By the Numbers: January 2013

And now for a summary of January… consider this a public status update on progress toward personal goals…

Every January for the past few years I have opted to refrain from drinking and eating desserts / sweets. This concept was borrowed from a friend and initially began in a “solidarity” fast. But I liked it so much, I’ve made it a tradition. Typically, the not eating sweets part proves to be more difficult than the not drinking part. This January was no different. I easily made it through all 31 days with no alcohol, but a handful of “special” occasions caused me to bend the rules a bit in favor of partaking in some sweet stuff (coworker won a pie from the Chef and decided to share, another coworker brought back sweets from his holiday visit to Iran, the Chef made cookies and I forgot I wasn’t supposed to eat any… basically, sweets at work are my weakness…).

In January I started to step up my swimming both in terms of days per week and miles per workout. My goal for the year is 250 miles. That works out to about 5 miles per week with 2 weeks off. For now, while I’m competing during the short course yards season (January through April), I’m aiming for 5 swims per week and about 1.5 miles per swim. January’s swimming stats:

• 19 of 31 days (target was ~21 days)
• 22.87 miles (target was ~21 miles)
• 2 swim meets (Santa Rosa Flower Power and Fog City Quadrathon)
• 6 events (details below)

Usually I read about 36 books each year. That’s about 3 books per month, on average. This year I’m off to a great start — I finished 4 books in January. Below I’ve listed the books I finished with a 140 character or less summary (Twitter-style):

• Glaciers — Portland. Alaska. Books. Librarians. Bikes. Postcards. Thrift stores. Finding beauty in the little things. 
• Howl’s Moving Castle — Contemporary fairy tale that throws all the cliche fairy tale bits out the window. Can’t wait to read this with @CEOlmetti when she’s older.
• The Dog Stars — Post-apocalyptic fiction featuring a plausible future. Humanity depicted without sugar coating, our best and worst all wrapped up together.
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower — Too old for this book, but glad it exists. Should be given to any teen who is undervalued by their peers. Now I can watch the movie.

I may not have done as much writing as I’d intended to this month, but I did blog… 7 posts this month, which is more than the one per week target I sent. Most of these posts are short, but take me a disproportionate amount of time to write. I also started my third UC Berkeley Extension writing class — The Craft of Writing.

And… just for fun… Here are the movies I watched this month, again with 140 character or less summaries:

• The Lady — Long movie. Moving story. Another reason why “Defend and respect the user’s voice” is my favorite core value. Democracy and Luc Besson FTW.
• Looper — If you don’t like to geek out on time travel, making diagrams with straws, you might not enjoy this movie. Unpredictable, good ending.
• To Rome With Love — Disappointing. All the funny bits are in the trailer. Woody Allen is hard to watch. Reminded me of @cornetteb ’cause he’s a big fan of Rome.
• Premium Rush — The cheesiest. With cheese on top. Reminded me of Hackers. But with bikes. And eye candy. Also, Third Rock Guy. Again.

And there you have it… January 2013.