Minutes, Miles, and Numbers

This is the time of year when I divulge how much little I biked, practiced the clarinet, read, and wrote last year. I did, however, watch a fair number of movies and TV shows. And yes, I really do keep track of all this information, because I like numbers and it makes it easy to give book/movie recommendations, which I was recently asked to do, so there.

Because of my tendency to leave for my class that was a mile away from my office five to ten minutes before class was scheduled to start, a few early December bike rides meant I rode my bike in every month of 2017. I only rode once in the months of January, February, and March (twice out of necessity, once on an unseasonably warm day to the farmer’s market), but once counts. In July alone I covered over a hundred miles on twenty-two days. A lot of those were short rides between my office and apartment, with longer rides across Ann Arbor on the weekends. My highest single day distance was 16.5 miles, on a day when I went grocery shopping and visited two library branches and the mall. Over the whole year, I biked 105 days (29% of the year) and rode 467 miles (about the distance from Boston to Washington, DC).

Biking mileage for 2017 by month

Since my return to concert band, I’ve been practicing the clarinet on my own again. I tried/try to be reasonably consistent about practicing. Looking at the graph below, there must have been something hard about our third and fourth concerts last year to get me to practice that much in March, but I don’t remember what. I definitely also took a break over the summer when I didn’t have any concert band music to work through.  Practice total for the year: 73 hours.  This doesn't include playing for fun, band rehearsals, or concerts.

Time spent practicing clarinet in 2017 by month

I also watched 62 movies, including close to two dozen musicals, and read 61 books, roughly a quarter of which were nonfiction and three quarters were fiction. I spent my summer reading research papers. My brain could take only so much educational material. Coming soon – a post with some of my favorite books and movies I watched last year.

Finally, I’ve been writing (or not writing) here for over five years now. The picture below sums up five years of writing.

Graph of blog posts vs month for the past five years
(Click to enlarge)