Some ideas for 2021, books to read or to get, stuff to plant, exercise to do

Here are just some ideas of what I would like to do in 2021, these are all non professional goals if you will

Run 800 miles

I ran 800.3 miles last year, this should be easily doable, it's about 4 miles 4 times a week

Read 50 books

Last year I read 60 books.. I assume at some point, I will be back in the office two times a day or so, this will maybe bump it down to 50 books from 60 books

Books in the queue

These are  books I or my kids already own, some of these I have gifted to them this Christmas season (Masters of Doom, 1984, Brave New World, Infinite Jest, Pirate Latitudes)

I have not read any of these except for 1984 and Brave New World, I will re-read those, it's been 20 years or more since I last read those

Here is a picture of some of these books.....

Here is the full list, the titles link to Amazon so you can read the reviews there

• Hyperion by Dan Simmons
• The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
• The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons
• Endymion by Dan Simmons
• Philip and Alexander Kings and Conquerors by Adrian Goldsworthy
• The Prince by Macchiavelli  
• The Dutch Overseas Empire by Pieter C. Emmer, Jos J.L. Gommans
• 1776: The riveting story of George Washington by David McCullough
• The Great Bridge by David McCullough
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy by Michael Lewis
• The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton  
• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith 
• The Killer Angels: The Classic Novel of the Civil War Paperback by Michael Shaara 
• The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley
• How Computers Really Work A Hands-On Guide to the Inner Workings of the Machine by Matthew Justice
• Can't Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop's Blockbuster Year by Michaelangelo Matos
• Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula by Bram Stoker , Valdimar Ásmundsson, et al
• Black Box Thinking The Surprising Truth About Success by Matthew Syed
• Life on Mars: What to Know Before We Go by David Weintraub
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays by David Foster Wallace
• Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton 
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• 100 Things Millionaires Do Little Lessons in Creating Wealth by Nigel Cumberland
• Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson
• Where the Past Begins: Memory and Imagination by Amy Tan
• Gerald's Game by Stephen King
• If It Bleeds by Stephen King
• The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King
• The Dead Zone by Stephen King
• The Running Man by Stephen King
• Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
• Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner  
• SQL Server 2019 Revealed Including Big Data Clusters and Machine Learning by Bob Ward
• The Man In The High Castle by Philip K. Dick

18,300 pushups

Do about 100 pushups every other day.. this adds up to about 18,300 pushups for the whole year

10,000 in dividends

Last year I received 9551 in dividends, since companies increase the dividend payout usually every 4 quarters and since I reinvest them, I should be easily able to get 10K

300 Hours of Pluralsight watching

I plan to watch about 6 hours a week of Pluralsight content. About 1 hour at lunch time and then 1 hour over the weekend

Get 10 of these book in 2021

Get at least  10 9 books of the "wish list" below

I have heard about these from friends or family. I also might have heard about these books from the various podcasts I listen to

• The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz by Eric Larson
• Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat
• The Lessons of History by Will Durant and Ariel Durant
• 1/1 The Prince by Macchiavelli  
• The Great War: A Combat History of the First World War by Peter Hart
• Hero with a 1000 faces by Joseph Campbell
• The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great by Steven Pressfield
• Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West by Tom Holland
• Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides
• Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne
• The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan
• Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary by Joe Jackson
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir by Haruki Murakami
• The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson
• A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
• The Innocent Anthropologist : Notes from a Mud Hut by Nigel Barley
• Shogun: The Epic Novel of Japan by James Clavell
• Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
• Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
• The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 by John Toland
• Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by Jonathan Parshall, Anthony Tully
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy 
• The End of October: A Novel by Lawrence Wright
• Change Agent by Daniel Suarez
• Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
• A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century by Barbara Tuchman
• Azure SQL Revealed: A Guide to the Cloud for SQL Server Professionals by Bob Ward

Plant all these peppers

We got the following seeds in December

The 3 packs on the left side are the Carolina Reaper, Trinidad Scorpion and Apocalypse Scorpion. These are some of the hottest peppers.... these things just look menacing, you can see they look spicy

Last year we planted 31 plants, you can those in the 2020 in Numbers... post

I am excited about the chocolate habaneros, those look pretty cool

Progress so far

Activity	Count	%
Pushups	370	2.02%
Run	22.17	2.77%
Pluralsight Hours Watched	2.13	0.711%
Books Read	1	2%
Dividends	$63.89	0.6389%

Done

Book Finished

Date    Title

-----    -------------------------------------------------------

Jan 3    St Petersburg

Pluralsight Course Finished

Date    Title

-----    -------------------------------------------------------

Jan 6    Optimizing Query Performance with Columnstore Indexes