Planning

Okay, so I started going through books at home last night, originally intending to just switch them from Dewey to LC, when I realized several things.

Firstly, even after having been using LC for close to ten years, I'm still more familiar with Dewey. I blame effective bibliographic instruction when I was in elementary school, as well as frequent immersion in the 940s, the 400s, and the 636's at the public library. (That... describes my pre-college nerdage pretty well, actually.)

Secondly, I don't have enough books to make a transition to LC reasonable. Half of my non-fiction is history. At least half of all my books are fiction. So I'd mostly have bloated D's and P's, and everything else would be sparsely populated. I'm not even sure what I have that would go in the A's. (Can you tell I took cataloging without an actual classification course?)

Thirdly, for what I want to be doing, I need to segregate my books into several distinct categories:

• Reference
• How-to/Self-help
• Textbooks
• Non-fiction
• Fiction

And then each category besides Reference needs to be divided:

• To read
• Already read
• Not going to read

So why do I have books I'm not going to read? It's mostly the how-to books: I'm not going to read the plumbing how-to book unless something breaks that I need to use immediately (I'm looking at you, Mr. Faulty Toilet Flusher) when my husband (son of plumber) isn't home. I also have quite a few books acquired over the years mostly for reference purposes which aren't actually reference books; when my mother was bringing home discarded books from the diocese, I acquired titles on various aspects of religion that I mostly wanted to refer to if I wrote something religiously themed. And of course the books acquired because one's personal library wouldn't be complete without owning x, y, and z... (Do I really have to read the Brontes? At least I've never bought any Austen...)

So, yeah. Step 1: Sorting the books. Once I know what I've got and what I need to get through, I can start actually getting there.

Reading goals:

• 1 or more books per week
• 5 chapters/week of textbook material
• 1 work-related publication/week

I'm thinking maybe on Sundays I'll lay out the week's reading.

I'm actually aiming at 1 fiction and 1 non-fiction a week as a baseline. (When I get to the two-ish Robin Hobb trilogies I haven't read yet, I anticipate hitting each one all in one Sunday.) I don't actually know how much fiction I own that I haven't read; we have a lot of R. A. Salvatore that we got because my husband was reading it (and I wanted to, but never found the time), a bunch of Terry Brooks, Robert Jordan, and so forth. This may actually lead to a small purge of books people gave me that I didn't really want to read.

The textbook material may go slower for some things - so far that I've found, I have calculus, statistics, chemistry, English grammars that by God I'm not doing English grammar again, Russian, French, German, Wheelock's Latin (or the Reader, I don't remember which), physical anthropology, and a boatload of library science textbooks that you would think I read. (Ahem.)

Work related publications may be underestimated, or it may vary. I may designate whichever week the American Historical Review shows up as its week, and then just get through my library periodicals backlog the rest of the weeks. I've got a couple years' worth of American Libraries that I really just

Writing goals:

• 1 blog post/day (or something like 3/week if I don't have the content for more)
• 1 hour of writing/day

I don't really plan my fiction writing - when something gets in my head, I'll work on it that day. (I thought of something last night that I kind of want to get down on paper, but, well, July is bad for me.) Blog posts I've just been writing as they occur to me, so I don't know if I need to plan them in advance.

Other... personal development? goals:

• 3 hours/week of Mandarin (audio CDs in the car)
• 1.5 hours of exercise/week
  
• 1 song/week on the piano
  

The hardest part about the Mandarin is remember to switch my car stereo over. Seriously.

I've been trying to start exercising for about five years now. It's clear by now I'm not very good at it. Part of it is working in 85 degree heat this summer (my office), and part of it is that I'm not sure where I can safely go by myself if I can't get my husband to go with me.

I added something on the piano since, well, I did take lessons for eleven years. I'm out of practice, especially compared to 3-4 hours a day the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. I may as well put the piano in the living room to use. (Note to self: find a "Piano maintenance and repair" book. It needs tuning.)

Cleaning goals:

• Full house cleaning on Saturdays
• 2 hours/week of closet purging

I should probably add "vacuum out my car" to the list, but that's really not a weekly thing. But, yeah, I've had it for almost two years, and it really needs to be vacuumed out.

I hope to have the books sorted by the end of the week (and, um, the bedroom reassembled, since stuff is going to have to move for me to get at some of them).