Do You Have Goals? Update Day? It's the end of August?

Many thanks to Misha and Beth for hosting and running this blog hop of goals! 

It's the end of August?

What?

I'm not ready.

August is usually my favorite month of the year. (Birthday month - 45 this year)

But this year it has blown by and it doesn't show much chance of slowing down in the next five days.

However, I'm trying to stretch out certain moments:

Walking to the corner store and back with my husband and our youngest daughter, discussing the merits of varying kinds of orange soda in the hot evening sunshine felt like one of those important, needs to be stretched moments.

Laughing with my oldest daughter while talking about the hilarious irony of being introduced as the "boss's wife" at a party. She gets my discomfort because I perceive the boss's wife as a primped, pearls and a pantsuit with poodle under her arm and long, manicured nails sort of person while I am a jeans and t-shirt with bare feet with a mutt-dog and determined cat kind of person (and my nails are short and blunt). 

But more seriously now, I'm here to throw down my goals' update.

Word Count: Around 16,000. I didn't keep track daily so this is based on projects I worked on in the last week. I will actually hit my 25,000 word count goal by the end of the month, if you count re-writing some stuff in revision for the next week. 

Publishing: I have two projects on the verge of publishness. Neither are fun reads unless you enjoy reading writing curriculum meant for homeschool co-op students. One just needs a cover upgrade because I realized that the current cover I have for it won't work for all places (too much to explain here - mid-project mentality going on).

Specific Goal: Finish these two projects ASAP.

Marketing: Well, I upped my buffer feed number per day and my book sales doubled from July to August - still low numbers but bigger. I'm not sure that the two things are related - that's how bad I am at marketing. I'm also revitalizing my use of wattpad by putting out bi-weekly updates on my facebook page for that, and weekly updates on my twitter account for that. 

Specific goal for September: Market the writing curriculum at two home-school websites. It's a bit late in the year, but some homeschoolers start late in the fall and some start in January and go through December.

Health: Spent seven days on vacation in super hot weather but walked at least 2 miles of "getting around" kind of walking each day. Then, spent seven days with a low-grade fever and fourteen days total feeling sick. I didn't exercise much at all for that time. 

(Warning: this is where the post starts to ramble on - skip to the end if you're in a hurry.)

I took a 4.5 mile hike on my birthday and thought I might die on the uphill, but finished. It was a lonely, underused sort of trail and I got spooked in the woods on the way back down the hill with my husband - he heard footsteps behind us that stopped when we stopped (echo in the trees?) and while the hike up included birds, squirrels, mosquitoes and horseflies; the hike down included still silence - no birds, squirrels, or even bugs buzzing. Just our footsteps . . . and our echo. 

So, that was interesting. And, we walked fairly quickly down the trail until we reached the picnic area at the bottom . . . where we rested for two minutes, felt like we were watched, waded across the stream, got a few mosquito bites in the parking lot and got in our car. It's been years since I did a lot of hiking since my husband smells like heaven to mosquitoes and horseflies (he gets bitten more than anyone I've ever met even with bug spray), but I've never experienced that kind of eerie silence before. I used to hike by myself in college - which was crazy, I know, but I never had issues then, never had a reason to feel fear in the woods. I did carry pepper spray and sometimes other deterrents "just in case" but I never felt watched or followed. My birthday hike ended on a strange note. My husband joked about Bigfoot tales . . .

It was just an odd experience . . . and I live near two acres of trees where deer, coyotes, raccoons, rabbits, and foxes roam and a black bear sometimes takes up residence. I know what it sounds like when something "big" or "predatory" is in the woods, and when everything is happily buzzing along normally. 

Anyway, it's all story fodder for me as a writer, I guess. And, I'm determined to get back into the daily walk, bike, stretch way of life. I live on the edge of the rural/suburbia crossroads, so I'll walk on the populated streets and walking paths, and save any "lonely" trails for times when I can go with a bigger group.

And . . . my last post shared much of my big family news. My oldest daughter is back from Peru with wonderful stories to share, and she wants to return. She found the mission field more fulfilling than regular life, found joy in every moment there (even the bad plumbing to no plumbing moments), and is considering how she might use bio-engineering in a mission/ministry kind of way. Engineers Without Borders may be something she considers when she finishes college. Of course, she hasn't finished high school yet . . . so those are her big goals and dreams in the distance. 

The Olympic Hopes Regatta is next month, and both of my daughters are training hard to represent Team USA . . . and we're all preparing for that and school starting. 

What are your big dreams and goals? And how are you building foundations underneath them?