2009 Ahoy!

Well, here it is January 4th (officially) of 2009, and I need to actually start working on my 101 things. So, that’s the question. What of these 101 things should I start first? Well, a couple of them strike me as doable right away. Learning the state capitals, doing my 25 pushups and 50 situps, taking my D vitamin (I’m out of multivitamins at the moment), and saving money. All are very doable, but how do I go about some of them?

In all honesty, when it comes to state capitals, I get about 43/50 correct when a name is given to me and I have the region of the state, but I only get 35/50 when I don’t have the region at all. Obviously I have work to do. So how to go about doing this? Simple schoolwork-style memorization. Once I can do all 50 without a problem, I get to move on to the next one, which is learning 50 new countries and their capitals! The reason behind these challenges for myself is that although I had some geography in school, I still know so little about other states and other countries. For several years I had a world map as my shower curtain and I found myself enjoying it simply because I had no idea where half of these various countries were located and what their capitals were and what kinds of people lived there. Most of my fellow Americans have this problem actually, and I want to get away from that sense of laziness with regard to simply knowing where things are and what happens there and the significance of these places.

The whole taking Vitamin D every night thing is simply because I have to take thyroid hormones due to having a condition where my body destroyed most of my thyroid and there have been studies showing that when taking thyroid, bone density issues come about. Considering that I’m a woman going into my thirties and Vitamin D helps bones absorb calcium and also helps the body do a whole slew of other things, I think this is something that will just be good for me all over. I just have to get in the habit again.

25 push ups and 50 sit ups are something I am capable of doing. So… this morning I start. I’m writing a reminder to myself now so that I do get those done, and simply put… my arms could use it and my abs have disappeared.

And saving money. I have not started out the month doing a terribly good job at that, but starting today I will be working hard at saving money. I think this will be doable, it’s just a matter of counting what I’m spending more carefully.

And it begins! Wish me luck!

20 “Classics”

I meant to post this on January 1, but hadn’t quite figured out my list of “classics” for the 20 classics in a year. As with that book 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, I’m missing a lot of really good stuff. Some of which I’ve read before, some of which I am not sure I’ll ever want to read. In any case, below is a list of 35 books for me to choose from for the year of classics. I’ll mark when I’ve read them.

These books were chosen based on a lot of random interests. The main reason I’m doing the “read classics” challenge is because I read way too much from the science fiction and fantasy genres. Although these genres are absolutely chock full of high quality writing and story telling I do need to expand my reading a bit more to include the influences of the writers I love best too.

20 Classics to be chosen from among the list below:

Middlemarch – George Eliot
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The White Goddess – Robert Graves
The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
American Psycho – Brett Easton Ellis
Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Ecco
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller – Italo Calvino
Henry and June – Anais Nin
Ulysses – James Joyce
Walden Civil Disobedience – Henry David Thoreau
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
Thank You, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
Metamorphoses – Ovid
The Grapes of Wrath -John Steinbeck
The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexander Dumas
Paradise Lost – John Milton
Journey to America – Alexis de Tocqueville
Essays of Elia – Charles Lamb
Four Socratic Dialogues – Plato
Imaginary Conversations – Walter Savage Landor
The Canterbury Tales – Chaucer
Inferno – Dante
Hamlet – Shakespeare
The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
The Iliad/Odyssey – Homer
Decameron – Boccacio
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
The Plague – Albert Camus
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway