Wordless Wednesday

Well, not entirely wordless this week...... {grin}

Quote for the day

“The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were. ”

John F. Kennedy (1917-1963);

35th US President

Thursday's Thoughts

I took the time today to catch up on, or at least try to, on a few blogs I follow. I managed to read a few post from Becoming Minimalist and karenika. I found Karen's post about 52 things to do and it really intrigued me. I don't like the idea of resolutions, but I knew I need to set some goals. The idea of 52, one per week, really struck a chord with me. That and a post over at Minimalist about other good thing to incorporate into a new year really got me going. I drafted up some vague ideas, then used the idea of the 52 things and wrote attainable goals from that. I won;t share them all here now, but one of my goals is to read more. I love to read and always have but I find that I'm reading less and less as I get older. I think I find I let distractions get in the way. I spend too much time surfing the net, reading what everyone else is doing. I thought that writing out a schedule would help me be more disciplined. Bah! Too boring.

I had set up my daily schedule in blocks of 30 minutes, with "rewards" and "drudgery" interspersed. I thought I would be motivated to get things done if I knew there was fun stuff to be done. To be fair, the schedule is less than a week old. But I changed it up by writing the activities on small pieces of cardstock so I can pick them out of a basket and do them in any order I want. I hope this will make my schedule feel less, well, scheduled! And hopefully it will help remove some of those pesky distractions that have been keeping me from the things I really do like to do! Minimalist has another good post that helped me in all this goal setting I have done today, right here.

I made a goal to read more. Then I narrowed that down to reading one book a month (I'm in grad school too), plus a few extra. I took some of Minimalist's advice and added 3 classics to my list, then split the other 12 up between non-fiction and fiction. Here's the list of books that I plan to read this year:

Classics:
Great Expectations
Gulliver's Travels
The Importance of Being Earnest

Fiction:
The Promise - Ted Dekker
Inkheart, Inkspell and Inkdeath - Cornelia Funke
Dragon Rider - Cornelia Funke
The Heaven Trilogy - Ted Dekker

Non Fiction:
Self Nurture - Alice D. Domar
Captivating - John & Stasi Eldredge
Ninety Days of God's Goodness: Daily Reflections That Shine Light on Personal Darkness - Randy Alcorn
Has God Spoken? - Hank Hanegraaff
The Life God Blesses - Jim Cymbala
Blessing Your Husband - Debra Evans

Some of these I have already started, so I hope to get a few more books in by the end of the year. Also, I do not know how grueling my MS program will be nor how many breaks I will have so that will also affect my pace. I am sooo looking forward to getting some good reading in again! And I will report on each one as I finish it, or maybe even while I'm still in it!

Wordless Wednesday

Old Colorado City {Colorado Springs}, CO ~ October 1, 2011