Read three science magazines to understand what science writing is all about, especially medical science."
• 48. Read Bonnie's New Yorker's fiction piece at least 6 times. Well, I never did that and now Bonnie doesn't get the New Yorker, and I'm not going to be living with her anymore... so now it's going to be "Read non-fiction or travel writing in a magazine I could submit to and write an article in the same style." since I need the writing practice anyways.
• 60. Complete a Project 365. Well, the camera met the ocean and I was so far behind already at that point that 2008 is no going to work out, so I'm adding in a little extra goal to this, to entice me to start before Jan 1, 2009: "OR a photo-a-city for BER."

I'm also going to relax a bit on the goals themselves as they reach completion... There have been many that I really haven't kept track of as I was actually doing them. That and I went to Mexico and never really learned any spanish, but didn't need to know any. So completed goals are now up to 15/101. I'm behind by 9 for being at 8 months in (at a 3/month completion average rate required). Luckily, I've got a lot of free time to work on some of the easier-to-complete goals, being unemployed and all.

Lastly,there is number 96... What to put in for that one? I think the new goal, much facilitated by my new job and ever-increasing competition with some friends (who know who they are... ;)) will be to "Increase my states visited to 40/50." Should be fun, relatively manageable, while getting some stories along the way.

last second thoughts

It's natural for me to get in over my head with ideas. I'm already starting to think that my list is going to happen far too quickly, so it will be fine to add auxiliary items. Perhaps it is a good idea to give the list one more go through, to determine if any goals have lost their purpose or interest in the last two weeks that I've been working on this.

I've really been wanting to add the goal of documenting and categorizing all spending for a 12 month period, since I think that's a very admirable goal and something that I need to do so that I can actually see what I'm spending on things. Without a real checkbook to balance, I don't really pay attention to the amounts I spend on things. So, I'll add that, but what to take out? "Rollerblade around Greenlake 1x a week for a month" seems a little superfluous after all the other exercise goals. Even in the agony of removing a goal from the list, it's a change that's good and actually makes the list harder. We'll see if I have any more last moment edits before the night is through...

always doing everything at once

New years always mean resolutions, no matter how much I resolve to let myself go past an arbitrary milestone without declaring it important. Last year's January 1st meant a lot to me... it was a true milestone as I came out of my depression, graduated college, and gave away many things, emotional and physical, that were holding me back. I, for once, was able to start the new year with a new journal (leaving only a scant 19 pages in the previous volume unadorned) along with the hopes of writing and making beautiful pages once a day. That goal failed sometime in February, along with a lot of the hopes for a New Start. January and it's concurrent resolutions come once every 12 months, so if I fail... Well, it's a dismal prospect by August.

Enter the 101 in 1001 meme. It is true that giving oneself goals in a time frame where failure becomes an option allows one to get past the "failure equals giving up" problem that I face time and again with resolutions. Thus, here comes a list of what I think are almost too easy goals--goals that I am almost certain to complete 80% or more before 1001 days are up (Sept. 28, 2010). I am not being overly optimistic in these goals for once, although there are a few that will definitely cause me to step outside of the comfort zone (see #22-relearn French, #55-NaNoWriMo, and #85-reconnect with lost friends). The point of this list is for once to allow myself some imperfection, to fail and try again: to miss a day of photo-taking for Project 365 and start again the next day, or to snap 2 the next day and never look back. 1001 days allows multiple attempts at everything on this list (as long as I do more than one thing at a time, I'll be well on my way).

I've noticed that many of these goals are somewhat health-related. Two of my longest categories are "Health and Athletics" and "Food." The biggest category overall though, is split up--my Creative Pursuits. Everything from reading, writing, and creating actual artwork has started slipping ever since I entered a job that I'm constantly becoming more dissatisfied with. I am incredibly dual in my perspective--right brained and left brained, artistic and analytical--which often slips by the wayside when I'm working in a scientific career. It is extremely important that I keep this duality along with my healthy pursuits of physical activity and personal growth... Plus the writing and art goals make for wonderfully specific goals!

The one part of the list I feel compelled to address is the last 6 goals. I have given myself the goals of re-evaluating the list every 6-or-so months and determining another goal to add to the list. While this feels like a cop out, I've dubed it "Ongoing Education" because I feel that without re-evaluation from time to time, my life tends to follow a straight and narrow path that often lands me where I don't want to be. This allows me room to challenge myself further, to change my mind, and to not be so god-damned perfect all the time.

So here's to imperfection and the manifestation of my future!