[Courses] [Spineful Living, lesson 1: Dreams]

[Raven Alder]

Hiya --

* Poppy Lochridge <poppychix at gmail.com> [2007-04-03 06:58:52 -0700]:
> And then as I started reading the archives, I was hesitant to post  
> anything. It's been so long since I was an active member, so much has  
> changed, etc etc. But then I saw 'pig's message and realized that I  
> can still come back, do still have something to say.

	It's good to see you!  There seems to be a resurgence of folks
who'd gone quieter popping back up again (me included), and I couldn't
be happier about it.

	My goals:

I want to travel more, to new and interesting places, have adventures,
and help people.  My current career is pretty well suited to this
(traveling international consultant), but I often don't get to pick
where I go other than saying "ooh, ooh, pick me" when a prospective gig
comes up.  I fill in the gaps by putting in talks at technical
conferences in interesting places, but in future am also going to select
for "can bring a friend" or "know someone there"; that's more fun for me
than travelling alone.

I want to turn my suburban townhouse scratch-clay yard into something
beautiful and fruitful.  I've done a bunch of reading about
permaculture, but have not had an actual garden in maybe ten years.
This is a long term project (you don't build up topsoil overnight), but
I'm really looking forward to it.

I want to square away my finances.  I'm contributing to my retirement
plan and savings every month, and that's great, but I have yet to go
around and consolidate the 401Ks from, uh, my entire work history before
this job.  (Naievely, I thought that if you left a job you lost that
money.  Doh.  So I have a lot of tracking down to do, though I am
pleased that I haven't lost that money after all.)

I want to improve my (currently pathetic) Irish and Japanese.  Making
time to study regularly is the biggest challenge for me here, and
finding regular conversation partners is something that I know I should
do but (ha!) have not yet made time for.  Eventually, I want to be able
to plop down in a Gaeltacht or in Harajuku and talk to the people
sitting next to me.

I want to successfully bring the major project that I'm working on for
my research (backbone protocol fuzzing) to completion.  I think I can do
it, but I've never been the chief project person on something so
programming-intensive before, and there are a lot of people looking at
the project, so I'm nervous but undaunted.

Cheers,
Raven

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