Things are very exciting, but I’m also very occupied with the everything of it all that has been the past few months, and it’s eating up a lot of time. I’m getting settled and caught up enough to start getting some extracurriculars taken care of. However, one of those is National Novel Writing Month (in which I’m participating for the first time this year but am definitely not hitting the intended word count–goal of 20,000, woooo!), and so most/all of the time I’m assigning to “writing” has been going to that.
Once again, I keep starting to write something for here, then get frustrated with not focusing and so I don’t end up posting anything at all. I would really like to start updating this more regularly, though, so I’m just going to post this so there’s something for me to keep building on.
Here look, I gave myself a challenge and did it!
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Checking out all of these places was pretty fun, despite losing my gloves and parts of it turning into a bittersweet tour of places I went to first with people who don’t talk to me anymore. It’s not a particularly extensive list of sites, but as a relatively geographically-challenged individual, I feel slightly better about my knowledge of where things are in the city. I also felt pretty good about all the walking, because did I mention I pretty much walked to all of of these places? I did, I walked to basically all of them from downtown.
I’ll start writing more focused posts soon, I promise! However, my sister just asked me to help keep her on task, which reminds me that I am also not on task. Until next time, here are the things I’ve checked off my bucket list since my last post:
Live in Boston
Learn what my vocal range/type/whatever is for singing
Chug a Frappucino
And here’s what I’ve added:
Jump a subway turnstile in NYC
Participate in NaNoWriMo >>> Participate in NaNoWriMo correctly
I received one challenge, from my grandmother, for my trip home with my sister:
I challenge you to go to the Casa Bonita restaurant in Denver on your return trip. See if it looks at all familiar!
The restaurant of Eric Cartman acclaim has been a semi-regular point of interest for my family on trips out west over the past four decades, and I hadn’t been there since I was about eleven. I think I found all the parts of the restaurant that I do remember, but there was a lot that apparently didn’t stick the first time for me. We were pretty underwhelmed with the food (fortunately a friend warned me that it’s “the worst food ever,” so I was prepared), but otherwise I could see it being pretty fun if you were there with kids. The sopaipillas did not disappoint, and no matter what, it would have been worth it for the joy that these two Google reviews bring me:
I know it’s longish, but seriously, I encourage you to read this surreal nonsense
Holy crap. Such spectacular melodrama.
Anyway, I have about three thousand things on my to-do list this summer before I move to Boston. Even though “get rid of things” is patently on the list, I’ll be honest, I did not pick up the “get rid of things” challenge when I got home like I was supposed to-do, as per my promise in my last post.
What I did do is find the bucket list I organized and then lost a few months ago–I’ve been working on a lot of lists lately. I wanna post some of that one because I can get a little negative here sometimes, I like having hopes and dreams, and at least it’s content–I’ve even finito-ed some of the items 🙂 Maybe making it public will give me more accountability or something, too:
Learn to juggle
Get really good at building fires
Be a barista
Be a waitress
Hug a tiger >>> Hug an adult tiger
Live in Boston *pen hovers above item*
Learn what my vocal range/type/whatever is for singing
Get married
Have kids
Do a 5k
Write a short story>>> Finish a short story
Touch a London pigeon with my foot
Visit all 50 states
Learn to drive stick
Learn to drive a motorcycle
Get professional headshots
Pinup photoshoot
Kiss the Blarney Stone
See Stonehenge in the early morning
Learn a valuable zombie survival skill
Start a retirement fund
March in a televised parade
Own a “FRANKIE SAY RELAX” t-shirt (just learned that this was apparently a thing with Ross on Friends when I was looking up a picture to link to here; he was definitely not the inspiration for this item)
Drive from the right side of a car
Ride as a front-seat passenger on the left side of a car
See Breaking Benjamin in concert
Learn all the words to “One Week” and “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”
Eat poutine
Eat haggis
Make my own perfume
Blow glass
Go down and then back up the really scary huge dune they say not to go down right off of Lake Michigan at the Sleeping Bear Dune park
Be able to do the splits
Be able to hold a handstand
Bake a rhubarb custard pie
Bake perfect cookies
Bake rum cake with pie cherries
Go to a wine tasting
Drive someone else’s car because they got too drunk
Get stitches>>> Get stitches from an interesting injury
Have a pleasant reading/speaking voice
Do a backbend from a handstand
Make a quilt
Knit a blanket
Learn how to use a gun
Get waxed
Be able to identify specific penalties in hockey
Have a work husband
Meet a Pittsburgh Penguin
Read Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Read The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
Go to a casino
Make sourdough bread like my mom’s
Bake with yeast successfully >>> Bake with yeast more successfully
Take my youngest sister to see Chicago on Broadway
That’s not all of it, but I’ve literally filled out four notebook pages so far, I know there’s stuff I keep forgetting to add to it, and I suspect these goals are more interesting to me than to you 😛 I’ve got a to-do list to work on anyway, so I better go cross “New blog post” off of it.
Completed my challenge! It wasn’t a particularly difficult one, but my challenger-sister and I just drove from North Carolina to California in four days, and I think I maybe made myself sick on one of them trying to make sure I finished reading on time.
My challenge was to read this book by today:
Melodramatic as that title is, I enjoyed the novel pretty well. The story is a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, so–as a fan of fairy tales and their various manifestations–I was excited for this challenge. It’s set in a fictional woolen mill inspired by the early Industrial Revolution and the cultural transition of values from superstition to “reason.”
The narrator is incredibly frustrating sometimes, and there are several characters in whom I was more interested, but the plot itself was strong enough that I didn’t have any issues sticking with it. It’s an easy read, I really like the writing, and I’m grateful for the pleasant resumption it provided for my challenges.
I discovered in the author’s note that she visited a functioning 19th century woolen mill in Missouri which is extraordinarily convenient to the sight-seeing trip that we’ll be taking back east next week. If I can convince my sister to read the book herself before we leave, I think it would all be pretty cute to check out the Watkins Woolen Mill State Historic Site as an interactive follow-up to this challenge.
This is the part when I should choose a new challenge from the suggestions I have. However, since I am on this grand cross-country adventure, I’d like to open the floor to travel-challenges for my sister and me in case anyone has any good ones that we can afford. My last post got 5 views, so I’m not overly expectant, but you can’t get what you don’t ask for. So! At risk of this being a particularly clumsy conclusion, I am requesting challenges relevant to a drive through northern CA, NV, UT, CO, KS, MO, KY, WV, VA, and NC. Thank you and good night.
Non Finito Spaghetti 
