Bucket Lists

Do you have a bucket list?

No, I’m not avoiding the Monday subject, which is supposed to be a report on how my writing week went. It’s just I don’t have a lot to report and bucket lists have been on my mind lately.

But just to get the writing stuff out of the way first...the week did not start out well, writing-wise. The hubby was on vacation, although he spent most of his time working around the house. But just having him home all day kind of threw me off my game and I spent more time reading than writing.

I really struggled to write something for this month’s picture prompt, and when I didn’t have anything to post on Friday I ended up writing both a poem and a story for the weekly Brazen Snake Books prompts. You can find my story HERE, and you can see both my poem and Jamie’s HERE. It’s kind of freaky how we had similar ideas, although we didn’t see each other’s poems until they were done.

Saturday I spent pretty much the whole day agonizing over my picture prompt before deciding my idea would work better as a poem. I really wanted to do a story for that picture, but it just wasn’t happening.

Sunday I spent the first half of the day shopping and the second half entertaining the in-laws for dinner. I was lucky to get the post done for my regular blog, let alone anything else. As it was, I was up past my bedtime doing it. Hopefully I’ll do better this week. :-D

Back to the bucket list.

A bucket list, for those of you totally out of the loop, is a list of things you want to do before you die, or “kick the bucket.” It could be travelling to places, getting married, getting divorced, getting that dream job, running a marathon, making a million dollars ... you get the idea.

I don’t have a bucket list, although there are oodles of things I’d like to do before I die. But as I said, I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately, and then I started making a list. I say a list, because I think it’ll have to be refined before it’s my official bucket list.

I started listing random “stuff” and realized making a bucket list is harder than it looks. It’s not like there are any rules to it - no set number of items to include, no guidelines as to what kinds of things should be included...

In my case, I’ve come to the conclusion I’m going to need three lists: things I want to read; places I want to visit; and miscellaneous. And I’m putting a self-imposed limit of the top ten in each category. This will still give me a total of thirty items to work on.

I did a Google search for ‘bucket list’ and wow, there was 115,000,000 results in 0.61 seconds! Unique Bucket List Ideas; 101 Things To Do Before You Die; 10,000 Things To Do Before You Die; 10,000+ Bucket List Ideas ... However, I only did the search for fun, I’m not going to waste time clicking on any of those likes. I figure if I can’t think of it myself, it doesn’t deserve to go on the list.

Limiting myself to a total of thirty items on my list means I’m going to be thinking long and hard about what goes on there. Ideally they’ll be things I can actually do, and I’m not going to be including namby pamby things like losing 20 pounds or getting a tattoo (which I already have). I think the hard part will be limiting myself to just ten places I want to visit - I’ve always wanted to travel - and coming up with ten books I want to read - I’m a prolific reader so I’ve already read a lot.

This might actually turn out to be a lot of fun!

So... what’s on your bucket list?