Elizabeth February 15th, 2009

It blows my mind that it is already mid-February. I had so many plans for the first few months of this year, and am feeling like time has just disappeared!

I have been making fairly steady progress on my 101 Things in 1001 Days list, even though I had hoped to have a few extra items crossed off by now. I’ve mostly been working on my “works in progress”, so I thought it might be nice to report on each of them here.

To date, I have completed 36 items and have another 18 in progress. These are the ones that are nearing completion:

001 Weight loss goal #1 (50%)
Progress stalled pretty significantly a couple of months ago, due to Christmas and general “holiday mode” atmosphere around here. We’ve had a lot of family staying with us over the past 6 weeks, and playing hosts to the tourists has made me a little too relaxed. It’s been too easy to slip into bad habits because of broken routines, and I’m keen to set things straight before the weather gets cooler. I am sure I can stay motivated to exercise and eat well through Winter if I have already set up healthy patterns for myself.

005 Learn 15 new vegetarian recipes (4/15)
I have decided to relax my stance on this task. I find that I am often cooking vegetarian dishes, it’s just that I often prefer to serve them alongside fish! The spirit of this goal was to learn more recipes, not to replace meat and fish in my diet. In hindsight, I think I’ve been a bit too hard on myself.

008 Learn to cook a recipe from 30 different countries (5/30)
I have only recently started paying attention to this task, but am already finding it very inspiring. I am keeping a separate page to track my progress.

Tim has added fuel to the fire by giving me a recipe book called World Food Cafe 2: Easy Vegetarian Recipes, put together by the owners of World Food Cafe in London’s Convent Garden. The recipes look enticing and the photographs are very inspiring, so I am looking forward to making plenty of progress over the next couple of months! And as the recipes are all vegetarian, this book will go a long way towards helping me with #005 as well.

016 Write a budget
This is just about done. Right now we’re making some decisions about how long we want to live here, when we’d like to buy a car, and when it looks like we’d be in a position to buy a house. In the meantime I have set up a detailed spreadsheet that is just waiting for the figures to be dropped in.

020 See 25 movies of Tim’s choosing (10/25)
For the remaining 15 movies I would like Tim to actually compile a list. So far we’ve been pretty spontaneous with this item. For those who are interested, here are the movies Tim has given me so far: Secretary, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Cloverfield, Batman Begins, The Corpse Bride, Tropic Thunder, Be Kind Rewind, Spiderman, The Thing, The Wrestler. Most have been worth it!

022 List 101 things that make me happy (64/101)
I struggled with this list at first – not because I’m a miserable person, but because it’s hard to actually write these things down without sounding like Julie Andrews! I’ve gotten past that block, however, and am well on the way to knocking this one over. You can follow my progress here.

023 Build a time capsule
Almost finished – I just need to make some decisions about where to store it, and when to re-open it.

024 Read the dictionary from beginning to end
I haven’t started reading yet, but I have made progress of another type! I started by purchasing a book called Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea, and am feeling very inspired to get cracking myself. I have also bought myself a new dictionary to further the cause.

Initially I struggled to decide on a dictionary to use for this task. I began by selecting dictionaries that looked like they were the most serious or comprehensive, and then realised that it was unnecessarily ambitious. The spirit of this goal is to absorb new vocabulary – real words that are relevant to me – and to learn a little about the origins of words that I am already familiar with. This task won’t be any more complete by reading all 20 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary!

The dictionary I have chosen is unlike any I’ve seen before – it has a condensed thesaurus on the lower third of each page that corresponds to the dictionary entries. I suspect that I will learn almost as much from the synonyms as I will from the definitions.

030 Learn to identify 5 constellations (3/5)
Pretty sure I’ve exhausted the major constellations that can be spotted in Southern skies from within the city. Looking forward to familiarising myself with another two when we buy a car, and can get away from the city lights.

038 Visit 10 local art galleries (1/10)
I am embarrassed to say that I have only visited one gallery since this challenge began 14 months ago. In my defence, the gallery is split between two sites and I visit both regularly… but yikes. I need to expand my horizons!

039 Visit 25 restaurants/cafes (16/25)
I recently edited this item to add “cafes”, since we’re not all that big on fine dining. Melbourne really blurs the line between restaurants and cafes anyway, and has such an incredible food culture that we certainly eat well! I am enjoying this item, and have found that it has encouraged us to try out new places rather than stick to what we know.

040 Read 10 novels by Melbourne authors (3/10)
I have made a habit of asking staff at bookshops for recommendations about Melbourne authors, and am constantly astounded at the blank stares that I get. For a city with such a strong arts scene, its authors are not being advocated by the people behind book store counters. What’s with that?

I’ve resorted to doing all my research online, as I have encountered only ONE book store assistant who could name a Melbourne author.

057 Read the last Harry Potter book
This one is listed as a “work in progress” only because I have the book here in my house. I’ve enjoyed the other books, but have not been motivated whatsoever to read the last one. I’ll get to this someday!

064 Organise my photos, and back them up
I have organised all of my photos in Lightroom, but haven’t yet backed anything up. Dumb, I know!

065 Improve my photography workflow
Lightroom has been a valuable tool in helping me to automate some of my workflow, however I am struggling badly with colour profiles. Something goes seriously wrong with my photos when I save them for web, and unless I do them one-by-one I end up with horrible washed-out colours.

I have spent hours researching this online, and everybody’s solution uses a different approach. If anybody reading this has a good understanding of colour profiles I would greatly appreciate some help.

074 Revive my online recipe book
I began work on my recipe site when my 101 challenge first began, but haven’t progressed a great deal since then. It would be really nice to have a block of time to concentrate on this, as I miss filing my recipes away online.

086 Make some jewellery
Two Valentines Days ago Tim and I were in Connecticut, and he bought me a beautiful bunch of pink roses. I racked my brains to think of a way to bring them back into the country on my return, and decided to make them into beads. It was time consuming, but they got through customs!

I have bought most of the supplies I need to make the beads into a necklace. First, I’d like to investigate methods for sealing the beads.

092 Keep a paper journal for a year
There was a time when I wrote every single day, and I’m very proud of some of my visual entries from that time. However, I have found it difficult to commit to writing by hand in recent times, and this item isn’t going very well. Need to get back in the saddle.

I know there are other 101ers who read this site sometimes, how are you going with YOUR list?

• 101 in 1001 , Life
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