Good thing I did all this stuff all summer so I can do nothing in the fall

Early on in the summer, I wrote that I had a bunch of goals I wanted to accomplish.  Now that summer’s done, how did I do?

Basically, it’s really easy to do stuff when I don’t have classes after work.

The way I focused on these goals was one main goal a month and the rest as side-goals. So in June, Python was my main goal. In July, it was my novel, and in August, it was the fitness/weight loss. In September, I basically plan to sit on the couch in my sweatpants and refresh Buzzfeed every five minutes.

Lose 10 pounds and run 1 5k:  Lost 7. Still working on the other 3. It’s really hard to keep losing weight when you’re surrounded by awesome Philly restaurants. This summer, we’ve been to Morimoto, White Dog Cafe, Cuba Libre, Vernick, Hungry Bear Cafe, Animo, Bar Ferdinand, Audrey Claire, Just Hooked, and Italy. All come highly recommended.

I ran 5k  this weekend, actually. It wasn’t an official race, but I ran the 5k on my own. I’ve been working up to it all summer since I took some time off running this winter to familiarize myself with frozen desserts.  And yes, I’m really slow.

I did a lot of sunrise runs. They were great.

Rewrite main website code in Bootstrap. Done! This was the easiest one. It took me about two nights to crank out. Bootstrap is a really cool framework, or set of HTML/CSS style files that is really good for static (read: not often updated like blogs) sites, and I recommend you check it out if you want stuff to look slick.

Learn Python: Kind of. I definitely am using at least three programs that I wrote at work right now and I started a GitHub account and blog to document my programming learnings, although they’re pretty sparse for now.  I’m hoping to get them up to speed in the fall.  I’m also going to keep learning Python. I also took a class taught in Python to brush up my skills.

Finish second draft of novel: Mneh. No, but I’ve been chipping away at it. I finished the first draft, and started three more drafts before I finally started writing the one that’s going to be close to the end-novel. So I wrote about 20,000 words in vain, and am now 12,000 words into the actual rewrite of the novel. I’ve also been doing tons of research reading:

Conveniently, programming and writing go together…if you’re not doing one, you can procrastinate by doing the other. I wrote a program to do a wordcount of my text file:

When I wasn’t doing any of that, I was busy trying to cram as much real summer into my summer as I could. My mom got us tickets to Wicked for my birthday, so we saw that. We went to the beach. We ate a lot of watermelon. I painted.  We celebrated tons of birthdays.

All in all, life was good, which is why I was away from the blog.

Now I’m back, refreshed, and ready to complain in 500-700 word posts three times a week once again.