New Years-2013 review

Another year down, that makes the 40th for me.  Damn, I’m getting old.  It was a good year, I guess.  Nothing really groundbreaking happened this year and I only had one resolution that I made at this time last year but it went unfulfilled.  My kids are getting older, which means I get along with them better.  Cheri and I are still going strong after a quick romance that led to our marriage a little over 3 years ago.  Trevor’s still getting straight A’s and Samantha has been working hard at raising her grades to all A’s and 1 B, which she brought up from a C.  Samantha made her first All-Star team in 2013 and 2014 she’s trying her hand at basketball.  They both seem to be getting older a lot quicker than what they were.

I’m looking forward to 2014, I’m hoping for 2 big changes.  I’m not going to call them a resolution because that didn’t work out so well last year.  I’m hoping for a house and a new job.  House I have discussed quite a bit and a job may or may not happen.  I’d like to switch jobs because I absolutely hate where I work now which I have discussed but I’m not just going to jump from this job to another job.  It has to be a step up, I’m not stepping into another factory job just to leave where I’m at so like I said, that may not happen.

As you all know (or at least you should), I’m a stats guy and just for kicks, I kept a stat throughout the year.  I kept track of where we ate out and how many times we’ve eaten there.  We eat in more than we out but we still eat out quite a bit.  According to my stats, we eat out on an average of 5 times a week (4.8 to be exact).  Wow, I didn’t realize it was that many times.  That was way higher than expected.  We really don’t eat out 5 times a week, I think that number is a little deceiving.  We tend to make doctor’s appointments in the mornings and it usually ends up with us grabbing some breakfast while we are out.  Monday-Thursday we almost always eat in because it’s too expensive for the 4 of us to eat out.  Little league season we tend to eat out more as well because we have limited time to grab supper between games.  Trips to Virginia also factors into that average, obviously we tend to eat out more when we are on vacation.  If Cheri and I go out on the weekend, we’ll generally go out because it’s just the 2 of us.  I would say on an average week, we’ll eat out 2 or 3 times and like I said, that’s generally on the weekends.

Let’s take a look at where and how many times I’ve eaten places.

• 1 Time - Adam's Bistro, Allie's Cafe, Applebees, Bella's, Biblers Pancake House, Cook's pizza, Enzo's, Hardee's, KFC, Palitos, Papa's Pizzeria, Stacy's, Toyko of Japan, Volcano's Pizza, Yummy Chinese
• 2 Times - 5 Guys, Bojangles, Domino's Pizza, Hacienda, Joe's Crab Shack, Memorial Hospital, Pals, Steak 'n Shake
• 3 Times - 7/11, Bravo Cafe, Chik-Fil-A, Fazoli's, Heinnies
• 4 Times - Chili's, IHOP, Long John Silvers, Martin's Supermarket Deli, Wendy's
• 5 Times - Bruno's Pizza, Dairy Queen, Pizza Hut, Smith's Food Mart
• 6 Times – Happy Cooker, Subway
• 8 Times – Little Ceasers Pizza

Quick glance – we eat at a lot of pizza places.  7 of those above are not local to us.

Are you ready to see where we eat out the most?  Our top 5 places to eat, all in the double digits.

#5 – We’ve eaten here 10 times and while it can be considered another pizza place, we usually get grinders from here.  It’s usually a Friday night when I work place.  We have no kids and it’s less than 1/2 mile from my job so Cheri will call it in and I’ll pick it up after I get off.

#4 -

We’ve eaten here 14 times.  We mainly go here for the original chicken sandwiches and usually when it’s on sale (2 for $4).  Cheri and I both like them.  I did have breakfast here once or twice as well.  I grew up eating the croissanwich for breakfast so I crave it every so often.  Although, they don’t seem to be as good as I remember.

#3 - 

We’ve eaten here 18 times.  I love the beef ‘n cheddar and for awhile I was getting their Ruben sandwich on a weekly basis.  This happens to be right next to the grocery store and drug store that we frequent so a lot of times we are just grabbing something after shopping.

#2 -

We’ve eaten here 41 times.  I really thought this would be #1 but I’ll explain why #1 is #1 in the next description.  Cheri and I love us some Taco Bell.  Although, as of late, we haven’t really gone there very often.  We used to be bad about running here for late night snacks but not so much this year.  Now we don’t want to leave the house to go once we are in for the night.  If you ask us our favorite fast food, this would be #1.

#1 -

We’ve eaten here 65 times.  Wow, that number is higher than expected.  I bet over half of those times were for breakfast.  I asked Cheri to guess how many were breakfast and she said 50 if that tells you anything.  Like I said above, it’s a quick place on the way to or from the doctor’s office or any other time we are actually up early for something.  Although lately I have been eating here more because they’ve had the McRib for the last couple of months and I do love that.  It also doesn’t help that it is in the local Walmart that we frequent.

While those are the only stats I kept last year in regards to my life, I plan on keeping more this year.  We will see how that works.  I did find out that Goodreads keeps stats on books I’ve read for the year so I’ll post that below.

I guess I forgot to give stars on a couple of books, oops.  According to Goodreads, I read 70 books last year, which is over a book a week.  See what happens when you take away my internet at work, it makes me read a lot more.  You can tell when they took it away on my books finished page because my books read goes from 3 or 4 a month to 7 or 8 a month.

When I went to my books finished page to get the link, I noticed that the 2 books that aren’t starred are ones I finished in January so I must have started starring books in February.  Goodreads also shows how many total pages that I’ve read for the year.

I’d be impressed but I don’t really know if that’s a lot or not.  I read a lot of free books and some of those tend to be shorter.  I guess if you average it out it ends up being 251 pages per book so I guess it isn’t that bad.

I do also keep track of words and posts on this blog.  Do you want to see those?  I know you do.  I screen capped 2012 results alongside the 2013 so we can compare.

As I was figuring these out, I noticed that I posted exactly 199 posts both years.  I never noticed until today so it wasn’t intentional.  But as you can see, my word counts are lower.  The main factor in that is because 2012 I did more personal stories where I had longer posts and in 2013 I ended up doing a lot of weekly posts where it wasn’t stories and such so they were shorter posts.  My biggest month was April, obviously because of the A to Z Challenge. although it wasn’t my wordiest month, that was January and it had 10 less posts than April.  At the rate I’ve been blogging lately, this will probably be my worst year.

That’s how my 2013 was, how was yours?  No, I’m not actually expecting stats in your answers but you can still let me know.