Get These Skills

• Become proficient in Javascript
• Improve soldering w/ plumber's torch.
• Improve sewing & pattern making skills.
• Fix the sewing machine, set up a table, sew plushies
• Acquire acetelyn jeweler's torch & drill press to finish pendants
• Carve new moulds
• Resin casting of action figures
• Make custom dolls/action figures
• Learn to use a CNC router. Handy for the shop.
• Learn to use a laser cutter. Handy for the shop.
• Learn to build circuitboards (w/ soldering iron).
• Improve MIG welding skills. To hell with Arc welding.
• Get some chops in engineering.
• Learn to test water & soil samples.
  • Maintain supplies for testing.
  • Get a firm enough grasp of organismal biology, chemistry & environmental ecology to accurately interpret results.

At Good Temporary Dwelling

• Grow a respectable garden
• Build a respectable library

At Owned Home

• Grow a thorough, proper garden.
• Build a wonderful (blue, white, and/or yellow) house, full of tricks and secrets
  • In that proper house, grow an expansive cavernous garden which envelopes all inorganic materials surrounding it
    • and fill it with mantid eggs
    • and fireflies
• grow crops of mind altering substances, just for fun, if not even for consumption.
• grow & harvest & prepare various teas
• We will have 9 cats, two dogs and 5 children, because that's the max you can have at one time in the Sims. There will be a herd of long-horned goats because they're rugged individualists, and a flock of Scottish blackface sheep because they look like clouds running over the mountains. The kids will be homeschooled. So will the human children.
• Scratch that, the kids will go to Montessori school where they can socialize with other weird kids & build "play schedules" and learn skills of self-regimentation

To Take Full Advantange of Fleeting Youth

• Visit an actual Irish tea room
• Visit a nice Irish pub in Ireland
• Have a lovely child, shoot for 3+, then one of them is bound to turn out alright...
  • Encourage an intense Lannister-like family dynamic, sans incest, and inculcate into them the sense that our legacy is all we leave behind, and we each represent each other and should carry ourselves accordingly with certain dignity and ambition.
• Dance at a great industrial discotheque in Berlin
• Go self-sufficient, off the grid, analog homestead, at least once more, for at least a year.
• Live in the forest and completely immerse myself in art. Paint, draw, look at paintings & installations online, and read my books, and write books. The rest of the time, I will tend to animals & the garden & the kids. The kids ought to entertain themselves sometimes.
• earn enough money to realize ambitions
• spend as much time with grandma as humanly possible
• spend as much time with nieces as humanly possible
• More photo shoots with F
• More art lessons with Z

Whenever

• Line up a full-time teaching position.
• Horseback riding through Mongolia
  • before decrepitude sets in, and surely it's only a matter of time. too late
• Visit a temple in Mongolia, Thailand and Taiwan
• Learn basic Russian & learn to read Cyrillic
• Become conversationally fluid in Russian.
• Comprehend the lyrics of rational French pop songs
• Comprehend the lyrics of comprehensible Spanish pop
• Read classic novels in their original French
• Read classic novels in their original Russian
• Stay in a sleazy Murmanski hotel. Enjoy borcht in Russia.
• Create brass/silver pendants and tiny sculptures/figurines
• Sculpt more, but in miniature especially, and perhaps incorporate LEDs, fiberoptics and gemstones...or perhaps not. Cast & fabricate more strange little talismans.
• Catch a baby octopus in a tidepool (with No and/or TBug)
• Encounter an eel in the wild
• Encounter a fox in the wild
• Encounter another fox in the wild
• Find a wild hedgehog!
• Raise a baby crow
• Save the life of a baby squirrel
• Encounter a moose in the wild
• Encounter bison in the wild
• Encounter reindeer in the wild
• Encounter elk in the wild
• Encounter bobcat in the wild
• Encounter bear in the wild
• See more fireflies
• See more dramatic thunderstorms
• Encounter more preying mantii
• Find a stick insect in the wild
• Encounter another luna moth in the wild
• Encounter raccoons in the wild
• Spot a (live) wild opossum
• Feed an opossum
• watch orcas in the wild
• sail through icy water
• kayak through icy water
• white water rafting
• Go clam digging in North Carolina
• Take kids clam digging, just because it's terrifying
• Boat through the Everglades
• herd sheep in Scotland
• Play with MRI machine for neuroscience research
• make an indie film as an adult
  • made a few, but the longest was 35 min.
• make full length indie film as an adult
• Sort out the citizenship, so kids can be dual. This should be priority as there are a number of years to go.
  • Depends on Brexit.
• Get involved in the early phases of interplanetary colonization - work on preparing another virgin planet for our ravaging subversions & proliferation of our vile and egregious species. Ironically submit my application without a willingness to compete, without a hope in the world, and then by some miracle, on the paycheck of an international endowment fund, slaving away, inexplicably, over an old-fashioned light table, drawing up blueprints for off-world colonization, thanks to my fancypants education, which has drawn me into the world of science for yet another form of escapism. I will work too much and distance myself from my children, stacking up a fine retirement plan and the funds to go abroad, and when I have outlived all but my children of what's dear to me on the earth, I, too, will go to space, alone. But there will surely be some sort of malfunction, as the technology is imperfect, and I will suffocate in the pitch starless vacuum of a power-outage in the windowless elevator between the bridge and residential hallway of our spaceship. There will be stars before my eyes, however, due to the lack of oxygen, and your face will be the last thing that swims up before my bleary, futile mortal eyes that could never see half the light spectrum viewed by a honeybee, nor the varieties of perception witnessed by an octopus, nor the goodness in a human heart - I was blind to that - and I will die alone with my dreams, as we all die alone, only wondering what it might have been like to be an octopus for a day, or to hold your hand as I died, or how I might have done it better if I'd never left the mountains.

Should I Ever be a Widow (Perks) Everything doesn't have to suck

• master Spanish, work internationally
  • travel all the time. non-stop business. no time to think about destitute personal life.
• find a hot girlfriend or older lady who looks like today's Katherine Turner, who is alive with guile, lusts for life, lives for laughs, feigns unsentimentality, despises the sacharine and halmarky, revels in the absurdity of kitsch, defies expectations, loves boldly, speaks dangerously, scoffs at both gender norms and the reactionary bucking of norms and the self-congratulation of countercultural pseudointellectuals.
• Or just run internationally amok with unchecked lasciviousness.
• foster an art commune, buying an expansive property and charging minimum rent to pool our resources and accordingly afford a life outside the grid for everyone
• open a cafe, perhaps in Nicaragua, that specifically hires aging transgender prostitutes looking to get out of the business and work out a steady job, with the following caveats:
  • you must uphold the same standard of performance expected of professional staff anywhere, which includes...
  • being on time, give or take 10 minutes here and there
  • being communicative
  • not using hardcore drugs if they negatively affect your ability to function at work and interact with coworkers/customers.
  • The customer is not always right. We will have a zero-tolerance policy for homophobic or otherwise disrespectful bullshit.
  • At night, it will transform into seedy nightclub, with burlesque robots and modified dancers & staff. It will be a temple of sin and Caligulan decadence, with electronic and industrial music playing 80% of the time, and the other 80% will be oldies.
• tons of uninterrupted time to write
• invite Vero to move in
• adopt a raven and a domesticated siberian fox
  • who will help me to recover from the deaths of all my loved ones, except kids
  • who I will thanklessly abandon in death someday, as they will most likely outlive me, but should see to it that the most thoughtful, empathic kid inherits the little friends
• Organize these volumes of art and writing so people don't have to do it after me, and if someone wants to keep something, it won't be in a thousand disparate parbaked pieces
• provide elaborate instructions regarding my postmortem arrangements
  • details as to the statue - haha
  • complete funeral soundtrack
  • come up with some sort of epitaph
  • early on, set aside funeral fund so it isn't a nuisance to others, and pick out a good graveyard
    • actually, never mind that, we'll set up a proper family graveyard and apply as a religious institution, and our commune can be written off as a Taoist monastery, which is essentially the case. Slap up a few posters of Alan Watts and we're Good2Go.
  • Good2Go referencing this horror

Good travel packages for reference

• Trans-siberan route

Backburnered/Discarded/Naive Bygone Hopes & Dreams

• Get skills in basic phlebotamy for at-home blood testing.
• Learn basic GIS skills. All the cool employers seem to want them these days.
  • Subversive of the analog dream.
• Learn to build Arduino machines.
  • If I ever have kids, sure.
• Render in AutoCAD. Handy for the shop...
  • Having neither need nor that kind of time.
• Become proficient in Java
  • Javascript is so superior & does most of what I need it to do.
• Dive off the coast of Vancouver Island
  • I'm scared now.
• take part in a dream study
  • contemporary psychology isn't as romantic as I once thought
• work on an oyster farm
  • The day has come & gone
• Attain a PhD for posterity. It will feed my ravenous ego and make me feel like I've been something in the world, while I stack up a mountain of debt and all of a speck in history for an immortalizing entry in a bottom-of-the-barrel institution's graduate alumni records, and maybe they'll add zeroes to my salary, but I don't want to work for them, anyway, because they're a bunch of whorish, tasteless fascists who missed the point of everything, or they're arrogant enough to believe that we can make the world a better place than it was when we first climbed down from the trees.
  • Gotta get past health drama first - can I pay it back? Would there be any potential practical use?
• Perhaps learn to give slightly more of a fuck about realities than possibilities, but then again maybe not. Perhaps by then I'll be dead, or as good as.
  • Possibilities keep you alive when nothing else will.