Every so often you’ll hear about some sort of writing challenge. Write every day for a month! they’ll say, sometimes with a list of suggested topics. Sometimes the challenge is just the list of topics and the idea is you’ll spend thirty days writing about your great love of, I dunno, horses or whatever.
This post marks five hundred days straight of blogging, without missing a day.
Nobody ever gets to tell me to do anything, ever again.
That’s out of five thousand and eighteen posts total, by the way, meaning that my five thousandth post was me being whiny and bored, and I didn’t realize it was such a significant number. The blog hit its twelfth anniversary in June; twelve is kind of a whatever number, so I deliberately didn’t worry about that.
Total wordcount: an utterly ludicrous 1,694,839, not counting this post.
Just imagine what I could do if I was, like, writing for money or something like that.
(Part of me wants to take tomorrow off, but I think we all know that’s not going to happen.)
I am proud to report that, for what feels like the first time in years, I went to work five days this week, and in fact managed to be early to work on two of those five days. I am hoping to be able to continue this trend next week, which is going to be the end of the quarter and includes two ILEARN days and Pi Day, which math teachers are supposed to pretend is important and I generally do my best to ignore. This year it’s falling on a Friday on the day after all of my kids’ work is due and my grades are due, though, so coming up with something fun and foolproof might actually be a pretty good use of my time.
One month until Spring Break. If you’re counting. I’m not counting. I refuse to count.
Let’s see. I didn’t manage to accomplish much with my Monday; anytime I’m considering bragging about putting my laundry away and beating the final boss on a video game, it wasn’t much of a day. But whatever; the pool is almost ready, and finishing off Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown has genuinely been on my nerves lately, and I got both of the spelling challenges right today in one of my Arabic programs, so fuck it, I’m gonna call today a win and go sit outside and relax.
I don’t know how many of you that headline will immediately trigger an auditory memory, but for those of you who are inexplicably thinking about big trucks, you’re welcome.
Anyway, I finished a book today and I am, wonder of wonders, two whole days ahead on lesson planning, and it’s only 7:00. That makes today the most productive Sunday in like a thousand years. What should I do with the rest of my time? Clean something? I should clean something.
Probably just going to play Prince of Persia, though. At least for a bit. There’s one more Red Rising book to finish and then I get to wait for the next one in 2025. Surely I’ll have the unread shelf cleared by then, right?
That I have had, all told, a spectacularly productive Wednesday thus far, having accomplished a number of both work-related and non-work-related tasks that needed doing (and I could get really fuckin’ used to this idea of teaching four days a week and having one day for, effectively, administrative tasks)
That there has not been a single second yet today where I have felt like I had a good grip on what I was supposed to be doing at that time, or what I should be doing next.
Executive disfunction for the win, I guess. I’ve spent all day convinced I’m forgetting the important thing I’m supposed to be doing and going “Okay, I’ll get <insert minor thing done here> while I think about it and eventually I’ll remember what I’m supposed to be working on right now.”
Has my cellphone destroyed my short-term memory over the years, or can I blame this on advanced age?
I am exceptionally annoyed that I genuinely can’t think of anything that I accomplished this year beyond the raw fact that at least so far I’ve survived the motherfucker. I replied to this on Twitter and said that all I could really think of were some minor social media metrics– the blog is going to get more hits than last year, and I’ve written here more than last year, and I’ve built my TikTok account from zero to nearly 5K in the last few months, but … I feel like calling those accomplishments is giving them more credit than they deserve.
Like, I read a bunch? And as of right now I’m caught up on my grading? That’s what I’ve got to brag on.
Survival’s going to have to be enough this year, I think. I’m putting off trying to achieve anything until at least February.
(Also, it’s a sign of just how tired people are of this year that they’re starting to try and trigger the end-of-year reminiscence and award-season bullshit in November.)
… halfway through, or depending on how you choose to look at it the break part of fall break is over and I’m into the weekend. One way or another I’ve been reasonably successful at doing that thing I do where vacations are useless unless I get a lot of stuff donewith them, as opposed to, say, relaxing, which I don’t really know how to do except in the context of basically monetizing it.
(I’m not being clear here. “Spend an hour reading” can be a perfectly cromulent way to “get stuff done,” provided that I intended to do a bunch of reading over the break. If “read a lot” isn’t on the list, it’s wasting time, not getting stuff done. There is no “relaxing.” If I can’t describe it, it doesn’t exist.)
Anyway. Point is, I finished the second-to-last, 660-page Throne of Glass book yesterday, leaving only the thousand-page monster that ends the series, and I’m taking a break to read something else in between Sarah Maas rodent-killers. I’ve been to both the dentist and the doctor. I beat my latest run of Dark Souls 2 and went back to Salt and Sanctuary, which didn’t catch on with me the first time I tried to play it and holy shit has it caught on on the second try. I have reclaimed the garage for my car, if not my wife’s; we’ve been parking in the driveway for far too long and we need to sell or toss a riding mower if we’re going to find a place for both cars in there again. I got one room in the house reasonably cleaned up and decluttered and I’m working on the office right now. Or at least I would be, if I wasn’t blogging, which still counts, because “blog every day” is definitely on the Shit to Do list.
But I got some decluttering done before I started blogging, so that counts. You can see the surface of a table in here that you haven’t been able to see for a while. Now if I can just get the floor cleaned up; it’s gross.
“Buy a feather duster” is on my list for this weekend, believe it or not. I don’t plan on feather dusting the floor, of course, but holy hell are the corners in the house getting troublesome. EDIT: Turns out we have a feather duster! I completely forgot about it, and found it just now while looking for the mop thingies for the “ReadyMop Mopping System” we have, which is basically just an oversized menstrual pad that can be rubbed on the floor. So I can dust tomorrow! Woo!
Yes, I just “Woo”‘ed dusting. I never said I was interesting. EDIT ENDS.
On the list for this weekend: my wife’s job has a family day/fun fair thing going on tomorrow, so we’re doing that; I have nothing at all to do for work, having quite sensibly prepared for next week before leaving on Wednesday. So the rest of the agenda is to get some shit going on Patreon, which has been languishing in October and is awfully close to becoming another free month. (I don’t charge my Patrons in months where I don’t feel like I’ve earned it. I don’t know that anyone would actually begrudge me the dollar or whatever they’re pledging, but it rubs me wrong.)
Oh: and the bathrooms. Gotta take care of the bathrooms, or at least the main one in the hallway. That’s Sunday sorted, right?
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