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Kicking The Bucket – Exercise #16

July 9, 2013 by Michael Carnell

There are movies, there are books, there are websites, and there are all sorts of folks offering advice on the subject. But, when it comes to a bucket list each of ours is a personal thing. What we want to do and what we feel we need to accomplish before we shuffle off this mortal coil is different for each person. The exercise for today, from my great list of exercises to do, is “What is at the top of my bucket list.”

I never thought so much about having a bucket list myself I have things I’d like to do in life, places I’d like to go, and people I want to meet, but I’ve never put them on a list of “things I have to do before I die or I am going to die.” I’m also very happy to say that a lot of the things I wanted to do in life I have already done. Not because I set out with some dogged determination that I had to accomplish something, but because I just did. It’s kind of like the old Nike ad of “just do it”.

Two of the things that I had always wanted to do envolved traveling. The first was to go to Ireland, and the second was to visit England. Luckily my father got invited to speak at a conference at Trinity College in Dublin 1992 and amazingly he asked my sister and me if we wanted to go along. How could anyone turned down such an invitation? We spent a marvelous week in Dublin and some other southerly parts of Ireland enjoying the history, people, poking the Book of Kells (well not really, I poked the case) and generally exploring and having a good time.

Later, on our 15th anniversary, my wife and I got a chance to go to England. She had a relative living just outside of London who kindly offered us full use of their house. They were to be away in Rome that week! Again, too good a deal to pass up – and we didn’t. I don’t think anyone could hit all the high points of the London area to lifetime, but we did a good bit. And I also did something I really wanted to which was visit Abingdon, the home of the original MG factory. Also got to visit Warwick Castle, Bath, and catch Phantom of the Opera at the Queen’s Theatre.

Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey – Timeline Exercise #15

July 8, 2013 by Michael Carnell

The timeline of my day. That is what we are here to talk about. And why? Because that is exercise number 15 in my thirty-one day blog challenge. And for the record, let me say once and for all, when this thirty-one day challenge is over I shall not be doing another one. At least not like this. Goals are fine. Challenges that ask us to go beyond our comfort zone and stretch a bit are fine, but challenges that really don’t have something to be gained by the steps as well as the finish are not so fine. That is where I am with this. I am doing this exercise to get my writing muscles back in shape a bit and to develop some regularity to my writing. But, I should have investigated the content of the exercises a bit better before signing on. Because of that I am left doing exercises like “Timeline of your day.” My fault.

Anyway, back to class folks! My timeline varies drastically, as it does for most people, depending on whether or not we are talking about a workday. Since there are 5 workdays per week to every 2 non-workdays, I shall choose to educate you on my normal workday. Only seems fair and democratic.

My basic workday goes something like this:

5:45 am – Get up. I try to get up on time, though occasionally I fail miserably. I use my iPhone as my alarm clock, and every once in a while I forget to set it or have turned the volume off or just sleep through it. So I get up, take a shower, dig through the laundry baskets for something to wear, curse my lack of matching socks, let the dogs and cats in and out multiple times, and then finally stumble out of the door hopefully by 6:40. It takes approximately 20 minutes to get to my parking garage, therefore our next step is …

If I Won The Lottery – Exercise #14

July 7, 2013 by Michael Carnell

The prize we all dream of. The payday we all hope will happen, even if we never take the necessary steps to make it occur. The lottery. That is today’s exercise. Exercise number 14 out of this journey is, “what would you do with your lottery winnings?” I have to admit to start off with though, that I am not generally money driven. I just don’t do things for money. And I rarely if ever buy a lottery ticket. I do not bet on things that I don’t already know I can win. I take risks yes, but I don’t gamble.

Let’s suspend all sorts of disbelief though and for the sake of argument we’ll assume that I did win the lottery. There are three basic areas that I would want to cover, and the first starts with giving some of that money away. After that we will cover a few trinkets and experiences I covet, and then will put all the rest away for the future. But first things first..

The first expenditure may sound odd, especially for anyone not from around here, but Charleston in the summer is hot. Heck, the winter is often hot too. One of my favorite places in this world to spend time is in our church. It feels like home. And our church doesn’t have air conditioning. The initial bricks for the building were first put down in 1774. Yes, before the Revolutionary war although the construction was not finished until long after. When you have something that old it’s a little hard to retrofit with the modern convenience of air-conditioning. Hard means expensive. So that is the first thing I would d0 – I would pay to put air conditioning in the church. Tell you what though, if I’m going to air conditioning the church this better be a pretty big lottery. I think the running estimate for air conditioning our church is somewhere around a cool $2 million.

Early Memories – Exercise #13

July 6, 2013 by Michael Carnell

Memories, “like the corners of my mind.” Or in my case more like the dusty things that get stuffed under the bed and you find years later and wonder what they heck it are. Our exercise for today, lucky number 13, is “your earliest memory.” That goes along long way back. It makes me wish I done this exercise when I was younger when I may have remembered more.

The funny thing about memories though is that the further away from the actual events we get, the harder it is to tell if the memory is fact or just something we made up. Or something in between. This doesn’t make it any less true, but it does mean it doesn’t necessarily match any one else’s recollection of the event. In fact sometimes I have memories of dreams that on later inspection I can’t ascertain if they ever really happened at all.

What I would assume is my earliest memory is of walking down a short stretch of road with a teddy bear in my arm while pulling a wagon. We were living in the West Ashley area of Charleston, where I have spent most of my life, but we were moving from a house my parents were renting to one they bought. A move of just a few street numbers – only leapfrogging one house. I must have been about 4 or 5 at the time. Now, did this actually take place? Do I only remember it because my parents told me about it, and I combined it with visions of that street that I had later? No idea. Doesn’t matter. It happened in some way and is firmly anchored in my head. It exists.

What's Inside The Fridge – Exercise #12

July 5, 2013 by Michael Carnell

OMG, it smells in there! Seriously, this is not happening. The exercise for today is to tell what is inside my fridge. And I will do that, at least partially, but before I do I am going to selectively edit the fridge and toss a few things out. [Insert stream of consciousness pause here.] And now that is done we can continue with Exercise Number 12: What’s Inside the Fridge.

We have a fairly normal sized side-by-side refrigerator. The left side is a freezer and the right side is the fridge. We can fairly safely ignore the left side. About all that is in there are some ice trays (do ice dispensers ever really work for long?), some ice cream and some English muffins my dad gave us for Christmas.

The right side isn’t very well populated at the moment, mainly because I just threw out some stuff before starting this exercise. On the top shelf are a couple of bottle of beer and two growlers. The growlers of beer come from the Charleston Beer Exchange and have two different ales; New Belgium Brewing’s Ranger Imperial Pale Ale and Dogfish Head Indian Brown Ale. There are also a couple of bottles of pumpkin ale left over from the fall that I still have drunk yet.

Further down the shelves things get much more mundane – cream cheese, cheddar cheese, some tortillas, a plastic contain filled with leftover green beans and potatoes. Next shelf we get to eggs, more tortillas and the left over roast beef that was the partner of the aforementioned beans and potatoes. Note to self – we are out of bacon and sausage. No biggie for at least another week though since I am in bachelor mode and sure won’t cook those just for myself.

The vegetable bins at the bottom are empty right now. They weren’t a short while ago, but after inspecting what was in there they are now. And we won’t go into the results of what I found.