Books and Movies and Cleaning Oh My!

Initially when I set up the 30 list I thought that 30 minutes dedicated to cleaning every day seemed like a lot. It's not. I far exceed it daily, but I'm going to leave the goal at 30 anyway :) It is nice to have a dedicated time for cleaning each day though, and Mags is getting into the act too. We set the kitchen timer each morning and then clean like crazy until it goes off, you'd be surprised how much you can achieve in 30 minutes. So, although it's not quite enough time it sure has injected some much needed fun into my daily routine.

Last night we watched V for Vendetta. I know, very last year of us. This movie has been recommended to me by just about everyone I know and now I understand why. It was an excellent movie, and very pertinent for today's political and societal climate, I highly recommend it! It may seem counter intuitive that I am trying to watch 30 minutes less of TV, yet 30 movies. My movie watching is not going to infringe upon my non-TV watching. First off, I was finding myself watching truly horrible TV out of habit (Girls Next Door - anyone? anyone?) and I think that movies are a much better use of my time. I won't count DVD's of TV shows though, I think that is kind of cheating. Man, you all get a peek into how truly neurotic I am. All of my goals have little rules :)

I am reading the Otherland series of books right now written by Tad Williams. I actually read the first one before I started the list, so in all fairness it did not count. It's a really cool series about some folks that get trapped in a Virtual Reality world. One thing that I find pretty interesting is that the first book was published around 1997, which means it was probably written in the early 90's. Although details are murky as to how far in the future this is supposed to take place, Mr. Williams was right on with many of his predictions . For example, everyone runs around with these data pads, which are totally iphones! I think that the reading portion of my goal is going to be easily achieved and highly enjoyable. Also, I love audiobooks, and intend to count those as books "read" I will note that though. I download them all from audible - which I think is part of itunes, and am totally addicted!

Blog posts vs. writing time. One more rule, my blog posts do NOT count towards my 30mins a day writing goal. That time is for working on other stuff. Which I have been neglecting thus far.

I am knitting totally sweet present for someone, and will post pics. after I give it to him. I don't want to spoil the surprise though, but it's da bomb diggity - if I do say so myself. You may be wondering how I keep track of all this stuff. No? Well I will tell you anyway. I set up an excel workbook with each goal, and a sheet for each month. At night I update each column, which then calculates which the percent of the goal I have achieved. I love excel. Seriously, I make excel spread sheets for Thanksgiving, to keep track of who is bringing what etc. If I wasn't so terrible at math I would have made a great accountant. Anyhow, to update my progress bars, all I do is change the numbers in my little HTML thinger that got from this site. I was a bit intimidated and it took me a while to get everything lined up, but I really like the result. And Finally, you may have noticed my Amazon links in the side bar underneath the progress bars. Here I will keep track of all the books, and movies I have read. Yes, it's kind of an ad, and yes if you want to be like me and buy books and movies I recommend from my site, I will get some money. I really like the app and how it looks, plus I like making money, so that's that.

That's it for today. After editing this I think I should've added - use 30 less commas and quotation marks per day :)