Tag Archives: goals

Smackdown!

I look back at 2024 and I’m not sure what we spent the year doing.🤷‍♀️ We didn’t get to take a big trip, but we did take a few short ones. At least we didn’t spend the year making a lot of expensive home repairs; we only had one appliance die on us in 2024: our range. Now, I’m side-eyeing our refrigerator because it’s the only appliance we haven’t replaced since we moved in.

I’m not really a resolution maker, but I have set myself a few goals:

  • Exercise more
  • Keep going through the items that I’ve allowed to pile up because I either a) don’t know what to do with them, or b) just haven’t wanted to deal with them.
  • This one is more of a wish than a goal: selling our old house. Our youngest son and his girlfriend rent from us and had expressed an interest in buying the house. Unfortunately, J (the girlfriend) lost her job and it took a few months for her to find a new one. However, she now has a new job she loves so it looks like we may be back on track to sell this year. I really hope it works out; Kenn and I are both tired of being landlords.

As for the title of my post, my word of the year was chosen by Merriam-Webster. Participants just had to take a screenshot of their GIF that was scrolling through a series of words, and I got “smackdown.” I showed it to Kenn and he said “Oh, crap.”😂 So… *crack knuckles* let’s do this?

Do you make resolutions?

Crunching The Numbers

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. I used too, but I never stuck to them which then caused me to beat myself up for my presumed “failure”. (Don’t worry. I used to be the Queen of Negative Self-Talk. Nowadays, I’m more like a lady-in-waiting.) The only exception to this rule is setting a goal for the number of books to read in my Kindle app.

I am an avid reader and have been as long as I can remember. If you had asked me several years ago if I would ever make the change from physical books to ebooks, the answer would have been a resounding NO. However, the transition began slowly before I retired. Trying to juggle a purse, lunchbox, and book among other things when going from the car to the office and back was a pain. Since I’ve always got my phone, converting to reading using the Kindle app was sort of natural. Eventually, I noticed that the app tracks what I read (duh) and prompted me for a “reading goal” at the beginning of a new year. Not having any idea how much I actually read, my initial goals were guesstimates at best.

According to my Kindle app, my reading stats for the past few years are as follows:

  • 2019: 41 titles read (no goal set)
  • 2020: 160 titles read with a goal of 45. It seems I don’t estimate well, LOL.
  • 2021: 156 titles read with a goal of 100. Better estimation, but still on the low side.
  • 2022: 114 titles read with a goal of 125.

2022 is the year I learned that the Kindle app does not give you credit for re-reading books. (Seriously Kindle? What’s up with that?) Since I did a lot of re-reading in 2022, it’s time to crunch the numbers and find out how many book I actually read in 2022. *cracks knuckles*

  • Two new books came out in Nalini Singh’s Guild Hunter series, so of course I re-read the first 13 books in the series in preparation.
  • A new book came out in Nalini Singh’s Psy-Changeling Trinity series so I re-read 14 of the 15 books in her Psy-Changeling series and the first 5 books in the Psy-Changeling Trinity series. (I skipped one book in the original series because I really don’t like the hero in that book.)
  • A new book came out in Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series so I re-read the first 12 books in the series.
  • A new book came out in Faith Hunter’s Soulwood series so I re-read the first 5 books in the series.

Side note: I don’t always re-read a series when a new book comes out. It kind of depends on how long it has been since I read the series or since a new book released.

So, let’s see:

  • 114 books counted by the Kindle app
  • 13 Guild Hunter books
  • 14 Psy-Changeling books
  • 5 Psy-Changeling Trinity books
  • 12 Mercy Thompson books
  • 5 Soulwood books
  • 163 number of books actually read in 2022

Booyah! Take that Kindle app! Yes, my competitiveness is making itself known, LOL. Just for giggles, I set my reading goal at 125 titles again this year. However, based on the computations above I may bump it up to 150.

So, are you a reader? If so, do you set any sort of reading goals? And, ebooks, physical books, or both?