I have two motivated and capable daughters who are having great success navigating through their busy lives raising kids and thriving in their careers while taking care of their personal needs as well. The daughter I see most often (because she lives in town) berates me pretty often about how slow my progress is on completing my 60th birthday bucket list items. This week, the other daughter added a curmudgeonly comment on my Facebook post: “How is ‘create bucket list for 70’ on the list when you haven’t finished 60”?
Point taken, but you do realize, daughters, that I have a full year to complete the list, right? And, yes, I do realize that I only have seven months of that year left! So, here’s what got accomplished this week.
Create my own website: If you are reading this, you will have noticed that I redesigned the look of my site. It badly needed it; however, regardless of the sales pitches used by WordPress, this process was not “drag and drop,” “plug and play,” or any of those computer catchphrases that make it sound easy. It took me two days to get the links at the top to work properly, and this morning I already spent two hours trying to fix the table on the “LIST” page, with no luck.
You’d think it would be easy to delete the extra spaces in a table so that it isn’t so long and spread out. Thinking that, I installed a plugin called “Easy Table.” Easy, right? Well, the plugin is now listed as “active,” but a way to actually use the thing is nowhere in sight anywhere on my WordPress dashboard or on the page editor. Gaaaa!
Enough complaining about that. Most of my readers have no idea what pain is involved with websites, so I’ll let it go. I will only say that I’m contemplating adding “learn HTML” to my bucket list. Could come in handy.
Learn to use a spreadsheet program: My curmudgeonly daughter (I’m going to get grief for that adjective) is an Excel expert, and I was lucky enough to see her (and watch her kids) last Saturday. She showed me how to move lines easily, and this has been a great help. I was going to check this item off as “done” rather than “in progress,” but whereas for my present purpose my Excel education is done, I am humbled that my daughter is composing her own dedicated drop-down menus for Excel and thus I am very aware that most learning is “in progress.” I’ll give myself a little longer to discover a few more tricks within Excel and gain speed at using it before I consider myself “done” there.
Read War and Peace: I made it to page 143 (of 1,224) this week. It’s not as tough going as I thought it would be, at least so far.
Fit into my skinny clothes: Bob’s and my favorite Christmas gift to each other was a Magic Bullet blender with which we have been making nutritious breakfast and lunch drinks. Combine that better eating with more running, biking, and even swimming, and my new scale reads a pound less this week than last.
Onward and upward! I’m going to try to check off some of the quick items on my list during the upcoming week, such as “watch Citizen Kane.” Now, like my daughters, you have some expectations of me. I’ll let you know how it goes.