Tag Archives: goals

Hundred day mandates

The PolyBlog
September 24 2023

A strange confluence of thoughts merged in my brain earlier this week. When new governments take over, or even new Ministers within a Department, people inside government are often focused on the “first 100 days”. What is immediate, what needs to get done now vs. what can wait, that kind of conversation. Plus, “what can I do right now that will look like an early win”. Usually, it’s either low-hanging fruit or it’s an announcement of a plan over actual results.

It interests me a bit because, as you know from my blog, I’m frequently interested in anything that has to do with goal-setting, results, monitoring, etc. And right now, I’ve been thinking about my future retirement of late.

For some reason, the two collided in my brain, partly as I was thinking about the fact that is really hard to picture the time between now and retirement — 1433 days today, i.e., 204w and 5d or just shy of 4 years — as anything other than one big blob of time. How do I break that up into more useful “chunks”? Could “100-day mandates” do something for me?

What are the dates?

 Friday, August 27, 2027  
1Wednesday, May 19, 202710014w, 2d
2Monday, February 8, 202720028w, 4d
3Saturday, October 31, 202630042w, 5d
4Thursday, July 23, 202640057w, 1d
5Tuesday, April 14, 202650071w, 3d
6Sunday, January 4, 202660085w, 4d
7Friday, September 26, 2025700100w, 0d
8Wednesday, June 18, 2025800114w, 2d
9Monday, March 10, 2025900128w, 4d
10Saturday, November 30, 20241000142w, 6d
11Thursday, August 22, 20241100157w, 0d
12Tuesday, May 14, 20241200171w, 2d
13Sunday, February 4, 20241300185w, 5d
14Friday, October 27, 20231400200w, 0d
 Sunday, September 24, 20231433204w, 5d
15Wednesday, July 19, 20231500 

I threw some #s and formulas into Excel, working from my expected retirement date (August 27, 2027). From there, I worked backward in terms of 100-day “chunks”. I have a countdown clock on my website to help me keep track of the total number of days, just for fun, but it doesn’t do much beyond that. The chart above? It gives me some planning dates to play with.

If I time-travelled back to July 19th, my hundred-day “mandate” for myself would have been heavily weighted towards the trip to New England. I would have identified, too, my interest in processing all the pictures when I got back, but I wouldn’t necessarily have committed to updating all of my photo albums on the website for earlier years. I mean, it’s on my regular to-do list, but I’ve been thinking more about things tied to my 60×60 list than my regular list.

Which brings me to a small visualization tool that hit me. Technically, I’m using three sets of tools simultaneously.

First, I have my big 60×60 goals tied to turning 60 in 2028. They’re big, they’re ambitious, I’m making progress on them.

Second, I have my ongoing to-do list and goals, a rolling evergreen list out the wazoo. It needs trimming and updating, but it’s not a bad list.

And now third, I have my goals that are related to my retirement. Or, well, sort of. They’re not a different SET of goals, not really. More like they are a way of triaging the other goals into more concrete implementation steps. What do I want to accomplish on my various goals limited to the NEXT 100 DAYS.

Except I don’t have the full 100 days right now

My next “milestone” date will be Friday, October 27, 2023. That will get me on track for 14 “units” between then and retirement. That is just over a month away, which means I really only have 33 days until then. What do I want to accomplish in what is left of “this 100 days” that started 67 days ago?

If I look at my 60×60 list, I can see some that are well underway and will be completed in the next month:

  • 01 Plan my life…this one is relatively self-explanatory;
  • 03 Plan my retirement…this contributes to that, but won’t complete it, just move it along a bit;
  • 04 Reading…yep still going;
  • 05 Write 5 books…October is National Novel Writing in a Month (NaNoWriMo) and I’m going to break off some other things so that I can focus heavily on finishing my HR guide;
  • 07 Exercise…we have the exercise bike assembled, so will restart those;
  • 16 Cooking: Curate wings recipe…we’ve tried out some new rubs and spices and will keep going;
  • 25 3D Printing items…I want to get my printer going at least ONCE this coming month;
  • 35 Write new blog entries…well, this one counts too;
  • 42 Travel…the trip to NE covered this for 2023;
  • 49 Photography…I took photos of waterfalls during the trip, but haven’t written it up yet;
  • 56 Fireworks…we saw the fireworks put on by Ukraine;

If I look at my regular list, I would prioritize the following (not including ones that overlap with above list):

  • Finish Crime and Punishment;
  • Setup video games in the basement;
  • Assemble Lego Colosseum…well, keep working on it, at least;
  • Restart upload of gallery…I’ve got up to 2004 fully done, and 2005 was already there, so I’ll start puttering with 2006;
  • Assemble exercise bike…hired out and done;
  • Assemble workout bench…hired out and done;

Soooo, what do I do with that?

My next 33 days

I already spoiled things a bit by noting that I’m going to do NaNoWriMo this year with a focus on my HR Guide. That’s my big deliverable.

Of the remaining 16 things on the two lists, I am committing to four more as absolutes.

I am going to set up my video games in the basement. This isn’t born of a big desire to be playing regularly; it’s about getting the stuff out of boxes, organized, and set up for use.

Once those are out of the way, I want to get my 3D printer going so that I can print some stuff for Christmas. But I need to figure it all out before then. If I don’t get going soon, it will be WAY too late.

For my website, I will slow my roll so to speak on getting new galleries up on the site, in favour of more time spent writing. But I’ll keep nudging along.

And while last in order, but not priority, I want to get working out again on the exercise bike, BowFlex and bench.

I can live with those items as potential major accomplishments for a month until I can set the goals for my REAL first 100-day mandate for myself. While the video games and galleries are more “regular” list, exercise + writing + 3D printing are all key foundations for my retirement planning.

Just a piece of the pitch

The PolyBlog
September 21 2023

So, from the earlier post about not hitting the curve, I’m now a day later, and I’m out of some of the initial funk.

First and foremost, of course, I found the missing parts for the exercise bike so the big “spiral” moment was mostly averted.

Second, and almost equally important, I had the guy come to the house and do a bunch of work for the day that helped jumpstart some of my old goals that have been lingering for quite a while.

Obviously, he assembled the exercise bike. I had printed some instructions, and just looking at them was almost a traumatic trigger. They are/were HORRIBLE pictures. You had to stare at segments for 15 minutes to even comprehend where screw 4 went into part 3 that was separated from main part 7, blah blah blah. If you get it, you get it; if you don’t, IKEA looks like ideal schematics by comparison. The guy that came, Sam, is great and has done work for me before. He is really good at this stuff, he’s assembled this type of bike before, more or less, and I think he did most of it without wrestling with the instructions. Awesome. Except even for someone who is GOOD at this, and who didn’t need the instructions, he still took 30 minutes to do it. Now, admittedly, he also put a screw through a broken part and reattached it. It’s not particularly a relevant part unless you’re moving the whole bike around (it’s like an extra roller so you can tip the bike and then move it more easily…if you leave the bike mostly in one spot, the part isn’t that critical). Anyway, he got it together and Andrea and Jacob tried it last night. All functional.

He also assembled a workout bench. I mostly wanted it so that I could lie flat on it, but it does angle up and has some stationary bars to let you hook your feet for stabilizing your lower body, etc. It probably would have taken me about an hour with someone like Jacob or Andrea helping me, while rolling around on the floor and getting frustrated with the diagrams. Instead? Sam had it together in thirty minutes. One hour in and Sam had two of the four projects done.

He tackled the Gorilla cart next. It is a large professional-grade utility cart, and one that I planned for carting all my astro gear from the garage to the backyard in one go so that I wouldn’t have to make a whole bunch of trips. And with a little planning, I could even throw a tarp over it and leave some of my gear in it between outings. Now, I know this cart is a pain in the patootie to put together. I’ve seen online videos of people saying how awesome the cart is but how painful the assembly process was. It’s just big. Sam is really good, has all the tools to do it, AND it still took him a full hour of work to assemble it. When I talked to him, he said, “You know, this is really industrial grade. It’s not really a home cart.” He had to use his power tools to get all the parts to go together in the hour, or he would have been much longer still turning bolts and nuts. Uh huh, that’s why I’m paying you, dude. Cuz I don’t want that pain. Now, don’t get me wrong, he LIKES doing this stuff, but it was a tough slog for that second hour.

The fourth and supposedly final project was one that I initially was going to do myself. We have a trampoline, great quality, amazing device. Yet it was an absolute beast to assemble. They had views of guys assembling some aspects of it one-handed by themselves like they were laying lace doilies on a table. In our case, we had me on the ground underneath the trampoline BENDING the sides as far as I could, while Andrea and her mother hauled on the canvas, and her dad hauled too. With all four of us PULLING, we could attach the parts. But once together, it’s fine. Just REALLY heavy. The solution for moving it is to get 4-6 really strong people and lift it. Uh huh. I always keep 3-5 spare people in my shed in case I need that kind of muscle work. OR you can get wheels made by the same company, attach them in a criss-cross pattern to four equally-spaced spots on the trampoline’s base, and bob’s your uncle, you have a way to use the wheels like a lever. You put in a wrench, lever the wheels into their DOWN position, and the trampoline goes up. Do all four wheels and the trampoline is elevated and ready to roll. Once the wheels are down, Sam can move the whole thing by himself. Great tool. We repositioned the trampoline closer to where we wanted it, and then put the wheels back into their UP positions.

Four projects done in three hours. Pretty sweet. So I asked if he wanted to consider a fifth. A few years ago, or maybe more since I know it was pre-pandemic, we bought a new doorknob for our main door. We needed to replace the latch at the time, which I did manage to do with a bit of help. But there was a second component for the deadbolt — an electronic keypad. I would have tried to install it long ago, but we just ran out of time when we did the first part. So it sat in our living room for a while in a box. Then in a bag. Then we got rid of the box to the garage. Then we weren’t sure where the bag was when we asked him to look at it. Sam initially figured about 30 minutes or so. Hah!

The mechanism was too big to fit into the existing deadbolt hole. And the frame of the outer door is metal, not wood. Dun dun dun. Sam had to get creative to make everything fit, which he did at my request, and one full hour later, we had a new e-pad on our front door. It’s surprising how much this will mean to us.

When I go out, I am almost always going in the car, so I have my car keys with a front door key on the ring. Yet equally regularly, I have 3-4 things that I’m carrying for the route to work, or going shopping, or whatever. I need a new shoulder bag so I can put it all together more easily, my man purse if you will, but I don’t have it right now. But that means I don’t have a free hand to take care of the front door with key, pulling the door tight, locking, etc.

For Andrea, she doesn’t drive, so often when she goes out, she doesn’t need a big key ring with a fob or anything. The only keys she has is to the mailbox and our house. While the garage has a keypad on it, it’s a bit more elaborate a routine to open the garage door just to let a person into the house. With the new pad, if she goes for a walk, she may not even need to take anything with her. Or if she’s the last one out of the house, she doesn’t have to dig for a key, etc. She can literally press a button and turn the bolt mechanism to lock with one hand. All good.

Jacob has a key to the house, but never uses it. He’s almost always with us or we’re home when he needs to go in or out. Often when he gets home, he waits for us to get out first and then slowly follows us to the door. The last few days? He raises to be the first one to the door, in the house, shoes off, and gone before we’re out of the car. I don’t know who this kid is, actually.

There are obvious benefits for guests too. Parents, siblings (at least the ones we like) or friends watching the house can get a code to get in without any need to get together first or hide a key for their arrival. Kind of like an AirBNB for friends, here’s your code. Let yourself in when you get here.

But a bigger irritant was removed today. For some inexplicable reason — and really, we’ve asked — the cleaning company we use keeps sending people to our house without a key. They arrive, complain they couldn’t get in, and leave. We get home late in the day to a WTF moment…whyyyyyy? They have a key. Why did they not bring it? Needing keys is not unusual for a house cleaning service. Most people are NOT home (although the pandemic changed a lot of that). But I think this is about the fourth time in 2 years, and maybe the third time in 3-4 months that they have forgotten their key. Which means things like beds that were stripped so the cleaners could clean need to be re-sheeted so we can sleep in them. It’s not life altering, don’t get me wrong. I know that. It’s just really irritating. This week? Andrea texted the owner and said, “Here’s your code”. We came home, they had been, the code worked, no issues. Hallelujah, and pass the ammunition!

So, five projects that are all relatively minor; yes, I/we could do almost all of them myself/ourselves. But here’s the thing. For the exercise bike? I knew it was going to be a pain in the ass because I’m the one who assembled it the first time, with Andrea. Really, really frustrating. So I’ve sat on the project since we moved in many years ago (we had originally partly dismantled it in order to move it as the seat and frame were too wide for doorways).

The work-out bench was self-indulgent. We could have done that ourselves. Instead, I basically paid someone $30 to put it together and get it off our to do list.

The utility cart, by contrast, was big. We could have done it, but as Sam said, some of it really needed the right power tools to make it go efficiently. I had no interest in spending 3-4 hours assembling it. It cost me about $60 to have Sam do it. Again, done. I feel we COULD have, but meh, nowhere near as efficiently.

The trampoline wheels were ones that I said I thought about doing myself initially. But you have to be down on the ground, fiddling with the frame on something that was a royal pain to assemble, etc. Sam knew it was one of the tasks (we chatted in advance), and he brought a small hydraulic lift so the could get at the frame better. Fantastic. I don’t have one of those though. So I am not confident that even with 3-4 hours, I would get it done. I know it would have been supremely painful and frustrating. Even Andrea didn’t have a burning desire to touch that one, although she felt we could do the bike, bench and cart ourselves.

Finally, the extra project for the door pad? Sam took an HOUR including having to CUT THE DOOR frame to make things fit. I would have had NO chance of doing that, not even close.

So I totally feel that it was money well-spent. I’m not particularly thrilled that TaskRabbit takes a slice of the pie AND slaps on a $10/hour service charge that seems to do nothing other than line their pockets. The TR contractors hate the fee too, but well, they like the website gigs. I had booked him for about four hours to do four projects, and he managed those four plus an extra one, too. That’s a pretty good deal, I think, all things considered.

And they’re all DONE. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. When it comes to home handyman work, I write a mean cheque.

Yet at the end of the whole day, having taken Jacob to band in the morning, worked my office gig for the day, and picked him up, while also liaising with Sam the whole time he was here for any questions he had, I was totally exhausted. Definitely glad to be done.

And I’ll count it as having caught a piece of the pitch. I didn’t drive it deep into left field, but at least it was a credible swing overall. And did I mention that five big projects just came off my old to do list?

“60 x 60”: Goals 42 – 60 – Travel, actions and learning

The PolyBlog
August 17 2023

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.

60×60 – Formal progress report #1 / 60

The PolyBlog
July 20 2023

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?

“60 x 60”: Goals 25-41 – Embracing creativity

The PolyBlog
July 12 2023

Earlier, I talked about my “writing goals” for 5 books, which is obviously a pretty ambitious creativity goal already. Some of that will be back-ended most likely, and I have a lot of other creative outlets that I’m pursuing. But many of my other goals are activity-based — exercise, cooking, events, etc. While some of them, like cooking, may seem creative, they are not really what I’m thinking of when I’m tapping creativity. So today I’m going to list a LONG set of new goals designed to push my creative juices to the forefront.

25. Make 60 items with 3D printing. I have a 3D printer, and I haven’t got it up and running yet. There’s a lot of psychology tied up in the “why not”, too long to address here, and besides, I’ve already talked about it before. I’m sure everyone was taking notes on previous posts hehehe. Annnnnyway, I want to do more “fun” things for the future when I get it going, BUT for some of it, I want to design the prints myself. I was tempted to commit to more items than that, maybe one a week, or to require that the items be designed entirely by me, but that’s a bit unrealistic. I suspect in most cases, I would take an existing design out there and tweak it to what I want.

26. Make 60 items with other methods. That probably sounds vague, but it is a bit of an odd grouping to categorize. I have Lego kits to assemble. A plan for a Raspberry Pi. Repurposing old computers into a video game option with Jacob. A robot. Oh, and just for fun? I’ve had a very long commitment to wanting to learn more origami. Like, all the way back to Grade 6 when I first saw it. I’ve got paper, books, diagrams, everything else except apparently the will to commit to actually doing it.

27. Play 60 (physical) games. I want to call them board games, but well, there are card games in there too. Now, I could JUST play the ones we already have in the house, and that would reach 60 right there. But most of them wouldn’t count. We play them too often. No, for me, this is a bit like the restaurant commitment — it can’t be somewhere we would go without effort, and it can’t be a game here that we would play anyway. It has to be something that takes a bit of effort to do. For instance, I played Camel Up with friends a few months ago and really enjoyed it. But finding a copy to buy is almost impossible, it’s out of print currently. Soooo, if I want to play, we have to make time to go to their house and play. Assuming they’re willing to play again. Equally, I’m getting into Print ‘n’ Play games that I’ve found on the internet. Full games, ready to play, or at least ready to play once you download them and print them. With lots of fun little hobby-like tips and tricks to make it more creative when doing the assembly.

28. Design 5 board games. Jacob has lots of ideas about board games, and has already created a few at a camp he was part of during previous summers. I want to turn them into playable games, using the tools from the above hobbies. In a sense, I’ll use the techniques of 3D printing and the tools/approaches for PnP games to support building and designing 5 board games with Jacob.

29-34. Complete six learning courses. I’m assigning them by calendar year, so there’s a bit of a glitch in the planning where I get 6 calendar years including the current one for learning. I know the first one is going to be learning to use GIMP. I’ve already started, in fact, although I went a bit sideways of late. The other 5? I have some ideas, but not sure in which order or if my plans will bear fruit. I might decide I want to do something on Greek history and then realize it’s really boring. So it is more the commitment than knowing “exactly” what it looks like yet. But they are going to be significant enough that I want to treat them as separate commitments, not simply 1.

35. 260 new blog entries (not including reviews). There are times when I get away from the blog, just sort of drift. By contrast, I know there are people out there who commit to one post every day. And I might average out to that in fact when some things are posted. But I’m not talking simply about counting ANY blog topic, as many of them are out of bounds for the goal. For instance, posting my writing for books contributes to other commitments, not this one. Equally, I’ll have a separate one just for reviews. So those will be out. Mind you, somewhat ironically, this blog post itself DOES count. Basically, I want to blog about my thoughts and what I’m doing, not just meeting quotas. Call it free-range blogging. 🙂 About once a week.

36. 300 new reviews. Remember those board games I’m going to read? Books? Movies to go to or TV shows to watch? Recipes to curate? Well, I’m going to blog about them in the form of reviews. All added up, I’m aiming for 300 reviews. I haven’t quite decided if it is 60 per topic or just 300 in total, as I could probably meet most of it just from reading books. Or posting old TV show reviews of seasons. But we’ll see as I go. I would like a bit of a balance.

37. Curate a list of 300 of my favourite songs. I think the final list will ACTUALLY be a bit longer than that, but not sure what the rate will be for the next 5 years. I want to commit to 600 songs on the list. Maybe even 1000. But I’ll commit to 300 for now.

38. Learn to play the piano. Okay, this requires a bit of explanation. No, I’m not going to start the Conservatory plan and try to do tests or anything. I will rely on books, videos, maybe a lesson or two here and there, plus guidance from Jacob and Andrea. My goal, such as it is, is basically to get to the point where I could play 10 songs relatively well, albeit with errors. I don’t want it to be cringe-y I guess. Kind of songs that my mother would have enjoyed hearing, even if not perfectly played. Yes, it’s a separate goal from the learning courses above. Those are more knowledge, this one is more creative. And the goal is in-house performance, not some recital or public performance. Maybe a random video for evidence.

39. Do a memory challenge. Do you remember way back in high school when you took chemistry? I don’t, because I didn’t take it. Not because I wasn’t into science, or wasn’t intrigued by chemistry, but in part because the idea of memorizing the periodic table looked really hard and seemed ridiculously stupid. If you watch Jeopardy, you frequently see people talking afterwards about how they learned x or y, and often it was flashcards to help them get ready. There are whole internet sites and fora where people debate the best ways to prepare. For me? I am not very good at geography. I probably couldn’t label more than 15 states on the US map, maybe 20. European geography? Probably 10. Asia? Here and there okay, other areas would be a total wash (particularly islands). And Africa? Fuggedaboutit. Soooo…here’s my thought. I want to be able to turn myself, for a one-time performance, into … wait for it … Yakko Warner. Remember the Animaniacs? He did two renditions. All the US states and their capitals AND all the countries of the world. It was updated a few years ago for the list, although set to the same music. Jacob did it a few years ago, and I want to follow suit. Except that part of my learning is not just the words to the song — I want to be able to memorize where on a map they actually are…when we play trivia together, I avoid geography questions like the plague while Jacob and Andrea double down on geography, worldwide, and travel and leisure. Soooo, I’m going to do it. I’m going to memorize the US states AND the countries/nations of the world.

40. Do a brain challenge. This one is a bit harder to figure out what to do. Lots of articles out there talk about using your brain, challenging yourself, doing Sudoku or crossword puzzles to stay fresh and active, don’t let your mind turn to mush. I have an app on my phone called The Puzzle Page. I wonder if I should use that, it’s simple, and I enjoy doing the puzzles. I used to do the puzzles on my Android app, and the status didn’t transfer over, unfortunately, so I restarted from scratch. Back when the app started, they had about 4-6 puzzles per day of different types. Now it’s closer to 8-10 from a longer list of x puzzles. Some are really easy — Armada is a bit like a picture cross except there are only a set number of “blocks”, almost like a negative-space picture cross. Circuits, Ox and Xs, Picture Block, Picture Cross, Picture Cross (Colour), Picture Path, and Word Search round out the list of 9 easiest ones. For a medium level of challenge, I would put Bridges, Charge Up, Cross Out, Cross Sum, Futoshiki, Picture Sweep, Quote Slide, Wordy. and Word Snake on the lower end while Codeword, Kakuro, One Clue, Sudoku, and Word Slide at the higher end for me. I find Crossword, Killer Sudoko, and Link Words the hardest, just an extra set of parameters or more the need to see “letters” in permutations and combinations that are not the way my brain thinks. I’ve always struggled with more advanced crosswords. And this one has three or four variations of crosswords for their daily. Call it about 26 official types, around 30 unofficial types. According to my progress, I have completed 4800 puzzles on this app, 322 days worth of puzzles, 158 special pages, 14 special issues, and 17 events. It takes me to level 199. Some I find easy and boring, others I find hard and boring. Others in the middle are fun, but the completist in me wants to keep going. Is it the best way to keep my brain stimulated “formally”? Or do I do something more test-oriented. Like downloading some math contests from various sources out on the net and completing them. I like logic puzzles, could do more of those, but often my challenge is how long they take to work through the hard ones. I’m not looking for an activity that takes me 45 minutes a day to do. The app is good, I can try something out for 5 minutes, and move on. I don’t know if it’s the right “set”. Is my goal 10 a day? Or do I do something really off-beat. Like set myself up that at some point in the next 5 years, I’m going to pay to re-write the LSAT or GMAT that I last took when I was 23. It’s certainly an external arbitrary standard way to gauge change in brain power, at least by focusing on the percentile aspect.

41. Learn to juggle. I don’t have very good hand-to-eye coordination. But I’ve always thought that it would be fun to be able to juggle, at least basic stuff. Three balls. I’ve thought about other things like rolling coins on my knuckles, the pen spin people used to do in school (and which Jacob does now), but I never really had the dexterity for it. I think I can do juggling? Or at least try and create some funny embarrassing videos of myself. And no, I don’t want to develop a routine with 5 oranges, a knife and a chainsaw. I just want to try the basics.

It’s more creative than I am now. Maybe there will be other things to add, but that’s my list so far.