On the 20th of each month, I assess how well I'm doing with the 75 x 75 project. I don't want to look at the list of 75 things a month before my birthday and see that I still have half of them to do! I want to keep up with progress.
On November 20 I had finished 28 of the 75 items. Some of those were easy (eat 75 blueberries; donate $75 to the Applegater), but some were more complex: write down a memory for each year of my life (difficult not because each year didn't have a memory but because I couldn't remember what happened in which year and because I had a hard time omitting memories), hike to a 7500-foot altitude (fun!), knit something based on 75 stitches.
I had, in total, accomplished 54% of all items, somewhat ahead of the percentage per month necessary for even distribution of tasks2. It looks like I'm in pretty good shape until you look at what's left. I can't identify 75 botanical items on one hike until wild flower season or hike 75 miles until the snow melts. I have a lot more new dishes to cook, a lot more new words to add to my vocabulary (reading Moby Dick has helped), and a lot more hikes or skis to do, to say nothing of taking sixty-two more swims, somehow, before July 20. The last swim was on the 18th of November, in the Smith River of Northern California.
I'm coming along well with writing 75 poems of 75 words each. (See today's post at dianacoogle.blogspot.com for two of those poems.) I haven't strung 75 beads or made a crown with 75 dried flowers or created a collage of 75 pieces. I have collected 75 rocks (91, actually), but I haven't created the Goldsworthy-style art piece with them yet. I haven't learned to count to 75 in a new language, but I have learned how to say, "Hello. What's your name? Good-bye" in 56 languages. Nineteen to go! My granddaughter, who gave me that challenge, opened her atlas while I was with her at Thanksgiving and gave me thirteen more languages: Marshallese, Kyrgyz, Dioula (from the Ivory Coast and Mali), Kurdish, Xhosa, Luxembourgish, Makhuwa (from Mozambique), Palauan, Kinyarwanda, Melanesian (from the Solomon Islands), Somalian, and Isi Zulu (from South Africa). I'll learn any of them that has a YouTube segment telling me how to pronounce the phrases. As for Samo, which she also suggested, I was lucky enough to get a Lyft driver from Samoa on my way to the train station in Tacoma, who taught me to say Malo (hello), Olé halo i goa (what is your name), and Tofa (good-bye). I also sat next to two students in a coffee shop who were learning sign langue, so they taught me how to say those three phrases in that language.
Learning the languages is my second favorite item. Hugging 75 trees is my favorite. I've already hugged 74 trees, but I still want to hug blossoming trees this spring. Then I'll pick out the best tree-hugging pictures and make a book of them. Here's one, from Redwoods National Park, that'll certainly go in:
No comments:
Post a Comment