The Forty List

As I mentioned previously, one of the activities at my 30th birthday party was for the guests to help me come up with a "To Do" list of goals to achieve by my 40th birthday. They could make as many entries as they liked, and the only rules where that the activity could do no harm, and that they could not work together. Otherwise, any suggestion was fair game. My intention is to complete all of these by my 40th birthday. Some will be harder to achieve than others, but the promise is to at least attempt all of these. So here it the list my friends and family provided. The ones in RED are those which I have already completed, and GREEN are those in progress. Any comments in [brackets] are mine, in (parenthesis) are theirs. Each bullet point represents a person, NOT an individual goal, as several people had more than one goal.

Without further ado, here are the things I'll do by the time I am 40:

• Watch these movies: Citizen Kane, Hamlet (Kenneth Branaugh's version), Death Trap (with Christopher Reeve and Michael Caine.) Watch all 12 episodes of "Fawlty Towers", and learn a song and sing it in front of a crowd. A small group is okay, but YOU must sing it.
  
• See your name up in lights [Heck yeah!]
• Become an Australian Citizen [Frankly, I can't be bothered.]
• Design a cake that looks like me (Jess), finish your course with flying colours, make up a song and sing it in front of 10 people, swim with sharks.
  
• Repeat your [9 weeks in Europe backpacking] honeymoon trip, but with with triplets
• You and DH should spend 50 hours a week together in the same bed for the next ten years. [Okay, I don't quantify the hours we spend in bed together, but we do spend as much time as we can. What we do in bed isn't your bees wax!]
• Write a series of children's books that will be as interesting and as successful as the series of books I just read [she had just finished the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series.]
• Have such success in your business that you can come visit me three times a year. [Three Sweeties' doors officially open on October 1st.]
• Graduate at the top of your class, or at least in joint first place with me.
  
• Take a week off without DH and the triplets. [In November 2010, my BF Alexis and I are taking a 2 week, girls only vacation to celebrate our 35th birthdays.]
• Join a weekend circus school, become a life coach or motivator, take singing lessons, learn to play the tuba, be under-ambitious at some point. [that last one is the real killer.]
• Learn pole dancing, shave your head and do a mohawk [if I shave my head, how do I get a mowhawk?], get a Brazilian wax if you haven't already [I haven't], learn to tango with DH, go trick-or-treating, in costume, as a family, enter a serious karaoke competition without laughing, learn a musical instrument like a triangle or a kazoo, play naked twister with DH only, learn to scuba.
  
• Write a cookbook that is suitable for people with nut/egg/coeliac allergies
• Achieve a weekly column in a prestige publication covering topics which make a difference, become proficient in dialectic [I don't even know what that word means], acquire patience with "what if" discussions around the dinner table and "happily" participate, never lose your ability to laugh at all the silly things life throws up, keep your talent for embracing life without steamrolling the people who love you.
  
• Swim with the dolphins, go to the top of Mt Kosciusko, invite me to your 40th birthday party, give me the cake that looks like Jess, encourage the kids to remember to call me "Uncle", dance at my wedding, and put a king sized bed in my bungalow [this is my BIL, who I want to live in a cool house in our backyard].
• Climb Ayer's Rock to the summit, you will never forget it. [I refuse to do this, on principle. I've been to Uluru, I chose not to climb to the top. I wouldn't want someone scrambling on my sacred site, either. I will, however, amend this goal to be walking around the base of Uluru.]
• Bake a cake for royalty, run a marathon, own your own cake shop and hire me.
  
• Say NO to teachers who prey on you because of your culinary ability at least twice this year.
  
• Go BLONDE blonde for a month, wear high heels every day for a month (with the weekends and gym sessions off), write a book that at minimum is published for friends and family.
  
• Write a regular column for a magazine or newspaper, set up a franchise (baking or otherwise), bungee jump in New Zealand
• Get to know each other better [I tried to do this, and I failed spectacularly. How do you 'get to know' someone who never wants to talk on the phone, send emails, go out to dinner, or otherwise? This one is a bit of a lost cause.]
  
• Swim the "Pier to Pub" in the same year that I do, go for a 40km ride down to Sandringham and back with me and anyone else you choose, turn Three Sweeties into a national franchise to rival Mrs Fields.
  
• Do at least one stand up comedy gig, do the Great Victorian Bike Ride, write a novella/short story and endeavor to have it published somewhere (your local multiple birth newsletter doesn't count).
  
• You need more adrenaline, so sky dive, preferably with parachute and instructor
• Survive three bar/bat mitzvahs, enter the Great Victorian Bike Ride, win a prize at the Royal Melbourne Show for "Cake of the Year"
• Scuba dive in the Great Barrier Reef and the Dead Sea [I don't think you can scuba in the Dead Sea, and given that it's dead, what would there be to see?], or if you feel daring, a nice left nipple piercing wouldn't go astray, to match your nose ring (well, the one that's going to be revamped.) [I was young and stupid, what can I say?]
• Take me dancing again, because we are such a good couple, find a way to balance food, work, sleep and family. [This entry was not written by DH. DH refused to participate.]
  

So there you have it. Seems like everyone is obsessed either by my getting exercise, or by my writing something and having it published. I have visions of being at my 40th birthday party with a big slide show, showing me achieving all the things I've done on this list. I think it's doable, although perhaps a bit painful as well. :) Ahh, well, I've got 9 years left to go!