I'm FIFTY!
ABJECT 50 x 50 FAILURES AND MY POOR EXCUSES FOR THEM
Meditation - 9 of 50
I do some kind of little workout 4-5 days a week. At least one of those workouts is generally yoga, where I finish up by sitting on my mat. What a great time to set my phone timer for 5 minutes and do a little meditation! NOPE.
New recipes - 12 of 50
I knew this was a stretch when I added it to the list. I add maybe 1 or 2 new recipes to my repertoire annually and they all have something in common: they're easy and I don't have to spend a lot of time touching raw meat. As much as I enjoy watching those elaborate multi-step cooking process videos (and I do, omg, I spent, like, 15 minutes watching some guy make 'short rib croquettes' last night) my cooking style is more Cordon Blaaarg than Cordon Bleu. Although I did make this pretty cake:
Out of the 12 new recipes I DID try, I will definitely keep making "zucchini fries" in the air fryer and probably also the chicken lentil soup recipe I found in the NYT (but only because I had to buy a 10-ton bag of lentils at the store).
Blogging - 15 of 50. But hey, it's 15 more than the previous 4 years combined, so that's something!
Some people are like "I HAVE to write! It's like BREATHING for me!" and to those people I say "Fuck all the way off." I love writing but for me, it takes a lot of effort. Work was INSANE for ALL of 2024 and when it stopped being insane, suddenly it seemed like the WORLD was insane and I found it hard to contemplate bitching about my shitty neighbour when I was too busy watching open-mouthed at the dumpster fire down south. Jesus. H. Christ.
No dessert days - 18 of 50
You'd think I could go one day per week without some kind of baked good, or chocolate, or refined sugar. You'd be incorrect.
Hours of knitting - 25 of 50
"Oooo, we're halfway theeere, oooo-OO, knitting on a prayer!" Honestly, this could have gone worse, I haven't knit since March of 2020. This year, I knit a hat for an adorable baby (baby not shown)!!
And am still working on a slow, laborious project that I won't post about here because its intended recipient occasionally reads my blog. Although by the time I'm finished it, he probably will not remember that I posted about it! Because he will be 80 years old.
Books read - 37 of 50
The success of a goal like this depends on either having a lot of reading time (which I didn't for most of the year) or picking shorter books (which I also failed to do) but I do blame one book in particular for this failure and it's a French book called La Vérité sur l'affaire Harry Quebert (The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair).
As part of my French reeducation, I thought I should try reading a novel that was recommended on one of my French podcasts for intermediate French students. The podcast host said that it was a good choice because it was an engaging story that used pretty plain language but she did NOT mention how it was about a 30-something author's sexy romance with statutory rape of a 15 year old girl blaaaaaaaarg but by the time I figured that out, the girl turned up dead and I was hookez (that's French for hooked).
This book took me FOREVER to read. I couldn't figure out if I was just...très slow en français or if it was the biggest fucking book in Bookonia and I didn't know, because I was reading it on my Kindle? Well, I just looked it up and it was 863 fucking pages, so I'm not crazy. It took me nearly 2 months to get through it and it was a WILD RIDE, so many twists and turns and "that 15 year old came on to ME" bullshit.
Probably my favourite thing about reading this book was discussing it with my 30 year old conversational French teacher Rox, who remembered reading the book in her teens and thinking it was the EPITOME of ROMANCE and now she's like QU'EST CE C'EST THE FUCK WAS I THINKING?
In my next post - my stunning 50x50 achievements, where I brag about completing several basic tasks!
