Okay, well I wasn’t as productive as I’d hoped to be this quarter. I’m chugging toward the finish line slowly, and the way things are going, unless I win the lottery, I am not going to finish everything on my list. The upside is that in this, my third attempt at the 101 Things, I have crossed the 50% completion mark, and I am really happy about it. I got another chunk of things done this quarter (detailed below), and I am feeling pretty good about my progress.
This is my second-to-last quarterly update. I can’t believe I’m coming down to the wire on this. Crazy. Next quarter I’m going to mark a bunch of stuff as “failed”, seeing as there’ll be no way in hell to get them done before the end of the project.
Quarterly Metrics
Completed tasks this quarter: 6 (5.9%)
In-progress tasks: 7 (6.9%)
Overall Metrics
Days completed: 843
Days remaining: 158
Completed tasks (total): 52 (51.4%)
In-progress tasks (total): 20 (19.8%)
Failed: 1 (0.9%)
Completed in Q4
16. Plan for Paris-Brest-Paris (PBP) 2027. I decided a few months ago that I wanted to do this for-real-for-real — it’s been on my bucket list since the early 1990’s — and I’ve been noodling with the idea for awhile now. I’ve researched the requirements, the registration dates, and so on. I’ve joined MN Rando, a randonneuring club locally, and I’ve been planning on what I need to do to get ready for this. It’s going to be amazing. I’ve got a lot of work to do between now and summer of 2027.
26. Build a WordPress plugin to manage these 101 Things lists. Holy poop, this was a fun one. I spent a couple of days defining the project and then blasted through the thing. I’ll be using it to manage my next iteration of this insane 101 Things project, which will help automate things nicely and make things like these quarterly updates go a lot more smoothly.
39. Go infinite in Marvel Snap. I’ve been playing for a couple years now, and had never gone infinite (gone past level 100 in a season). The highest I’d been was level 93. In March, I buckled down, did a bunch of research on decks, put together a couple new ones, and managed to go on a tear. I’m done with this one, but likely not done with the game. At least not for awhile.
61. Read at least 150 books. I came into 2026 with only 16 books left to go. I made the mistake of making one of them Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion, which really bogged me down, as the audiobook is 34 hours long. I’m not likely to be done reading for the year, obviously, but I did manage to finish this task.
75. Do at least six online courses. In February, I finished a writing course from Alan Moore on BBC Maestro, and in March, I blasted through “Web Application Architecture and Deployment,” (Udemy) which was…painful. One of the worst online courses I’ve ever taken, at least from a standpoint of production quality.
79. Take more snowboarding lessons. Yeah, totally rocked this. And I’m feeling pretty good. The new gear (Burton Step-On bindings and boots, #101, completed last quarter) definitely helped with things.
Notable In-Progress Tasks in Q4
5. Ride three brevets. I registered for the City Slicker 200km (late April) and the Twin Ball or Bust 300km (early July), and the Southern Tour 600km (late August). I will likely treat the DAMN as my 400km event, seeing as how it’s 400km long. These don’t qualify me for PBP — but they serve as great rides to start wrapping my head around ridiculous distances again, and the Southern Tour will qualify me to register for the PBP in the second wave of registrants.
15. Touring frames. I’ve got a ’94 Stumpjumper FS that I’m going to turn into a touring platform, and I’ve been researching stock frames for Didi.
17. Ride the DAMN. I registered for this in January as soon as it opened, and I spent the next day planning my training, getting logistics thought-through, and brainstorming with Didi on how we’re going to work the support side of things. I’m deep into training now, and with the way my rides have been going so far, I am feeling really good about things.
19. Ride at Ray’s Bike Park in Cleveland. I had planned on doing this in February, but got sidetracked for multiple reasons. The upside is that Didi and I are going to try to get it done before the end of this 101 Things.
20. Scoutreads build. Front-end layer is basically done here, and I am moving on to the user accounts and login functions.
21. PCAP Certification. Jammed through the studying. Taking the test in April.
89. Go to at least five concerts. (7/5) This was actually finished last quarter when we bought tickets for the Yacht Club Festival in July of 2026. But, I kinda wanted to note that I also got tickets to Guns N’ Roses/Public Enemy for August of 2026, a week after the DAMN, and Weird Al the night before the Southern Tour, my 600km brevet for the year.
