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“Go everywhere,” he said at last, in a low, kind voice; “do everything; get everything out of life. Be happy – be triumphant.”
– Osmond, in The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James
Jane and Mo have both done this, as well as plenty of other people on the internets, and I’ve been thinking about this for some time now. There are lots of things I want to do that I keep putting off for one reason or another, and since I’m feeling better, I thought I might start tackling some of them. Plus, I love lists, and this is, like, the mother of all lists.
The idea, if you haven’t already figured it out, is to come up with 101 things you want to accomplish in the next 1001 days. And then do them. I’m posting this here as a regular post, but I’ll add it as a page tab across the top, so you can follow along with me, if you like. Here goes nothing:
Start date: August 1, 2009
End date: April 28, 2012
Creative
1. Find a way to sing again – in public
2. Work my way through one quarter of “No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog” (0/25)
3. Start keeping a personal journal again (without the pressure of feeling like I need to “recap” everything that’s happened since I last kept one, which is the reason I haven’t started doing it before now)
4. Make 5 more journals and give them away
5. Draw something suitable for framing
6. Blow up and frame a photo I took
7. Blog at least three times a week for 3 months (0/12) (0/3)
Travel
8. Go to 5 states I’ve never been to (0/5)
9. Take a train somewhere far away enough that I have to book a sleeper car
10. Visit a national landmark I’ve never seen before
11. Visit a tourist trap I’ve never seen before (like the World’s Largest Ball of Twine, or something)
12. Spend a weekend in Amish country at a Bed & Breakfast
13. Visit my friend who lives in LA
14. Spend a night at the Wigwam Village Motel in Holbrook, Arizona
15. Ice skate at Rockefeller Center
16. Finally Yelp! Fat Matt’s Rib Shack from our trip to Atlanta (short version: go there)
17. Go back to the Excellent Dumpling House in Chinatown in New York (where they really do serve excellent dumplings)
18. Go to Coney Island (when it’s open this time)
Tourism at Home
19. Take a Duck Boat tour of D.C.
20. Visit the September 11 Pentagon Memorial
21. Take a tour of Old Town with one of the colonial guides
22. Take a Segway tour of D.C. with my mom
23. Go see the dolphin show at the Baltimore Aquarium
24. Go to the National Zoo
25. Go to 5 new museums in D.C. (0/5)
26. Go to Arlington Cemetery
Home
27. Finally finish unpacking the books
28. Try 2 new recipes a month for 6 months (0/12)
29. Put loose recipes into binder
30. Go through boxes of high school and college memorabilia and toss everything that no longer holds meaning (0/2)
31. Host a dinner party
32. Bake something that requires yeast (which scares me)
33. Enter a baked good in a contest
34. Hang curtains in bedroom
35. Bake a cheesecake from scratch
36. Cook meals for lunches at work two weekends a month for 3 months (0/3)
37. Find out what, exactly, chipotle en adobo is, get some, and then make something with it
38. Find dulce de leche and re-attempt Death by Caramel Bars
39. Grow mint so I can learn to make my own mojitos
40. Get caught up on putting photos in albums and printing photos from my camera
41. Buy a scanner
42. Upload old photos
43. Go through photo files and name all photos
44. Buy an apron, maybe from Etsy
45. Find a recipe for beef burgundy and try it out; see if it compares to this
Health & Fitness
46. Lose 40 pounds, 5 pounds at a time (0/40)
47. Journal food intake (i.e., get back on track with Weight Watchers) for 30 days (0/30)
48. Run another 5k
49. Take a kickboxing class
50. Take a dance class
51. Get off my medication
52. Floss every day for 30 days (0/30)
53. Take Pico to the vet three times (more as medically necessary) (0/3)
54. Take my vitamins every day for 30 days (0/30)
55. Work out 5 days a week for one month (0/20)
56. Finally upgrade my processor or get my back-up processor fixed
Financial
57. Establish a savings account and deposit money from every paycheck
58. Create and implement plan to pay off credit card 1
59. Create and implement plan to pay off credit card 2
60. Create and implement plan to pay off car
61. Figure out whether and how to roll over old 401(k)
Recreation
62. Attend an NFL game
63. Go ice skating
64. See games at 3 Major League ballparks I’ve never been to (0/3)
65. Go horseback riding
66. Fly a kite
67. Go to the drive-in
68. Join a bowling league
69. Go to a monster truck show
70. Drag David into a photo booth get a photo strip of pictures of us
71. Bowl a perfect game on Wii Bowling
Enrichment
72. Read Anna Karenina
73. Learn to play Euchre, so I can play with David’s family
74. Learn all the state capitals by heart
75. Take a class at the community college
76. See half of the movies on AFI’s list of the Top 100 Films of the Last 100 Years that I haven’t seen (0/23)
77. Finish Heart of Darkness, even if it kills me
78. Learn to use 3 new features on my digital camera (0/3)
79. Watch the third Godfather film (I’ve seen the other two, and I need to know if this one’s really as bad as they say)
80. Re-read all 7 Harry Potter books
Community
81. Volunteer with the Girl Scouts
82. Do 10 nice things for strangers and don’t tell anyone about them (0/10)
83. Leave a secret in a Post Secret book at the library or bookstore
84. Write three letters to companies whose products I enjoy (0/3)
85. Write three letters to companies when I have a problem with a product or service (0/3)
86. Send a care package through AnySoldier.com
Personal
87. Ask my grandmother to write down five memories of her own mother for me
88. Have the Princess and Conductor spend an overnight with me in D.C. and take them to do fun stuff
89. Write actual letters to 10 people telling them how much they mean to me (0/10)
90. Go one weekend (from 6pm Friday to 7am Monday) without using the internet (including from my cell phone)
91. Do something special with Aimee in 2011 to celebrate 20 years of friendship
92. Take David on a picnic
93. Continue the Christmas cookie weekend tradition with Karen (0/3)
94. Get a haircut and maintain it with regular (every 6 months) trims (I haven’t had a hair cut in more than a year)
95. Write myself a letter at FutureMe.org to be delivered on the end date of this challenge
96. Find a new job
97. Finally get my diploma and bar certificates framed
98. Send someone flowers for no reason
99. Buy new running shoes
100. Buy new iPod
101. Marry David
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So there you go. What do you think? Too ambitious? Not ambitious enough? I can’t decide. A few notes:
- The things that are for 30 days at a time or the like are meant to get me into the habit of doing those things. I don’t intend to stop flossing at the end of 30 days, or quit taking my vitamins, I just wanted to challenge myself to get back into good habits.
- At the end of the challenge, I will donate $2 to a charity (TBD, probably hearing-loss related) for every goal on this list that I did not complete. (If I complete them all, I’ll donate $202 to the charity.)
The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaieties, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
1. 4-day workweeks
2. A good book you don’t want to put down
3. Tacos
What are you happy about today?
In Scouting, a boy is encouraged to educate himself instead of being instructed.
– Sir Robert Baden-Powell
It’s fortuitous that NaBloPoMo ends Friday. Tomorrow’s Three Things Thursday, and for Friday’s post I just have to put the finishing touches on something I’ve been working on all month and put it up that morning. Then, David and I are flying to Detroit for the weekend, so blogging probably won’t happen, but Saturday’s the 1st, so I’m home free!
David’s brother is being promoted (is that the right word?) to Eagle Scout and the ceremony is Friday night. David promised TJ that he’d be there, so off we go. I’m looking forward to it, actually. I really like David’s family and I’m excited to see them again. We’re actually going back at the end of August for several days before heading to Buffalo (with a side trip to Toronto) for my cousin’s wedding Labor Day weekend (I’m a bridesmaid yet again, and the dress is awesome – I’ve have very good luck in the bridesmaid dress department). I’m hoping we’ll get up to the Northern Penninsula on that trip; I hear it’s beautiful.
That’s all the vacationing we’re doing this summer. David has tons of vacation time saved up – so much so that he’s got to use something like 10 days before the end of the year or he loses them – but I don’t, so I’ve got to save some for the holidays. So I want to live vicariously through all of you: Where have you gone so far this summer, or where are you still planning to go?
If winning isn’t everything, why do they keep score?
– Vince Lombardi
Yahoo! We did it! We finally won our first game! 16-11! And I hit a double, and had an RBI, and fielded some balls out in right field! And kept a mean scorebook during the innings the subs were in! Yay!
P.S. I just made up the title to this post. I don’t actually know if we’ve played 13 games and lost twelve, but I know we’ve lost every game we’ve played until tonight, so I just picked a number out of thin air. I suspect I’m not too far off.
I remembered my secular father’s only strong spiritual directive: Don’t be an asshole, and make sure everybody eats.
– from Grace (Eventually): Further Thoughts on Faith, by Anne Lamott
Five more posts, including this one, and my NaBloPoMo experiment will be a success. Good thing, too, because I’m running out of ideas!
Here’s one thing I’ve been thinking about, though: Are there any rules you had growing up that you hated or thought were stupid, but which were so ingrained in you that you still follow them now?
This came to mind this weekend, when I set my alarm for 9AM even though I really wanted to go to bed without setting it at all and just sleep as long as I pleased on Saturday morning. Growing up, mostly when my brother and I were teenagers or home from college for the summer, my mom’s rule was that we couldn’t sleep past 10 in the morning. In her words, any later and “you’re wasting the day.”
And as much as I hated it then, I’ve come to really believe that my mother was right. You can accomplish so much before 10AM – gym, errands, laundry – and then you have the whole day free to do whatever else you want to do. Since moving in with David, I don’t get up as early as I used to on the weekends (8 or 8:30), but I do usually still get up by 10. It’s just pathological; I feel bad about wasting the day if I stay in bed any later.
So what about you?
You need three things in the theater – the play, the actors, and the audience – and each must give you something.
– Kenneth Haigh
I’m really pushing it today to get this in under the wire. As it is, my posts on Reader make it look like I missed a day and posted twice on the 24th, but I swear that’s Reader’s fault for not updating in a timely manner and not mine!
Today, we finally got to go see Second City’s Barack Stars. There was a snafu with the tickets last weekend and we didn’t get to see it then, but we got it all worked out for today. The theater was quite small – intimate, I believe is the proper term – and every seat was filled. The show – the parts I could understand – was great. But there was a lot of fast talking and dropped punchlines (you know, how sometimes you lower your voice at the end of a joke to make it sound funnier?), and, of course, laughter that obscured some lines, so it was enjoyable, frustrating, and sad for me all at once. David, though, was cracking up the whole time, and he’s been having such a crappy, busy time at work the last month or so, so it was so great to see him smile and laugh for two hours straight. The best line of the show? “Honey, what do you think about this abortion bill?” “Pay it.”
At the end, after the show, the actors – there were six of them – came back on stage to do a little improv exercise. They sent two of them (one man, one woman) out of the room, and the others asked the audience for three words – we came up with bodacious, legerdemain, and conjugate. The other two came back in, and in teams of three (men v. women), the two that had heard us choose the words had to act out each of the three words. It was like the very best game of charades I’ve ever seen. A lot of fun to watch.
We just got back from playing putt-putt at the hardest course I’ve ever played. Remember back in September, I planned a date weekend for me and David that included miniature golf? And remember how I won, and David kept insisting I cheated (because he’s a sore loser – though he’s totally teasing)? So this was a rematch, and man, did I ever tank. Though I was, again, the only one of us to score a hole in one (and I got to yell “Get in the hole” like the spectators do at real live golf events), I still lost by eleven strokes. I’m not even kidding. But David was happy so that was good. I’ve been kicking his behind at tennis for three weeks running (10-4, 10-8, 6-4) and on the way home tonight he said, “Finally, I beat you at something besides thumb wrestling.” Hee. For the record, he also beats me at arm wrestling and checkers. Like, kicks my ass at checkers so badly it makes me cry.
Anyway, it’s bedtime now. Maybe I’ll get some reading in. I’m reading My Sister’s Keeper by Jodie Picoult because I want to see the movie and I know the movie ends differently from the book, so I want to be able to compare them. Have a great Monday, everyone – see you tomorrow!
If thou tastest a crust of bread, thou tastest all the stars and all the heavens.
– Robert Browning
Today, I pulled all of these ripe tomatoes from our tomato plants:
(There’s a sixth one hiding under there somewhere.) What to do with my bounty? David, despite being the primary caretaker of the tomatoes, does not like them (except in ketchup and tomato sauce), so the tomato-eating duties fall to me. What a shame.
I decided to make what is probably my all-time favorite food, one that takes me back to my time in Spain in high school and college, and one that could almost not be any easier: pa amb tomàquet (in Catalan) or pan con tomate (in Spanish) or tomato bread (in English – duh).
Here’s all you need: a baguette or peasant bread, some tomatoes, olive oil, salt and pepper. That’s it.
Here’s how you do it:
Slice the baguette in half lengthwise (or slice the peasant bread in thick slices). (P.S. This baguette was still warm from Panera’s oven when I cut into it this afternoon. Don’t be jealous.)
Slice a tomato in half (not lengthwise – you want the top to be one half and the bottom to be the other half) like this:
Then take one half of the tomato and rub it – firmly – over one side of the cut baguette. Repeat with other tomato half and other baguette half. Don’t be afraid to really squeeze the tomato – you want all of its insides on your bread. Depending on how juicy your tomatoes are, you may need more than one for this step.
Then, if you want (and I did, since this tomato was so fresh), slice up the mutilated tomato and eat it!
Next, drizzle some olive oil over each side of the bread – for this size slices, I used about a teaspoon per slice.
Finally, sprinkle some salt (and pepper if you like – fresh ground is best, but powdered will do) on each slice.
If you try this, an optional step is to toast the bread (or put it under the broiler for a few minutes until it’s crusty) and then rub raw garlic over it before the tomato step. I like it that way as well, but I’m really more of a purist when it comes to this. Also, be careful – a little bit of raw garlic on the toasted bread goes a loooong way.
Then eat. I will not be responsible for any swooning, drooling, fainting, etc, that may occur upon your first taste of this little bit of heaven. I added some thick slices of Swiss cheese on the side (not really what we would have in Spain, but still a great addition), and a little bit of Sangria because, why not?
If you were to ask me if I’d ever had the bad luck to miss my daily cocktail, I’d have to say that I doubt it; where certain things are concerned, I plan ahead.
– Luis Buñuel
What’s your favorite? Right now I’m drinking a Greyhound, which is just vodka and grapefruit juice, since that’s what I have in the house; when I’m at a wedding or somewhere else with an open bar, I usually opt for a screwdriver. But my two favorite mixed drinks are mojitos and Malibu Bay Breezes. Yum.
Let the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby
– Langston Hughes
1. Big, fat raindrops
2. Watching lightning flash in the distance
3. Cracks of thunder that rattle your bones, but don’t scare you because you’re safe and warm at home
(Can you tell it’s storming here?)
What’s making you happy today?
The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.
– from Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell
I’m cheating a little again, because it’s 9:30, and I’m in the middle of making dinner, and I’m still exhausted from yesterday.
I’m making chicken and dumplings for the first time ever, which is taking longer than I expected, and I’m nervous David won’t like it. He’s a good sport and tries anything I make, but I can always tell when he doesn’t like something (and he always answers truthfully if I ask him). And although I know it’s not personal, it makes me feel bad when he doesn’t like it, because I only want to take care of him, and food is one way I do that. I’m working on this – I know he won’t starve if he doesn’t eat what I make, and we don’t always have to like the same things, and it’s not a reflection on my skills as a cook. I’m a work in progress.
Anyway, back to the cheating. Please enjoy the following pictures of me and some of my favorite people:
Me and Karen last summer – she’s thinner now and I’m heavier!
Me and Aimee somewhere in the neighborhood of 9 years ago at a Sister Hazel show. This is still one of my favorite pictures of us.
Me and Nate in Atlantic City, before our dad’s band played at House of Blues (he’s wearing orange because it’s my dad’s favorite color).
This was the Princess’s third birthday. Now that I look at it again, they both looking like they might be squirming to get away from me, but I promise, they are actually laughing!
Me and David in September at my friend’s wedding on Long Island (I was a bridesmaid).
I saved this in the middle while we ate dinner – success! David liked it quite a bit, and though I thought the seasoning needs some work, it’s definitely a keeper (but probably more for fall and winter)!
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