It is
February 3.
That means
that I have completed the one-month blogging challenge. The 500 words 5 times a week challenge. If my math holds up, that’s roughly 11,500
words. And that’s not too shabby.
Some
observations (as a good scientist does…):
It is really,
really hard sometimes to write 500 words.
Sometimes I am in a slump and feel like literally nothing has happened
and maybe rehashing things from my past that I’ve rehashed about 8 million
times doesn’t really do it for me anymore.
Sometimes I have a bad day and don’t want to stew in it. Sometimes I’m hurting for material, man!
When I do
have something to write, it’s hard to exercise brevity. I think that the bite-sized stories are
probably more palatable to the casual reader, but I have sometimes found myself
nickel-and-diming to try to stay below 750 words or so. Well, I think that only happened once, and it
was good for the entry in the end.
It has been
a really nice exercise in general to have an attainable goal and to accomplish
it. I think there were only one or two
days where I found myself slipping my blog entry in just before the clock
struck twelve.
I have
written more in the first month of 2014 than in the previous three years
combined, and only in 2010, when I was experiencing a lot of undergraduate
angst, did I write more in the entire year than I did in this first month.
Some of the
entries that I wrote are real stinkers.
They are boring and uninspired.
But I think that the rote nature of writing every day, whether or not I
felt like I had material, made me better equipped to write about the material
that I did have. And that is kind of
nice.
I expect
that I will not keep this up as a five-times-a-week thing, but we’ll see how
often I can make it happen. Writing has
always been a good outlet. I’m doing it
now, even if only as a sort of reflection on the past month. Kind of cool to have “achieved” a new year’s
resolution. Maybe if more resolutions
were achievable, we’d stick to them better.
After the
monstrous, momentous Syracuse-Duke game, the Super Bowl was a total
letdown. I did feel kind of bad about
it, as we sat around the television at Kate’s apartment. We stayed cheerful, and there were chicken
wings and chili, guacamole and buffalo wing dip, salsa and celery and cupcakes
in blue and orange that said ‘GO BRONCOS!”
I wore a
tank top under a blue sweater, a tank top I bought at Walmart on a whim for
$3.49 with bold, thick horizontal stripes alternating orange and a sort of
off-white. I figured the Syracuse colors
were repurposable.
Then the
game started, and the safety off of the botched snap basically set the tone for
the whole game. By the time the evening
ended and the Vince Lombardi trophy was awarded, I was playing a little
half-hearted solitaire on my phone while the Broncos fans around me yelled in
agony.
But hey – at
least my team won. Hoping not to jinx us
for our Notre Dame game tonight…
And it’s
always fun to get together for the Super Bowl, anyway.
I was wishing for chili last night. We'd been invited to a party, but I didn't feel good enough to go. Between practically prolapsing my entire insides trying to vacuum up behind the electricians on Wednesday, and slipping on the ice and falling flat-out face-first into the snow while walking the dogs on Friday, by Sunday I was a hurting turkey. So we stayed home. Dad went to Dairy Queen and came home with a large chocolate shake for me, and a large Heath blizzard for himself, so it was festive if not spicy, warm and traditional. We plugged in the electric heat stove (which I have take to carrying around the house with me), and agonized through the game. I don't know how even a Seahawks fan could have enjoyed that one. That was just sad. Huzzah for Solitaire.
ReplyDeleteI hope you keep writing.
I'm going to keep daily updates going (5 days a week) until the kitchen is done.