Lent... the results!

Ok. I have a confession - a measley 9 days short of Easter, I watched television. Whoops. I blame being ill and too tired to face a dvd or a book on Friday - my body craved ER and Chuck and resistance was futile. One of the things I've learnt through the 38 TV-less days is that I find watching TV relaxing - just a 45 minute episode when I get home from work or if I'm tired is really welcome.

So, was the whole thing a success?

Well, I've left several shows by the wayside that I no longer want to watch - Masterchef, Being Erica, The Mentalist and Heroes off the top of my head. Battlestar Galactica and ER have both finished (though I still haven't seen the end of BSG so it's still a no spoiler zone!) and Lost ends soon, so they're now out of the picture. Which leaves How I Met Your Mother and Chuck. 2 shows. Well, actually make that 3 - after listening to other peoples opinions on the matter, I've decided to stick with Dollhouse as apparently it gets really good as soon as the studio stopped interfering. So, it's early days, but I appear to have shed the group of shows that I didn't care about, and I have no intention of going back to them. In order to avoid picking up too many things again, I'm going to try to limit myself to less than 5 shows at any time - enough to give me that hour of relaxation when I need it, but not so much that I stop doing other things.

In terms of giving me free time to do other stuff, it's been a tremendous success. I've watched a few more films than normal (the mostly highly recommended being The Fall), I've definately read a lot more (9 or 10 books since the start of Lent, compared to the zero that I'd read in the preceeding few months). The biggest success though has to be in regards to my writing. When I started Lent, I had a few notes in a notebook, but not much else. I now have about 20,000 words. Which is a pretty good start to a first draft of my novel. I've also discovered the delights of devoting a spare evening to writing in a cafe, rather than using it to catch up on tv at home.

So I did miss TV, more than I expected if I'm honest. But I also did manage to use the time to do other things and get back into the habit of writing and reading in my spare time, so I'd say on the whole it was a success... However I'm now really looking forward to catching up on all the stuff I've missed :o)