Bucket List #1

Oh, it's become way too fashionable and trite to have a bucket list, but I've never truly written one.  I have a lot of things in my head, most of the time, that I plan on, or more often wish I had the opportunity to do.  It won't take me long to fill up a short list, making up for the incredibly long blog I had last week (sorry about that, but it was so cathartic).

Here's what could pass for a rough draft bucket list:

1.  Drive the PCH.  I am a Welker, after all, and we love the challenge of a scenic road, any road, really. Having only been from LA down to San Diego, I feel like I missed out on a big part of what California is all about, especially from the northern part of the state.  Slipping up that highway would be a one-time thing I could not pass up.

2.  See Paris and Italy.  The rest of Europe would be great, too, but I know the chances of that grow less and less likely with every passing year. 

3.  Publish some piece of work that I'm really proud of.  Heck, just publishing anything should satisfy me----but no, I want it to be something I'm proud to have other people see.  I don't really count the blogosphere, since this mostly is a lot of self-indulgent navel-gazing.  (That's not something weird!  It just means being way self-absorbed---guilty as charged.)

4.  Live in some little dump in NYC for about 6 months or so, working a temp job or something small like ushering in one of the theaters, so I can have ample time to go to all the museums and historical sites during the day that I'd like to see.  And this time, I want to be there in the spring!

5.  Speaking of, I want to really experience those cherry blossoms in DC.  I've not been there at all, and I'd need time to do it right, to see all the historical sites.  I am eligible this year to compete for another Fund for Teachers grant, and I just may do it for this trip.

6.  This is a huge bucket list item, and probably just as fantastical as the others here:  to get off the majority of the medications I take.  I don't resent them, but it's financially debilitating.  I've gotten off some in the last few years, replaced a few with vitamins, but it would be sooo sweet to throw away the old-lady pill box forEVER.

7.  Find some of my extended relatives from both sides of my family, from the Cherokee heritage and the Yates/McCoy/Brown families on Mom's side, and from my great-grandad John Welker, who came to OK in the 1889 land run after fighting in the Civil War. 

8.  Learn to eat realllly healthy and love it. 

9.  Provide something wonderful (God knows it won't be money, but it could still be fantastic) to each of my three nephews and three nieces. 

10.  Anonymously leave a $500 tip somewhere that the person truly needs it.  Just being able to leave the tip is the bucket list item---but I crave the chance to make it count for someone who is down.

I could keep going for a long time on this, so there'll probably be another Bucket List on down the line.  For tonight, though, I need sleep.  More sleep----now that's a bucket list item I really need to get behind!