This batch is somewhat eclectic, so I’m grouping them all together.

42-47. Spend at least 1 week outside of Ottawa per year. In my tracker, I noted this goal as a travel goal. And at first, I was thinking “outside Canada”. But as I thought about it, I realized that it could just as easily be to Alberta or BC, the cottage, Mexico, the US or Europe. What I really want to do is “get out of my house” for a trip of “some” kind where I am not doing “the same old thing” at home. Before the pandemic, maybe that would have been “outside Canada” as a goal; now, it is outside Ottawa. And I thought about making it just a single goal with several sub-pieces for the years, but they are WAY bigger than that for planning, execution, and just overall effort and experience. So I am creating a separate goal for each of 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026, 2027, and 2028.

48. A weekend retreat. Before the pandemic hit, I had been thinking of doing a weekend away somewhere. While Andrea likes the idea of it being a couples thing, and I like that too, that isn’t what this goal is. This is about me doing a weekend by myself to just sit and think about my life, my goals, etc. Maybe it’s a writing weekend. Maybe it’s a vegging weekend. I don’t really know. I just like the idea of trying a weekend to just be alone somewhere, no phones, no connections. To unplug from my life entirely. To gain perspective. Or at least to get a different one. Maybe I last 5 minutes and I’ll be craving the connection; maybe I’ll drift into peaceful bliss. But I want to do it sometime, maybe even as early as this fall.

49. Photos of waterfalls. I love waterfalls, I confess. And as a semi-photography, semi-creative, semi-travel goal, I want to take photos of 60 waterfalls over the next five years. Some will be small, more rapids than falls. I’m okay with that. Some might be a small trickle of water instead of a raging torrent. And I’m okay with that too.

50. Photos of sunsets. Similarly, I want 60 photos of sunsets. Two of my favourite photos from our past travels is a sunset over the ocean from a beach in Hawaii and another of a sunset from a small pier area in Matane, QC. Not to mention numerous photos of sunsets from the cottage.

51. Volunteer at doing something different. I’m not sure what this goal means, exactly. Sounds odd, right? After all, I came up with it. But I guess I mean a new area of volunteering, different from what I am already doing for the HR Guide type mentoring, AstroPontiac or RASC. Recently, the Peterborough Astronomical Association asked for a volunteer to run their website. It’s more work than I wanted, but I considered it until I realized that the site is actually manually programmed. Shudder. I could have taken it, but the first thing I would have done was swapped it over to WordPress probably. But someone else stepped up, so I don’t feel obligated to take that on now. Maybe it will be a different organization that I don’t even know about yet. Something maybe Treasurer-ish? I don’t know. But it’s on my list. Heck, maybe it will be the public library somehow.

52. Ride an e-scooter. I used to want to try a segue, but never really got around to it. Now, they have the e-bikes and e-scooters. I’ll probably just rent one sometime for an afternoon to give it a try. A friend rode one back home over the summer with his brother and fell in love. Now he wants one of his own for Ottawa, and he’s going for a super-powered one. Seems overkill to me. Maybe I’ll eventually buy one, but for now, I just want to try it. Ideally, with Andrea and Jacob giving it a go too to see if they would be comfortable enough sometime on a trip to do a tour with them in some city. I’d love to use it to go all around the hills above Rome someday. It was a REALLY long hike the day I did it.

53. Ride a jetski. I have ZERO idea where or how I’m going to do this. I don’t know anyone who owns one, or where I can even rent one for an afternoon. I could do it at a resort somewhere I suppose.

54. Drive a boat. This one is, seemingly, pretty easy to accomplish. We have a boat at the cottage, and all I need to do is pay to take and pass the boating license test for Ontario which is pretty basic. Probably not this year, maybe for next year.

55. Language learning with DuoLingo. I haven’t quite figured out the specifics of this one. I have DuoLingo, and I do it for awhile and then get out of the habit. The “streak” motivates me but they have these options where you can “save” your streak if you miss a day. Which I don’t want to do, but you can’t turn them completely off. If you miss a day, it’ll ask you on the next day if you want to save it. If you say “no”, it says okay, and then if you have a free save already earned, it will use it anyway for you. To “help” you. I don’t want the help. So the last time this happened, I had three earned “saves”, and I had to wait at least 4 days to kill the streak after I missed a day. I don’t mind using it if I happen to do it at like 12:30 at night, just timeshifting. But if I totally missed doing it between the time I woke up, and the time I went to bed, that’s a miss for me. And so I got out of it, and never went back. It’s not a few seconds, it’s a good 10-20 minutes of practice. Sometimes I have the commitment to do that time, sometimes I don’t. Anyway, regardless, I’d like to complete all the training for French before I retire (for no real good reason), and maybe start on either Spanish or German. I’d love to try something like Mandarin, but I definitely don’t have an ear for tonal languages. That might be a really really tough one.

56. Go see professional fireworks. I thought about committing to this as an annual event, as just “any fireworks”, but well, that wouldn’t require much of an effort. So I upgraded it to “professional” fireworks but downgraded it from annual to at least once. Ottawa has options put on by the Casino du Lac Leamy. They offer four to five countries each year a chance to compete, and they are put on their display in the river behind Parliament Hill. It’s a huge crowd that gathers all along each side of the river, and there’s an option to reserve and pay for the “perfect” seats behind the Museum of History. But there are other venues too (Montreal, Vancouver).

57. Curate the best root beer. Recently, I became really interested in root beer choices. And so I want to do a side-by-side choice sometime to contrast and compare them to choose the one that I like best. Just something fun to do.

58. Curate the best vanilla ice cream for home. I like vanilla ice cream, as it seems like the purest form. Any vendor might come up with a great combo for cookie dough or raspberry or a host of other flavours, but to me, I judge their offerings when there isn’t extra flavouring, toppings, sauces, etc. added. How good is the purest form of the ice cream? That’s the test. And recently I saw an article that did the same in Ontario with everything they could find easily available for take-home ice-cream. But my immediate thought was, “Hmm, would I agree with their choice?”. Hence a new goal to repeat the process myself. I know, it’s a dirty job, but someone has to take the hit for the team.

That leaves me two open slots. One that I’m still considering, but which is likely to remain confidential until I’m certified, if I do it at all (59. Get certified as blah blah blah). And number 60 which is still “open”. I suspect that I’ll fill it with something “event-ish” or a “one-off activity” like the scooter or jet ski options. I’m not sure what it will be yet. But I can think of it as “60. Do something interesting” for now.