Reading and Other Dangerous Endeavors

It’s been a really, really nice long weekend for me. I’m so spoiled for days off right now! I had off the 10th, the 13th, 17th—19th, and then I get Thanksgiving and the weekend after! I do have to work Friday, but I think I’ll get 8 hours of vacation to use at another time for working it and I have to say that it is a pretty good deal. I’ve been fairly lazy this weekend, but I think I needed it after being sick. I did do laundry today! Which reminds me, that I need to get my sheets out of the dryer and make my bed… Crap. Ah well, I’ll get there. The nice thing is that I won’t have to get up early tomorrow or Tuesday. I’m working the 11am—8pm shift both nights. Then Wednesday we’re closing at 5pm so it’ll be a normal day for me hours wise, but still. 

I just dumped eggnog all down my shirt, booooooo. I love eggnog. There isn’t much about Christmas that I don’t love, to be honest. I don’t love fruitcake. Or Black Friday starting Thanksgiving. But outside of that, I really can’t think of much. Oh! I need to start getting my Christmas playlists downloaded. 

On a totally unrelated note, I had a goal for myself this year of number of pages read. If I’m honest, I can’t actually remember what that number was. I know it was at least 50,000 but it could have been 55,000 or 60,000. I’m sure I wrote it down somewhere but as of yet I haven’t been able to figure out where. Which is aggravating as all shit, let me tell you. 

Either way, I’ve found myself in a bit of a pickle. Not a normal pickle, mine, not a real pickle, but what I would call an “Only Kate Pickle.” As of about a week ago, I had reached about 45,000 pages read and my goal was going to be to get to 55,000 words by the end of the year. It meant reading about 220 - 230 pages a day between now and the end of the year. Which was just THE PERFECT amount of challenge. It was small enough that I could do it and it was big enough to make me work for it. Exactly the right balance for myself! I’ve got to finish one other book for the Popsugar challenge and then I’ll have completed that too so everything was looking great. 

Now I’ve been using Goodreads to track my pages and books read for the year because that’s the easiest thing to do, obviously. However, last night I discovered that for some reason, some of the editions I’d had listed as “read” didn’t have a page count on them. I switched the editions in order to estimate the pages. There are a few comics, mostly Boom! Comics Kindle editions, that don’t have a page count at all, but most of the books that were missing a page count initially have one now. 

Changing those pages added about 2,000 pages to my page count. Which means that in order to reach 55,000 I only have read 170 pages a day between now and the end of the year which is too easy. But if I try for 60,000 I would have to read 300 pages a day which is not manageable. I mean, I don’t think I can read that much. I can read a lot but 300 pages would be stretching it. Oh, three days out of the week? Totally. I probably read more than that yesterday, but consistently every day for 38 days? With all the family stuff and adventuring that will be coming up for the holidays I think that kind of amount would be just too much. 

I mean, I guess I could go for 58,000 but I don’t like big numbers like that when they aren’t divisible by 5. I know that’s dumb. I really, really do, but it’s my head and I don’t know how to fix that. Plus, I mean, if you’re going to get to 58,000 how can you not try for 60,000? It’s like right there. Ughhhhh. I know this is such a dumb, not real problem, I really do. 

If I could find what number I originally settled on I think I’d feel much better about the whole thing. I guess I’ll have to keep looking. If anyone happens to remember what I told myself, it would be super helpful if you could remind me. Argh. 

Update

I found an email from a group email convo from late last year that said my goal for the year, including fan fic estimated pages, was going to be 50,000. Which is helpful because at least I know I won’t have fallen down on my page goal for the year. Although I did stop keeping track of my fanfic pages read about 9 months ago which is aggravating because maybe I’d be able to make the 60,000 if I had kept up with them. But I didn’t and as much as I would like to believe I will next year, I can say with some confidence that I probably won’t because it’s way more annoying than in might seem. It’s not so bad if it’s from AO3 but I spend a lot of time reading little ficlets on tumblr that are between 500-1,200 words and I usually binge a few of them at once. To stop and attempt to copy them into a word doc to get their word count to use to estimate their page count in a spreadsheet is just really not fun at all. Maybe I’ll track some of the big ones if I read them on my Kindle, but there will still be a whole lot that go unrecorded. I’m going to allow myself to count any of them that I do bother to record though, for sure. I did keep track of a few things from this year and they add up to 197 more pages, but I don’t think that makes a big enough difference in trying to reach for 60,000. *Sigh.* Well, I’ll definitely get to 55,000 

The other thing I should probably mention is that I always start the challenge for the next year on December 28th. I have to have whatever challenge I’ve given myself completed by December 27th. Every year I’ve managed it which has left me too antsy to start the challenge for the next year to wait any longer. I know. Total weirdo. 

Well, I guess what I could do is decide that I would give myself until the end of December 31st to reach 60,000 pages. It’s not a big difference days wise but it’s the difference between have to read 300 pages a day and reading like 265 pages a day. I mean, I know that probably doesn’t sound like a big difference but I can read a graphic novel in an hour maybe an hour and a half and that’s like 170 pages right there. If I spend a little of my car ride listening to an audiobook, I should be able to make that. It would be a stretch. I might not quite make it. But I think that might be worth it to try...