1/6/06 - Sunny, 50 Degrees, And Zero Snow. Winter Is Brutal in ABQ.
According to LJ, it's been 19 weeks since my last post, which is the longest break since I started keeping a blog. At least I've got a good excuse: I've been busy.
Our plan for living in Albuquerque has always been pretty ballsy. Our goals included:
-Me completing a two-year master's degree in one year,
-Me maintaining an assistantship while completing said degree,
-Seeing many of the southwest's sights while we're in the area,
-And doing all of this on a very limited budget.
With the first two in particular, I knew I was going to be busy, but still - once the semester started, balancing school and the assistantship was like trying to drink from the fire hose.
Despite the ballsiness, though, I'm really proud of how we'll we've done with everything. I finished the fall semester with a 3.6, my job as a teaching assistant got rave reviews, and we've so far managed to see about 2/3 of the places on our must-do list.
But those things are all for future posts. My point here is "big break = bad - my bad". Unfortunately, it'll probably happen again once the spring semester starts.
So, hello. And hasta la vista.
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It's just after the new year, so lately everyone's begun posting their resolutions for this year. I didn't post mine last year - beating a video game a month for the whole year - but my success has encouraged me to put this year's resolution on the record.
But first, a little background.
My wife has a degree in English. In fact, she's something of a literature savant (my favorite factoid is that she was reading Dickens at 6). And she's a voracious reader to boot. So, her head-start coupled with her lifelong reading habit means that she's read pretty much every important book in existence.
I started reading young, too, but my path quickly turned to the Dark Side: I got into sci-fi/fantasy in elementary school, and didn't get out of it until I hit the Academy. Thus, my exposure to the classics has been extremely limited - a fact which leads to many a huff and a scoff from my lady.
So, this year, I gave her a blank check - I told her to make a list of twelve books that I absolutely had to read, and I would resolve to read the list by the end of the year. Given the demands of school and such, I even said that she could take time management into account.
Here's what she came up with:
January: Milton's Paradise Lost
February: Shakespeare's King Lear
March: C. Bronte's Jane Eyre
April: Austen's Pride and Prejudice
May: Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lovers
June: Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales
July: Chopin's The Awakening
August: Somebody's Beowulf
September: Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment
October: Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
November: Melville's Moby Dick
December: E. Bronte's Wuthering Heights
(And, no, I really haven't read any of these. Seriously.)
So that's my New Year's Resolution: 12 classics in 12 months. Done and done.