One of the challenges was a reading one. I set myself a goal of finishing 25 books during the course of 2012. In the event, I finished 54 books, but a lot of those were of the chick-lit/romance genre Kindle freebie type and, to be honest, many of those weren't very good. I did read some books which I thoroughly enjoyed though, including Andre Agassi's autobiography and a few novels by Melissa Nathan (who very sadly died of breast cancer at a very young age). A few months ago I linked my Shelfari account to this blog and that adds new books here as I add them to Shelfari, so I won't give you a long list of 54 books. If you enjoy reading and haven't looked at Shelfari, then do - it's an excellent site which not only keeps a reading record for you (as long as you keep it updated - obviously!), but can also be used for further reading recommendations and for working out the order in which a series of books should be read.
The second challenge was a photography challenge. A list of 50 words (chosen at random as they popped into people's heads) was issued:
01. 2012
02. Animal
03. Beauty
04. Blue
05. Bright
06. Bus
07. Celebration
08. Childhood Memory
09. Cute
10. Decay
11. Doodle
12. Fame
13. Family
14. Flight
15. Food
16. Fortune
17. Friend
18. Gold
19. Ground
20. High
21. Inside
22. Inspirational
23. Irritating
24. Large
25. Low
26. Memory
27. Music
28. New
29. One
30. Pathway
31. Power
32. Purchase
33. Red
34. Reflection
35. Rural
36. Season
37. Shiny
38. Ship
39. Sky
40. Small
41. Tall
42. Touristy
43. Train
44. Unique
45. Urban
46. Warmth
47. Water
48. Weather
49. Wild
50. Wood
The idea was very simple: take a photo to represent each of the 50 words.
I just about managed this, although some of the photos were stretching the theme a bit.
Photos 1-25
Photos 26-50
The mosaics read top to bottom, left to right, in word number order.
This year, I haven't set any knitting goals (other than the usual 'reduce stash' target), but I've signed up for three non-knitting challenges.
Reading challenge: my goal is to read 25 books, but also to read one book from each category in the Essex and Suffolk digital library catalogues. I'm currently reading "Prince of Tides" by Pat Conroy, which was listed in the Drama section at Essex. It's quite long (650 pages) and is taking me longer than usual to read, but I think that's because the story's quite involved and requires proper reading.
Photography challenge 1: we're doing another 50 photo challenge. So far I've taken one photo to represent 2013 (I took a photo of our weather station at 8.13pm one evening!).
Photography challenge 2: take one a photo a month, of the same object/view. I've chosen a location on the green/common area where I walk Jess most days. It's looking across the road, with the village church in the distance. Having seen most people's January photos, it's going to be interesting seeing how different seasons and weather conditions affect the view.
Hubby thinks I'm mad doing these things, but what does he know? :D
I'll be back with more knitting stuff soon.
Ignore him Christine, I love the Scavenger Hunt. it really makes you look at things around, don' t you think?
ReplyDeleteWow! 54 books is a lot, and I like to read!! I love your photos, they're really interesting. I agree with Clicky Needles, it does make me look at things, instead of just taking an everyday item as background - if that makes sense!
ReplyDeleteOne thing the 50-photo challenge made me do was look around locally at things. For example, I've been past the war memorial hundreds, if not thousands of times, but I've never really looked at it, but using it for the 'Memory' photo meant I properly looked at it and was able to appreciate that although it's small, it's been put in a nice little setting on the High St of our tiny town. As for the 54 books - quite a few of those were very quick not-very-good chick-lit that were fewer than 300 pages. The sort of book that you start, get about a third of the way through and keep plodding on in the hope that something will happen, or it will improve. These books are very much the downside of the Amazon Kindle freebies!
ReplyDelete