To Do In January
At least 10 blog posts.At least two blog posts on non-gaming-centric topics.Nerd Girl Thoughts will get a bit of a cosmetic overhaul.- Figure out a method of content planning that works for me, and implement it.
Choose and play a game for the first So We Meet Again post.
Four out of five isn’t too shabby. I’m not sure if I should give myself full credit for the cosmetic overhaul – I definitely made a few changes, but after a couple of sessions of poring over different themes, I found that there wasn’t anything I actually liked better than what I was using! I am, however, finally three years in starting to play around with pages rather than just posts, but I am also a creature of habit who likes to keep things simple, so it’s still feeling a little awkward to me.
However, the start of the #JustOnePercent Project has kind of necessitated a level of organization I hadn’t previously really needed. Now that it’s started, I’m hoping to streamline some more things to make looking back over the now-not-insignificant amount of content here a little more manageable.
I did at least look into content planning solutions, and I’ve had tabs open for both Notion and Asana for most of the month. I think Asana will be more useful to me and the way that I work, but since I haven’t gotten around to actually trying either one, it’s hard to say for sure.
GAMING
Initially, when I was looking at my data for this month, I thought to myself that it couldn’t possibly be right. I haven’t had a sub-40 hour gaming month since I started tracking last June. But on reflection, this was definitely a dry-spell sort of month. Now that the holidays are over, renovations have resumed, which really sucks the energy right out of me. I also probably took on too much in regards to crafting projects, so most of my useful down time was spent on those, rather than on games. There were two weeks in January where I didn’t have my regular co-op gaming night, and I still can’t get enthused about World of Warcraft outside of raid nights.
So I guess it makes sense.
It was a month of dabbling. I deliberately chose a very short game for my first So We Meet Again post to make sure I’d have the time and energy to see it through to completion. After ending December on a huge PowerWash Simulator bender, I lost interest when it came time to clean the Ferris wheel, what I believe was probably only a couple of jobs from the current end. I did play through The Gunk to the credits on GamePass, and I’m mostly done with the peaceful missions in The Colonists, which I expect I’ll be wrapping up before the middle of February. As for co-op, we revisited Wildermyth this past week to play through the new Legacy-Only story campaign, and we spent one evening trying to work out the intricacies of Stolen Realm.
I also have been back on my bullshit, having downloaded both Merge Dragons and The Secret Society onto my tablet, and have been checking in with both of those at least daily. In a way, it’s nice to have a couple of comfort games on the go that are self-limiting in how much time I spend on them. I’ve also been consistently playing Wordle, which guarantees I’ll spend at least five minutes a day thinking. Unfortunately, I don’t have any good way of tracking these gaming activities, so they don’t show up in my nifty pie chart.
READING
I’m off to a great start with my GoodReads challenge this year, exclusively with audiobooks. Sure, three of those were novellas, but if I keep up at this pace, whatever reservations I have about novellas “counting” won’t much matter. In the end, stories are stories, and I’ve been listening to a lot of stories.
WATCHING
Suprisingly, this was also a light television month. Sure, I might have binge watched a few seasons of Worst Cooks in America, and checked out the first few episodes of Next Level Chef on Hulu, but I have cut way back on mindless background television.
On date nights, my husband and I have been watching one episode a week of Lovecraft Country. It’s a pretty heavy show, so I like having time to process it all between episodes, so despite feeling like we’ve been watching it forever, we still have three episodes left to go. Once we’ve finished, I think I’m going to take another stab at reading the book, which I’m guessing is probably going to be so different as to be almost unrecognizable.
STITCHCRAFT
I only ended up finishing one project this month, although I made really good progress on another despite having to started it later than intended due to a shipment of supplies that got delayed by several weeks. This finishes off my first big burst of the year. I’m planning to do a project for all the birthdays in our friend group this year, and now that the February birthdays are finished up, I have a couple of April deadline projects, and then a whole bunch over the summer.
It’s entirely possible I may even get around to working on some of the projects I’ve picked out for myself, or perhaps starting up the Tarot Stitch-Along I signed up for, and then proceeded to completely ignore. Of course, patterns don’t expire, and embroidery floss doesn’t spoil, so there’s no rush.
All in all, January felt to me like a well balanced month for all things nerdy. I’m getting more organized, and life is feeling a little less out of control than it has for the past few months. Here’s to maintaining equilibrium!
Nerd Girl Thoughts 