Blog-tober - The New Bucket List

Friday is list day

As expected, the worst of the fallout from dream group has passed. What felt like a gaping hole in my psyche has been replaced with some minor tickles and some insights into myself that I'm not sure I would have got if not for the dream group process. 

Yesterday was also blessed with some lovely off the cuff things happening that took from my frazzled pit and perked me up no end. An old friend dropping by for a coffee, another asking if I could mind her cat for a fortnight starting next week (lovely beastie she is too, that cat), a not too intense session with Pinochet all helped to get things back on track.

It appears the dream group process, for the angst it provides temporarily, is still working away in the background - but one thing that has come out of all of this is the feeling that one must look ahead, hence it's time to look at the bucket list.

These bucket lists have been rather successful in the past for getting me out of my comfort zone. I've just had a look at the one that I last year in August and I've marked quite a few of the items off the list - degustation dinner - check, change in career, check, making more money, check, changed my car, check. Lots of things have been struck off the list.

So, here we go - what is on my bucket list for the next year - and I will take this out to the end of 2013.

I really want to try some amazing restaurants: Attica, Cutler and Co, Vue de Monde…. Finding somebody to take me to one of these places, even better, but they're on the list.

Save more money. I'm doing okay but I want to do better.

Then on the other hand, I need a decent overseas break - Thailand would be good for a fortnight when this contract is up whenever that may be in the new year - though taking a month off and going somewhere a bit more special could be the go - not that Thailand isn't special - Chang beer for breakfast and lots of massages could be the go.... and that's always good.

I still want to do the Camino de Compostella di Santiago. I'd love to go back to Spain as well, and France. And Italy.

I'm hoping the career progression keeps going the way it's been going. I've changed my job role - I just want to stay happy at work (and challenged and well paid and most importantly, employed)

As for the exercise. I keep putting this on the bucket list - the marathon. The reason I started this blog was because I wanted to blog my marathon journey. Though I've been remiss on the running of late, it's still something I want to prove to myself that I can do. Even better, the New York Marathon would be amazing.

For all the times I complain about being single and want a partner, maybe one foot in front of the other would be a better tactic. It's been worked out that I've never really been asked out on a date -  a real date. None of this internet dating bollox. To have somebody ask me out for the evening, that would be lovely - and I'm shoving that on the bucket list too.

Home ownership - though it seems like an impossible dream - that's there too - but a two bedroom flat with a carport and a balcony will be brilliant - I hate gardening and don't want a garden.

Hmmm - what else. 

By the end of next year I want the first draft of my novel written. This is almost a not negotiable - has to be done - and I need to make the time.

More time with friends - yep, put that on the list.

The going for a tandem skydive remains on the list too

I'm going to leave off getting a cat this time around. I appear to have friends who happily donate their cats to me regularly and I like this arrangement. Besides, in the words of Modern Family...

Anything else to add to the list?

I'd like to read a book a week - any maybe finally get through a few of the following: Midnight's Children, Love in a Time of Cholera, Ulysses, Cloud Atlas and a few more David Mitchells and the last two books in the Artemis Fowl series.

As for films - but the end of 2013 I hope to have seen The Godfather Triology, The Maltese Falcon, Schindler's List and a couple of other films I'm yet to sit through.

Mostly, I just want to be happy and secure.

That's not too much to ask.

But I will continue to be my normal, overachieving, A-type self and to continue to see what will come of this bucket list over the next 14 or so months.

It's out there now. Go on universe... let's see what comes back.

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