I did not make any resolutions about blogging more in 2022. I admit, though, in the back of my mind, getting back to blogging consistency feels like a good goal. Not quantity, necessarily, but the regular weekly or 2x weekly post. We’ll see.

I also did not make any resolutions about losing weight or exercising more. Again, in the back of my mind, it feels like a good thing to maybe put a little effort into, especially the exercising more. It’s much too easy for me to wind up basically staying in bed all day long. I get up, make the bed, then sit on top of it while using my computer. I try to remember to move, but when I get involved with something, I can easily wind up sitting still for hours.

Last week, in fact, I basically sat still for two solid days while I worked on my real New Year’s resolutions. Except they’re not resolutions, they’re projects. I sorted through all the books on my Kindle, all 1341 of them, putting them into collections. The relevant collections are:

2022 Fiction Reading Project – This contains 36 books that look like very readable books, that have been sitting on my Kindle for untold numbers of years. Seriously, I have unread books from 2011 on my Kindle. It is time to read them or conclude that I will never read them.

I also have a collection of Books to Try that contains another 135 books that I haven’t read, but I’m not crazy enough to try to schedule reading 171 books in the next year. Especially because I know myself: in the time since creating this collection (literally, one week), I’ve also put another two books on hold at the library, downloaded three KU titles, and bought one novella. It’s an addiction, I suppose, but such a nice one. And so far on my 2022 Fiction Reading Project, I’ve read one book, a historical romance from the 1990s that was somewhat too violent for my taste, and concluded that two others just weren’t for me after hitting the 10-20% mark in them. There’s a reason these books have gone unread for so long. I expect to be done with this project a lot sooner than 2023.

2022 Learning Project – This collection contains 20 non-fiction titles, also downloaded over the past decade and mostly unread. I’d guess that I’ve started almost all of them, but never finished. Most of them are books about writing or publishing, so I may wind up deciding that some of them aren’t for me, too, but I am going to make a solid try at finishing them, including taking notes so I retain at least some of the information. So far… well, so far this project is proceeding more slowly than the fiction project. Still, many months of the year are ahead of me!

2022 Cooking Project – This collection is currently empty. But I own 46 cookbooks and this year I’m actually going to try some of the recipes in them. Or delete them. It’s not that e-books can’t just live in the cloud forever, but there’s no reason to keep books that I will absolutely never read or look at. So I’ll be adding cookbooks to the Cooking Project collection as I try them out. I’m excited for some of them and others I strongly suspect are going to wind up deleted. Hmm, but writing this… the ones I’m excited for are all the interesting international cookbooks. Malaysian food, Vietnamese food, Spanish food — I think those will be fun. Not so sure about the paleo, AIP, & slow cooker cookbooks, of which I own far too many. I suppose, though, if I think about it as 12 years worth of cookbooks (which it is), 46 is not really so many.

Along the way of sorting my books, I also deleted 60 or so. And I’ve got another 325 or so in collections that acknowledge I will never look at or read the book, but the books are not deleted because I want to know to avoid downloading more the same authors. (Or at least to be wary.)

Anyway, organizing my Kindle was a very satisfying chore as I headed into 2022, but like I said, didn’t involve enough movement, and neither do my projects. It’s not a resolution, but the “move more, eat less” mantra is one I want to keep in mind. Also, of course, “write more.” I’m working on A Gift of Luck, one of the Tassamara projects I mentioned recently, and enjoying myself, one sentence at a time. Still haven’t managed to reach a writing flow state, but maybe someday soon.

In actual news, Suzanne and I took the puppies to the snow. Our first visit was just a short drive into the mountains where we played with puppies in a pull-off on the side of the road for half an hour or so. When it comes to snow, I’m about 1000x more anxious than Suzanne, which is the difference between growing up in upstate New York, where people die in the snow every year, and growing up in Southern California, where snow is fun and fluffy and pretty and strange. But Suzanne was right about that snow — it was extremely perfect winter snow.

Snow

See that spot of pink? That’s Suzanne. Those trees are huge and that snow was falling fast. Truly lovely.

Our second trip to snow was a much longer adventure: we drove up to Ashland, Oregon for a night. We walked the puppies in the redwoods along the way, then let them romp around Emigrant Lake, then took them to a dog park. Yep, travel with puppies is very puppy-centered. But it was an excellent mini-road trip. Plenty of outside time, fresh air, good conversation, and movement. And Ashland was still beautifully decorated for the holidays, sparkling with lights after dark. Of course, it was also cold and wet, so we didn’t spend a ton of time wandering around, but we had fun.

Coming home was rather less fun, because it was raining, reasonably heavily, and every time we passed a possible place to play with puppies, we kept driving. Heading out, the destination was never the point, only the journey, but on the way home, the destination was very much the point. I was so glad to get back to my cozy tiny house and snuggle down.

But speaking of rain, it is currently not raining, so I’m going to grab the opportunity to put “move more” into practice and take Sophie for a walk. Happy New Year to all!