float_on_alright | Reading and Other Dangerous Endeavors (Reply)

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.