Valentine's Day...

3. Complete a 26 Things Challenge - in progress

I went out on Friday with my friend Kelly to do the "10 minutes away" part of the challenge, which really turned into an hour and a half of exploring & being silly. I put a few images on Flickr, but I'll wait till I'm done with the challenge to label them with specific numbers.

7. Watch all movies on AFI's top 100 (24/100) - in progress

So I forgot to mention this last week when I finished watching "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," but I did finish it. In the interests of honesty, I had rented it through Netflix... I want to say two summers ago, but that can't be right because it was since I began the 101. In any case, I was not interested in the movie at all, and I remember almost none of it. But I watched it in my film adaptations class this past week after we finished discussing the novel, and I liked it a lot. I liked the book better, but I feel like that's pretty standard.

12. Keep Flickr updated - in progress

I posted the pictures I took Friday. They're mostly of our expedition to find Camp Overlook & the Brethren Woods. We succeeded, by the way, after encountering some suspicious people and one particularly strange poultry truck. I really enjoyed taking out my camera. I had some trouble editing the images in Photoshop -- I think my CS2 has seen better days -- so I ended up downloading a free application called Gimp. Then after I uploaded the images, I went back and looked at the images I uploaded this past spring from Charleston and Savannah and got overly nostalgic for the few weeks I spent in South Carolina. Anyways, here's the link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chainse/

14. Do a creative writing prompt once a week (13/52) - in progress

I found a sister site to the creative writing prompts that has a lot of journaling prompts, which I think I like a lot better than the site I originally bookmarked. This week, I wrote about the first thing I think of when I wake up -- which, by the way, is what time is it, and can I sleep longer.

25. Learn to cook 52 recipes and organize them in one place (25/52) - in progress

I made paprika chicken & dumplings on Monday, which were pretty good in my opinion. Next time I might try adding vegetables, but I was pretty proud of myself because I've never made a recipe like this. I also would cook the dumplings for longer. The recipe said to boil them until no longer doughy, but didn't give an estimate for when that would be. And in my mind, dumplings are inherently doughy, so I wasn't really sure what I was doing. They tasted fine the first night, but when I had the leftovers it was like eating raw biscuits -- not so tasty. A half success, perhaps.

37. Own a plant for at least a year without killing it - in progress

My plant turned six months old on Saturday, the 13th. Well, he's technically older than that, but as of Saturday, he's been in my custody for six months. He's doing OK -- still alive, in any case. My mom sent me an article recently about how to get orchids to bloom though, and I think I need to buy some fertilizer. Perhaps that will be my goal for the remaining six months, to get the orchid to bloom again. It had very pretty yellow flowers... two years ago.

56. Exercise 2-3 times a week (24/143) - in progress

So, it just so happens that when you get walloped with 20/+ inches of snow in one week, there's a lot of work to bail out your car. And your roommate's car. And your second roommate's car. We originally only had two trash cans to work with, but some nice neighbors offered their help & three shovels. So after 90 minutes on Monday and another hour on Wednesday, we were all able to leave our apartment complex. I read somewhere that shoveling in the winter is one of the greatest causes of heart attacks because people aren't used to such intense activity, and I laughed. But after this week -- my back was wrecked. I know exactly what the article meant.

-- Till next time