Asteroid Day and Challenge update

Asteroid Day is a global movement to increase knowledge and awareness of asteroids, and everything I know about it comes from the European Space Agency website.  There is detail here from the press announcement in February, and loads of activities are expected to take place at museums and establishments around the world. All sorts of scientists and celebrity astronomers are taking part.  See if there’s one near you, and check out what else is happening on the ESA website today.

Asteroid Day is held on 30 June – the anniversary of the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history, at Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908. The first Asteroid Day was launched in 2015, inspiring more than 150 events worldwide, attended by tens of thousands of scientists, academics and members of the public.

Check Twitter #asteroidday2016 as well.

What will you do?

Half-year Challenge Round-up

Back on planet Earth, I think I ought to draw your attention to my annual Challenges, since I’ve stopped reporting on them monthly – although they are updated in the Challenge pages in the menu top left as I go.

• The Alphabet Reading Challenge is going well, easily ahead of schedule, although we have also instigated an MG book A to Z on Great Middle Grade Reads on Goodreads, which is trickier.
• The TBR Mountain is being climbed steadily, in spite of throwing in new books from Net Galley, I managed to make a big hole in the pile in May when I joined the Clean Sweep Challenge and read an astounding (for me) twelve books in the month. I look set to achieve my aim of 24 books off my TBR, and maybe a few more.
• The What An Animal IX Challenge is working away.  I achieved the first target of six with not much hardship, then got the bug and covered four more (thanks in part to dogs and snakes on covers), and expect to complete the challenge of 12.  I probably won’t extend that further.

The overall Goodreads Reading Challenge is way ahead of schedule thanks to the Clean Sweep, but it gives me a chance to focus on writing for a bit.  And editing.  Both of which I need to do, and urgently.  So I suspect my target of 52 books is easy, but it’s better for me not to feel pressurised to read these books – especially when my bookclub throws in the 1000 page-plus of Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth!  It doesn’t fit any of my other challenges – not even a mouse on the cover.

Writing challenges are not going so well – I’m behind my word count tally for Short stories and flash fiction. Although I’m not counting repostings as in Flashback Fridays, I am counting the Character Interview posts that will appear next month, since they are fiction.  Really, they are…

And so far I have done all my monthly blogging challenges, IWSG, Fi50 etc.  Although I think I’m skipping my A to Z Road Trip in July, and aim to post that again in August.

You know, every winter I say I’m going to ease up.  I wish I’d learn how to take my own advice.

Binary Asteroids photo from ESA (esa.int/images)