#51. print & hang photos for house

When I made this list up, I guess I should've been more specific. We have printed several dozens of our travel photos at this point, and hung several of them up, too. No, not all of the photos are printed, and not all are hanging up, but seeing as how we have limited wall space and storage room for photos, so what?

I think what I really wanted was to get serious about the photos we took almost three years ago now; we've done that well, I think. Most are loaded up on a flickr account, some of the best were printed, framed and hung. So there.

That said, I'm really proud of our pictures. They look great and I think are a good cross section of where we've been and what we've done: thus, who we are. We gave pictures away at our wedding, and it was no coincidence.

#73. say "hi" to people instead of nodding

This was was a bit of a letdown. Not much is different. Maybe I'm coming off differently to people now. Parentheses/question mark.

#85. go to Montreal (if only for a weekend)

I went to Montreal twice, but only once for fun. The now-wife was there and it was absolutely great. It's weird going back to a place you lived in. It wasn't quite like walking through the neighbourhood you grew up in; the city is still the same size and the sites are similar, but it was a strange mix of feeling at home and a guest at the same time.

To heighten that weirdness I even went back to our old neighbourhood; even the grocery store we used to scrounge by on $40-$60/week at. We also went and checked out the new condos at the end of our old street and some of the new stores around.

I would love to move back there. I would love to regain the feeling totally at home there. I would love to live in that city on more than $16k a year. There are so many things at your disposal. Alas, practicality has to rule the day.

Of course, mastering French is somewhere on this list...

#34. go to dentist

This one isn't easy to write. For a long time, I prided myself on perfect teeth. I suffered (5 years of orthodontics and permanent retainers) for them and I was proud of them. Smug, even.

But then the crushing poverty of young adulthood meant that I didn't keep up with my dental hygiene as well as I should have. I can't remember the last time I'd gone to the dentist. Years. Several.

I have a job with benefits now and so I went to capitalize on it. I've now been to the dentist four times. I had five cavities, much to my shame. I still won't tell my parents. There's something to chew on, Dr. Freud.

But I'm glad I'm getting this done. I feel a great weight is being lifted and that I'm repairing the damage my neglect has done, or at least as best as could be approximated. Still, I can't help but feel shame for there being active decay in my head while I've been walking around.

#50. hang blinds in kitchen

Done. As done as it's going to get, at least. The problem with renting, of course, is that you can't actually do much about your dwelling. So the fact that we don't have an actual window frame per se means that most hangings won't work. However, we do have something (at least partially) obscuring the view into our home, and so that's mission accomplished.

#72. increase Facebook friends by 20%

Much easier than I thought. The wedding thing helped push me over the top, but the initial worry of contacting someone on Facebook is always unfounded. It's an almost meaningless exercise.

I suppose this goes against my Web 1.0-style-carefully-constructed-ICQ-contact-list. It's fine, though. It's good to catch up with people, and Facebook lets you act more as a voyeur than actual participant in people's lives which is probably the attraction.

#58. get married

I've been doing more on my list than I've been updating on, and I'll try to keep up with this here. But this one just happened on the weekend, and it was a great time.

There was a long time in my life that I just didn't ever see myself getting married. Didn't see the point, didn't understand why people would throw so much time and money into something so trivial that could be done at city hall, if even that. But family considerations made me realize that, for us at least, this wasn't about us at all, but about our families.

We're not from the same place and our families have never met. These days, our families rarely get to see us. This doesn't even begin to account for friends. So we agreed to basically throw a huge dinner party for loved ones. We invited lots of people and the vast majority actually showed up, which was really a powerful statement to us. Most came from far away and had to make serious investments of time and money to do so.

So we felt loved, we brought people together, saw old friends, facilitated people making new friends, and had a great time. It was a lot of work, and I never want to do it again, but it was spectacular.

#75. grow hair for 6 weeks

What an absolute travesty. I only made it to five weeks, but I wasn't going to go any further with this one.

I started to noticeably bald when I was about 21 or so. That was premature, but I went with it for a while. I kept my hair short at that point anyhow and that masked it for some time. Eventually even that didn't do enough and I figured I might as well take it all the way down and shave it off.

Two points of note, here. First, I never had good hair. I never knew how to do cool things with it. Or even uncool things, really. Second, I started shaving it when I moved to a new city where I didn't speak the common language and didn't want to find a new cheap place that also spoke English. That new city also meant I couldn't afford anything anyhow, other than a pair of clippers.

So I shaved it off. I would've been a few months short of 23. It was great. For the first time in my life I had a semi-consistent "look". I did it with the expectation that by the time I was in my late 20s I would be old enough and bald enough to keep it short and just be a balding guy. No big deal, no shame in that.

Now here I am in my late 20s and want to give the late 20s/early 30s comfortable-enough-with-himself to be obviously balding a shot. Well, I'm old enough but not bald enough. It was patchy. It was uneven. It felt unclean. I looked like I had mange.

So I shaved it off (again). Maybe when I'm looking at 35.

#66. become organ donor

Huh. That was easy. One quick download, print it out, trim it to size and that's all there is to it in my jurisdiction, apparently. I'm supposed to tell people about this, which I think I have, but I'll re-tell them, I suppose.

Organ donation. Why not? Assuming they don't take them from you while you're still using them, what's the difference? One of my other items on the list is to make a will, and the hardest thing to do for that, if I have to spell it out, will be to outline what should be done with me.

But that's another story. Organ donation is a big yes, and I think it should be the default option, and have people opt out of it rather than opt in. Or maybe donors could get a tax break or something. That's a bit macabre and could be interpreted as being paid for organs, but I don't see it like that. I think by doing this I'm merely being a good citizen, and human.

#27. get weight down to 170 & maintain for month

I've cheated a bit with this one. I originally started my list back in the summer of 2007, and that was one of my goals. By the end of fall 2007 I'd done it. From late October until the end of the year I was within 1% of 170.

I remember when I started losing weight. It was late January 2007; I was probably 225-230. The change was involuntary on my part, but I wanted to keep with the team attitude, so I went with it. And I stuck with it, even when I didn't have to. In conjunction with my necessarily moving around more often, I started losing weight. Steadily and not too much at a time. I feel better now that I generally eat fresh and higher quality food. Fortunately, we can afford to eat this way these days, too.

Since the holidays I've started some new bad habits and I've put a bit back on (I'm probably still within 2-3%), but that's another story. I know that there is a school of thought that will say that it's impossible for me to stay away from 225-230 over the long haul and I'm not too worried about it. As long as I still get to eat higher quality food and feel better for it, then that's ok.

So I ate better, and had to move around more often and I lost weight. On the short term.

First!

I could do profound explanations for items found on this list, and why I'm doing something like this at all, but that's not the point of this project and blog.

In fact, the counterintuitive truth is that the point of this project is to stop myself from being so inward looking, at least in the ways I've been doing so up until now.

And as it says up top, my timing is coincidentally tidy, since my time will be up on my 31st birthday. To think that that's only 1001 days away should be, in and of itself, enough motivation to start thinking differently and shifting my focus elsewhere.

From here on out, posts will be made upon completion of items.

And so it begins: there are 101 posts left on this blog.