Ok, I’m 40, big deal.
Here’s my update to my 40 by 40 blog post.
I’ll put a check mark in front of each of the items that I accomplished and an update in Bold.
—–Update—–
*Updates in italic
Inspired by a former classmate’s blog, I’m writing a similar set of goals, her original post has been removed.
So here is my 40 by 40 list. I’m sure I’ll be able to accomplish a few of these things, at least I hope so. Some of them may seem selfish, but keep in mind this is my personal list of goals, of course they will sound selfish.
These are the things that I would like to accomplish by my birthday in May of the year 2016. To do this I need 8 lists in five categories.
Life in General:
√ 1. Still be alive at age 40, this could be a challenge for anyone, depending on eating habits, lifestyle in general, success of skydiving attempt, etc.
2. If I’ve accomplished that goal, I hope to be in better shape than I am now. I want to weigh about 190 lbs, currently I’m around 230 or so, fluctuating at times like Holidays when I’m very tempted to eat unhealthy food and lots of it. – Working on it
3. Run in some kind of race/marathon. Not a full marathon that would be stupid. Or take part in some kind of cross country ski race like I did when I was in my 20s. I participated in the Lumberjack Jaunt in Brainerd, Minn.
√4. Have another child. Currently we have one wonderful kid, Madeline who is now seven years old. I think I would like to give it a shot having one more kid. Yep, and his name is Noah, wonderful kid! Still a wonderful kid!
√5. Continue to be married to my lovely wife, Jennifer. By the year 2016 I still want to be married to her, like any couple we have our ups and downs, but at the end of each day I’m happy to be with her. Also, see number 4 above, it would be hard to do that without her (yes I could do that with another person I don’t want to). Still married! Yes!
Finances:
6. Be debt free. Oh, don’t make me laugh. I’ll be lucky if I can pay off one of my credit cards by this year.
√7. Have paid some of my student loans back. All of it, would also be a pipedream.
√8. Pay off our current car loan, so we can buy another car or two and start that process all over again.
9. Have some kind of savings account with enough money in it to take a nice vacation, such as cruise that your wife has been begging for since she married you.
10. Have enough money in a college fund for Madeline to begin college and (have at least started one for this other kid if we have one).
My music hobby:
√11. Be able to play your guitars still at this age.
12. Learn at least 10 new songs, hopefully by then you will have learned to play a few Pearl Jam songs.
13. Start a band (okay this might be dumb idea, but I need 40 things to list for this blog post). OR attend one more Pearl Jam concert or some cool concert. I used to go to them all of the time but lately I haven’t been to any for a long time (well last year I saw Bon Jovi in Fargo again, but hey that’s just Bon Jovi).
14. Record a top selling hit with your new band and sell it on iTunes (okay, this is just crazy talk).
√15. If nothing else, make sure you teach Madeline how to play a song on the guitar.
Work:
√16. Continue working at the job you love. Yes and still loving it!
This is where it gets interesting, not only am I still at my job and loving it, I was elected President of our State Association, not just once, but re-elected. I also serve on a regional board for ASPIRE. #TRIOWORKS
√17. Learn how to be better at that job.
√18. Make more connections with people.
√19. Help others be better at their job.
20. Really get a start on that home business. If you want to know more about it (shameless plug, visit this website).
Education:
21. You’ve got your Masters Degree, how about maybe thinking of getting your Ph.D. again.
22. Take at least one college course just for fun.
23. Teach a class or two a local community college or community education program.
√24. Read a book on how to do something you don’t know how to do (this should be easy, there’s a lot of things that I don’t know how to do).
25. Learn the meaning of life, the universe and everything (Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy reference, just had to throw that in of course).
Personal selfish goals:
√26. Continue writing a blog or whatever this called by the year 2016.
√27. Buy an iPad or an Macbook Air (I still can’t decide which is better, this is actually probably fodder for another blog post). Didn’t buy one, but I have one from work!
√28. Buy an iPhone that works on Verizon (this is probably a pipedream for many reasons, but I won’t get into that now). Oh yes, thank goodness I finally have one!!!
29. Buy a sporty car, see this is even a lower priority on my list than an iPad. Actually this list isn’t necessarily in an priority but it kind of is a little bit, especially the first 10 or so items.
30. Write a novel, about what, I don’t know. I started doing this last year but I ran out of steam and gave up. It was something about Rugby North Dakota and I was posting daily updates to it on twitter, lame idea now, but at the time it seemed really cool.
31. Get your novel printed.
32. Actually, I should get my dad’s book printed. He wrote a short book about his life describing his early days growing up during the Great Depression. I typed it for him while in high school (albeit with many typos etc) and recently I tried to work on it and get it printed from a site like blurb.com but haven’t succeed yet. My wife wants to proof it before I print, I might just have to do it and not listen to her or it will never get done.
33. Inspire someone else to write a blog post just like this or similar to it with their own “bucket list” well that’s really what this is, now that I think about it. It’s things I want to accomplish before I “kick the bucket” aka die or get too old to do them.
√34. Here’s one that’s actually hard for me to do coming from German family (my heritage is German so we’re like this, or at least I’m blaming this on that) tell my parents I love them before they die. Yes this should be number 1 on my list, and heck I might even edit this and change it to be that but like I said I come from a family where expressing emotional feelings is something we suppress. I need to find more proof about this German theory thing. I’ll update this later if I find more proof, I’ve heard it from people before and I swear I’ve seen it too.
√34. A. Okay I’m kind of cheating, this actually might make my list a 41 item list, but this is my list so I can do whatever I want. Heck I might do more edits like this, add things as sub items. Alright I want to reconnect with my old friend Luke Fiedler, he’s kind of been ignoring me the past few years. Part of this is both of our faults, but mostly I’ll blame him. He’s got this aversion to technology or at least e-mail, cellphones, facebook, etc, so it makes it really fricken hard to contact him. So Luke, buddy old pal, I hope I can make this happen. Reconnected with him and he also has a new addition to his family!
35. Get at least more than my wife and two other people to read this. I’m sure by just posting a link to this on twitter or reddit, I’ll get a few suckers to read through this, if you actually do that, thank you it means a lot to me.
36. Get someone to comment on this God damn blog entry. That never happens for me. Proving my theory that no one reads the stuff I write or cares to say anything about it.
37. Become better at writing blog posts, heck just better at writing in general. I used to somewhat make a living from doing this when I was younger working for newspapers, and yes I admit I was not the best writer in the world but I think I can string together complete thoughts.
√38. Watch Ishtar. Okay, this one is a weird one, but I have a friend who claims this is the worst movie ever. I’ve never seen it and from what I’ve read about it, it’s probably true but I want to see for myself. I finally saw it, it wasn’t the greatest movie of all time, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought. The singing was horrible but that was the point of it. Basically, it’s about two guys who are song writers who can’t sing who get sent to the middle east and get involved in some CIA deal.
39. Read Hitchhikers Guide to Galaxy series of books again. These are my favorite books by my favorite author and it’s been awhile since I’ve done that.
40. Write a 50 x 50 blog post and one at 60 too and so on.
The last one was left blank, see number one, so if I’m alive at age 40 I can finally complete this list.