StevoWard.com

It is about 27 degrees with a wind chill of 19. I just finished a nice slow, cold 2 mile run. So far, the run every day goal is going fine. I did weight training yesterday instead of running, but have exercised every day this year so far.

Writing daily. See this. So far, so good.

Reading Daily. Check. Read from ‘From the Corner of His Eye’ today at lunch and will read more before bed tonight.

I have always loved books.  When I was a little kid, my mom would take my sister and me to the library often, and we’d check out as many books as the library would allow.  Over time, once I had a regular income, I learned about Amazon.com and started buying books online.  Early in my marriage, before having our daughter, Susan and I would camp out on a Sunday at the local bookstore and literally spend hours reading and browsing for books.  I almost always left with at least one new book.  Given the current economic situation, we’ve rediscovered the library, and since the list of checked out books with due dates is available online now, and our library system lets us request books from any library in the county for pickup at the local library, I always have about 10-20 books checked out at any time. Our house is full of books, and Susan recently had to buy a bookshelf to put next to my LazyBoy in the living room just to hold my current set of active reading material.

Here are just a few of the active books on the shelf:

I’ll be updating the Reading List page with more information and reviews from the books I actually get around to reading.

I’m not a big fan of cold weather, so we are feeling the chill of a hard freeze with more than a small bit of concern.

Still working on goals for the year, and have decided to continue with some additional daily goals.

Read Every Day
I always have several books checked out from the library and some purchased books from Amazon. The library is usually a bit behind on computer related books, so I end up buying several each year. I’ll keep the Reading Lists page up to date with my current titles.

Write Every Day
My goal to write every day, means that I’ll either write a post on this or any of my other blogs, or in my journal, or on one of my book projects. As long as I write at least one word each day, I’m good.

I always try to review the past year and make plans for the new year on the week or so around New Year’s Day. This year, with NYD being on a Friday, I have a nice long weekend to make this review.

So far, my goals for the next year:
Run every day. This requires a little clarification. I used to run every day, and it worked very well. When you have a goal to run every day, there is never a question of “is today a running day”. It is always a running day. Over the past year, with knee surgery and weight gain, I’ve not been running every day, but this year will be much better.

Another benefit of a “run every day” plan is that whenever there is a good reason to skip, you can skip with no worries, because tomorrow is a running day too. In fact, the way I used to work the “run every day” plan, at least one or two days ended up a skip day for rest, or weather, or whatever. That’s my major goal for the year.