Catching up

Boy, it's been a heck of a month.  Practically no posts this month -- it reflects my ability to stay awake at the computer at night.  I've kept up with reading, but I have many partially finished reviews.  I'm very glad to say I'm on vacation for one week, and I'm planning to use this time to its fullest!

Goals for my vacation:

1. Spend time with kids! ... including reading to them.  I hardly ever do this during the week because I just see them before bed, other than a bedtime story.  I'd like to ramp this up and do more reading.
2. Read!  I have several books I've put off reading, and I want to get caught up.  This means at least 2 books per day over break.  Yikes!
3. Review!  I want to finish all the reviews I've been putting off, and also review all the books I read this week.  I won't deluge you with reviews, but I'll save them over the next month and release one or two a day.
4. Read blogs!  My blog reading has seriously deteriorated, and I miss it.  I've spent some time culling my email down to professional-only (LM-NET and child-lit, mostly, with a few organizational lists) and now it's manageable.  I have to check out Google Reader on my iPhone to see if it's doable.  That could help me keep caught up.  Otherwise, I will have to plan a block or two of blog-reading time each day.  
5. Do my (our) taxes.
6. Plan my next 5 weeks of classes, and outline the remainder of the year.
7. Spend 1/2 day at work cleaning and sorting my office.
8. Do odd jobs around the house, like hang pictures and sort papers.  
9. Enjoy my birthday (Friday) and get lots of free things at restaurants.  =)

This is doable, but I will need to figure out priorities tomorrow morning while doing laundry.  

Here's a participation question: what do you do first when you go on vacation?  Clean your house?  Sleep in?  Tackle those big projects or do nothing?  Plan or go spontaneous?  

Review of 2009 and looking ahead

2009:

It was my first year blogging. I read blogs more regularly as the year went on. I just started to dip my toe into the water of writing my own reviews. I received my first review copy (which I have not yet reviewed, shame on me). My to-read shelf expanded to astronomical proportions (over 250 books at one point, ugh!). I read way more books than I reviewed. I found out about some of those day-of-the-week themed events, like Nonfiction Monday. I semi-participated in one 24 hour blogathon and I am definitely doing that again. Ivy and I did some collaborative reviews, which was so fun. I can't wait to get her writing her own as she improves her ability to type and write. My most exciting aspect of 2009 was participating in the Cybils graphic novel review panel.

2010:

I don't yet have a good sense of my goals here, but I'm having fun and that is fine. I'm trying not to make it about writing regularly or punishing myself for not keeping up with my to-read pile. But, I do want to do more blogging to go along with my reading. I am signing up for some challenges to give a bit of structure to my year. I'm going to do more themed reviews. You'll definitely see more of Ivy; maybe my littler kid will get in on the action as well.

Thanks for reading!