Monthly Reflection

First Written: 2023 October 3

Draft 1

Shoot, somehow it’s the end of October. I really feel like I blinked and suddenly the month has completely vanished.¹ Despite the fact that this month is gone without any blog postings, I still managed to keep up my five a days.²³ As a result, I can still give some highlights for the month.

This past month I:

• Went to a fancy PChem banquet in the department

• Gave my last planned talks for a while!

• Talked to children!⁴

• Met with a high school friend

• Visited home

• Made ravioli

• Went to Rocky Horror Picture Show!⁵

• Went diving for the first time in ages!

Let’s see how that lines up with my things I was excited for from last month’s reflection.

• I have a friend staying with me! That’s always exciting.⁶

• I’m giving two real talks this week!⁷

• There’s a cool dinner tomorrow I get to go to⁸

• I’m going to a school to talk to the kids about careers in STEM!⁹

• I’m going to a science fair next week!¹⁰

Hey, that’s pretty close to overlap. As always, there are new and exciting things that I did not know I was going to do at the start of the month. I also set my standards incredibly low, which made it easy for the lists to overlap. Let’s see how we did against last month’s goals, though.

• Blog more. I somehow blogged less.

• Get ahead on Jeb. I am planning to write another chapter of Jeb right after I write this post, which will technically be slightly ahead.

• Keep my home clean. My home is about as clean now as it was at the start of the month, which is nice. It fell apart in the middle, but I got it back.

• Pray better. I’ve started doing a daily rosary before bed, which is, at the very least, more prayer.

• Stretch more. I stretched a total of five times, compared to 6 in September. Whoops.

• Get back into writing letters to friends. I wrote not a single letter. I didn’t even address a letter wow.

So, as expected, I did not do a great job on my goals. But, there’s always the future to improve, and that’s what my goal is now. Next month, I’m excited for the following:

• Going home for Thanksgiving

• Doing NaNoWriMo with a friend

• I’m guest teaching a class, which is fun.¹¹

• I’m going to a cool discussion about Pascal.¹²

Once again, a fairly small list, though one that’s spaced a little more over the month, which is probably good for me. Goals for the upcoming month:

• Write 1700 words a day for my NaNo project. I averaged more than this last year, and I think that I can do it fairly quickly, especially since I even plotted this novel.¹³

• Write a chapter of Jeb every day. So, this is such an outlandish goal, except that I don’t do as many social activities anymore, and I will already be in the swing of writing for NaNoWriMo. If I cut myself off from writing too much more than 1700 words a day for that, the extra creative juice will have to flow somewhere, and it may as well be into Jeb.

• Blog every day. Now, lots of people say that the correct way to build a habit is by picking a single incremental change to your life and implementing it. They’re probably right. Nonetheless, I want to do my best here, rather than simply doing something. I very often have monthly goals of writing more blog posts, and this month I will already have the daily momentum of Jeb and NaNo to keep me blogging.

• Stretch every day. There is really nothing about my life that is not improved when I stretch more. Given that I will be hunched over a computer more this upcoming month¹⁴, it is almost certainly going to be necessary for me to at least stretch my neck, shoulders, and hands. Also, there’s now a club diving team at my school, so I can go diving again. My body was not flexible enough for it last time, but that’s only more reason for me to improve.

• Improve the cleanliness of my home. Last month I raised my standards for what my home should be like. I would like to do that again.

• Pray better. I have gotten to the point that a daily rosary is what I do, but it’s not always¹⁵ particularly mindful. At a minimum, it would be good for me to be better about that.

• Write letters to friends. At a minimum, there are three people I owe a letter to and at least one other person I would like to send a letter to. We’re almost at the time of year that holiday cards become appropriate, and I could consider doing those this year.

This means that I’ll have a daily reflection that looks like:

• Did I write 1700 words for NaNoWriMo? /1700

• Did I write a chapter of Jeb?

• Did I blog?

• Did I stretch?

• Am I doing better at prayer than a rushed and thoughtless rosary?

• Am I doing a good job writing letters to friends?