My normal progress reports will come in the middle of the month between the middle of June 2023 and the middle of June 2028. Five years to do the 60 things. Let’s see how I’m doing.

And then there were nine

At the moment, I’ve announced 41 goals out of a planned 60. I know what another 7 are, which will take me to 49, I just haven’t announced them yet. And I have ideas about 2 more, although 1 is a different kind of goal, and I’m not sure if it’s a goal or just a side-effect of something else. Anyway, I confess that it feels weird that I have another 9 “unset”, so to speak.

I am never at a loss for goals. And sure, I could put a ton of things in those remaining 9, but most of them would be process goals. Clean up the basement. Redo the backyard. They are not, generally, stretch goals, which is what my list of 60×60 is supposed to do. Push me out of my comfort zone and do something that I wouldn’t accomplish if I don’t push harder. I don’t want incremental things, I want bigger concept goals.

But to be honest, I’m also worried that most of my 49 known goals are all within my comfort zone. Very few of them are “scary” in that sense. A couple here and there, and the level of commitment is a bit scary due to its ambitious nature, but I’m smart enough to know that if I commit to 60 blogs about topic X, and I only end up doing 35, that’s still an accomplishment. Since I’ve never done some of them before, I have no idea what my “baseline” performance should be. Should it be 60? 100? 20? I’ll find out. Others are one-time events, perhaps.

Yet I’ll still have at least 9 to fill in over the next 5 years. Do I ask friends for suggestions? Or wait for inspiration as I go? Time will tell. I saw an interesting article about starting new hobbies as an adult, and grabbed on to it thinking it would give me startling insights and exciting options that I hadn’t already thought of or considered on my own! It didn’t. Of the 10 options listed, I had 9 of them already covered and the extra one in the list was simply “get out into nature”, which isn’t a separate goal, just something that is part of other goals.

Of the two that are on my “possible” list, one is a certification in something. And what makes it interesting is I’m thinking of doing it without telling anyone I’m doing it until I’m done. Like, “Hey, look at me, I’m now a registered taxidermist!” or something like that. It’s something that would be a useful “skill” to have for some other things I have planned in the future, not something I would likely “use” to generate income. But I think it would be fun in its own right, only done for me, and an interesting story to tell when I’m done.

The other isn’t secret, it’s more a philosophical question. Should I set a weight goal? That doesn’t feel like “out of my comfort zone”, it just feels like regular business. And technically a weight goal isn’t a “goal” at all, it’s just a performance indicator of something else like health and well-being.

But I digress. I have announced 41, I know another 7-9, with 9 still to be determined.

Progress on 8 of my goals

3. Plan my retirement. I set my retirement date (August 27, 2027), am working on some of the financials, and I still have to work on the psychology and isolation adjustment. I might use some of my holidays in each of the next 5 years to “test drive” my retirement.

4. Read 300 books. While it seems odd to consider this one of my biggest accomplishments so far, it is. I have read 12 fiction books so far (out of 240), and a good chunk of my 13th. The Ben Aaaronovitch River of Thames series has fallen book by book for 6 of them so far; then I took a break to read To Die For by Lisy Gray; then 2 more non-fiction books (out of 60); and 5 novels by Galbraith (aka JK Rowling). Not a bad start. I’m really enjoying my new Kindle.

12. Restaurant Outings. So far I’ve done 3 out of the 60 that is my goal. Mexis (for dinner), Allo Mon Coco (for breakfast), and Merivale Noodle House (for dinner).

14. Cooking new recipes and 16. Curating 10 recipes. These two goals can be mutually reinforcing. For the new recipes, I want to do more with certain tools like the air fryer in our oven. Equally, I also want to curate a set of wings recipes. We recently did a batch of wings with Epicure spices — Chinese Five Spice and a Lemon Pepper. We did them as just dry spice rub, not “saucy”, and I would say the Lemon Pepper was the winner. Not that spicy, although we might put less on next time, good blend of flavour with the original wings. Next time, we’ll do some “control” wings with no sauce at all (Jacob’s preference). Let’s see if anything can knock Lemon Pepper off the top spot. Long-term, we’ll play with BBQ and oven-roasting as well. We’re using bone-in, skin-on wings for now too.

27. Play 60 board or card games. We own Uno Flip, and we have played it before. Yet this past week or so, we dug it out looking for something different and quick to play, and we have been REALLY enjoying it. So I’m counting it as one of the 60.

35. Blogs not including reviews and 36. Write reviews. This is my 18th post in the last month, with 13 regular posts (out of 260) and 5 reviews (out of 300). I also cleaned up my recipes and TV season posts, as well as music, but I’m not counting those as new.

Not bad

As someone noted earlier, my goals are ambitious. And while I made “concrete” measurable progress on 8 of them, there’s another 5-6 that I would say I made progress on as well. I haven’t quite got enough in place to say “Yes, HERE is where I am”, some of it is more informal scoping of the goal (such as figuring out which websites will be good to use to start my improved knowledge of the world for my memory challenge), but it is progress of a sort. Not very quantitative though.

I’ll say not bad for now. Partly because as I was working on this blog, another “goal” popped up as a possibility in my email. I’m not quite sure it’s a stretch goal yet, so I’ll have to think about it a bit more. But maybe that means I only have room for 8 more. 🙂 Anyone have ideas they want to suggest?