When I began my 95 by 65 project, my 65th birthday seemed distant, but the time has come. How did I do? I completed only 50 of the 95 goals, but to my surprise am quite pleased with that. It was an intense list! Here's the breakdown.
I had divided my 95 goals into four sections, based on Steven Covey's "To Live, To Learn, To Love, To Leave a Legacy."
To Live: completed 11/33, 33.3%
| Item | Date Completed | Notes |
| Create the Leon Project | 1/12/2015 | |
| Create 95 by 65 list | 1/24/2015 | |
| Research and purchase food processor | 1/30/2015 | |
| Practice deliberate relaxation twice a day for a month | 5/16/2015 | |
| Find a GPS distance tracker that works for me | 11/11/2015 | |
| Walk/run the equivalent of home to Hillsboro | 12/16/2015 | Greatly exceeded; also "walked" from Hillsboro to Swtizerland; averaged 38 miles/week. |
| Get a working back porch sink | 8/24/2016 | Thank you, Porter! |
| Swim 5 miles / Brachiate 1 mile (cumulative) | 9/12/2016 | Exceeded: swim 10 miles, brachiate 2 miles |
| Design 5 Life Playground stations | 4/1/2017 | Pool Track, Pool/Braciation Ladder, Balance Board, Juggling Balls, Mini Trampoline, Exercise Ball |
| Create an herb garden | 6/15/2017 | I hope to expand this. |
| Develop a quick system for travel prep and packing | 7/3/2017 | |
| Create/tweak/finalize/codify 60 family recipes | ||
| Develop and sustain a system for making bread regularly | Developed a new cookie recipe instead. | |
| Develop and sustain a system for making yoghurt regularly | ||
| Experiment with making kefir | ||
| Finish Janet's birthday 2009 recipe book | Maybe by 2019? | |
| Go through all recipe books, digitizing what looks good, getting rid of all but essentials/favorites | ||
| Complete a biking challenge | ||
| Develop a stretching plan and execute at least 3x/week for a month | ||
| Execute 50 pushups nonstop on the higher bar at the park | An injury broke my steak, and I never got back to it. | |
| Reach desired weight goal | ||
| Run nonstop 3 times around the park trail then participate in a 5K race (any speed) | So close! I made the three times around nonstop in May of 2016, but again an injury broke the momentum. It healed, but the momentum was broken and I'm just starting over now. | |
| Declutter and organize phone | Ah, yes ... decluttering was definitely a casualty. | |
| Declutter blog template files | ||
| Declutter computer | ||
| Declutter garage | ||
| Declutter marked items in Janet's room | ||
| Declutter my office | ||
| Declutter our filing cabinets | ||
| Declutter sewing supplies | ||
| Recycle collected ink cartridges | Partially done | |
| Set up identification system for files to grab in an emergency | ||
| Create another goal-oriented project for when this one is complete | Working on this. |
To Love: 22/23, 95.6%
| Item | Date Completed | Notes |
| Join Twitter | 2/9/2015 | |
| Visit King Arthur Flour | 2/12/2015 | |
| Visit a state I've never been to | 4/9/2015 | Missouri |
| Try at least 5 new restaurants | 4/10/2015 | Greatly exceeded |
| Watch Unbroken | 4/24/2015 | |
| Visit Universal/IoA four times | 5/15/2015 | |
| Share at least 20 meals with others | 8/13/2015 | Greatly exceeded |
| Watch NCIS LA from the beginning | 10/23/2015 | |
| Convert our Christmas card system to postal plus e-mail | 12/5/2015 | |
| Join Google+ | 12/10/2015 | |
| Visit a country I've never been to | 1/15/2016 | Belgium (airport), Senegal, The Gambia, Spain (airport), Mexico, Cuba |
| Visit either Costa Rica or the Gambia | 1/15/2016 | The Gambia |
| Attend 15 live performances (e.g. music, drama, lectures) | 1/31/2016 | |
| Visit Venice | 4/18/2016 | |
| Keep up a 10 posts/month blogging schedule for 20 months | 8/17/2016 | Exceeded: 30 months, often more than 10/month. |
| Visit our friends who live in Arizona | 8/26/2016 | Instead of our visiting Arizona, they came to Florida. |
| Refrain from negative speech for 1 day. Do this 30 times. | 10/24/2016 | This is a whole lot harder than it looks. |
| Visit with all immediate family members at least once per year | 11/22/2016 | |
| Write at least 75 physical letters to children/grandchildren | 1/13/2017 | |
| Send at least 4 care packages to each of our freshman/sophomore nephews | 2/3/2017 | |
| Write at least 5 notes of encouragement to each nephew | 4/6/2017 | This did not turn out to be ask I had expected -- brief, friendly, USPS notes of encouragement. This generation has little use for physical letters, unless they have cookies attached. But there were so many other forms of communication --visits, e-mail, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook -- that I consider this goal met. |
| Write an encouraging note each month to someone other than family | 6/5/2017 | |
| Write at least 10 letters to political officeholders | I managed one.... |
To Learn: 13/17, 76.5%
| Item | Date Completed | Notes |
| Read the Koran | 4/14/2015 | |
| Listen to all of Pimsleur German I (30 lessons) | 5/30/2015 | |
| Finish chronological Bible reading plan | 7/29/2015 | |
| Achieve 40,000 DuoLingo points | 11/3/2015 | Exceeded: over 81,000 points. |
| Start and keep up with other daily Bible reading plan(s) | 11/25/2015 | Exceeded: completed six plans total. |
| Complete 100 Great Courses lectures | 12/30/2015 | Exceeded: over 300 |
| Make 30 museum visits | 4/21/2016 | Exceeded. but I stopped counting. |
| Read The History of the Renaissance World | 7/5/2016 | |
| Read 130 books (new or old, print or audio, any level) | 10/19/2016 | Exceeded: 175 |
| Complete George MacDonald reading plan (50 books, 14 completed in 2014) | 10/24/2016 | |
| Experience all 37 of Shakespeare's plays (attend, watch, and/or read) | 10/25/2016 | |
| Set and attain Khan Academy goal | 6/3/2017 | Complete Math Missions from Kindergarten through 8th grade, plus Algebra 1 (refreshing my own experience through 8th grade). This took longer than expected because Khan kept adding requirements. |
| Read 26 existing but as yet unread books from my bookshelves | 6/7/2017 | |
| Learn sufficient Javascript and/or jquery to know if it will work for creating my GTC website | ||
| Set and attain BrainHQ goal | Instead of these three I concentrated on Peak and WordChums. | |
| Set and attain Memrise goal | ||
| Set and attain Sporcle goal |
To Leave a Legacy: 4/22, 18.2%
| Item | Date Completed | Notes |
| Rocket boost genealogy work by end of January 2015 (40 hours of work in segments of 1 or more hours, over approximately 2 weeks) | 2/1/2015 | |
| Make 2 baby blankets | 5/14/2015 | |
| Rocket boost photo work (40 hours of work in segments of 1 or more hours, over approximately 2 weeks) | 9/29/2015 | |
| Convert WRL memorial PPT to video | 6/9/2017 | |
| Copy LPs to CDs | ||
| Copy tapes to CDs | Partially done, thanks Porter! | |
| Complete conversion of bits PPTs to videos | ||
| Create 20 new GTC shows | ||
| Create a form of GTC independent of YouTube and useable offline | ||
| Create scent bits | ||
| Make new family bits | Modified from "for Heather"--Janet needs them, too. | |
| Print bit back labels for Heather | ||
| Clean up, expand, and document the lines I currently have in my genealogy database | ||
| Enter unentered genealogy data | ||
| Publish revised editions of Honor Enough volumes 1-4 | ||
| Update Phoebe's Quilt and print in "final" form | I made a lot of progress, even though it's not complete. | |
| Create one photo album with Picaboo | Since I tied this to Phoebe's Quilt, I made progress here, too. | |
| Digitize photos | ||
| Digitize slides | ||
| Organize photos 2007-2011 | ||
| Organize photos 2012-2016 | I completed 2015, and made some progress on other years. | |
| Research and purchase scanner suitable for prints and slides |
I'm happy with the "To Love" and "To Learn" categories, and okay with "To Live" though it needs work. "To Leave a Legacy" was sorely neglected, and there are two clear reasons. First and foremost, this category is where most of my gargantuan personal projects ended up. Projects like "Organize photos 2012-2016" and "Clean up, expand, and document the lines I currently have in my genealogy database," each of which requires far more time than most of the other 95. They are also complex, and require a lot more focussed and continuous thought—and decision-making—than, say, reading a book or inviting someone over for dinner. This is the kind of work I do best when I can put on my Li'l Writer Guy persona:
He rather likes to imagine he’s seated in some academic cloister, inhaling the intoxicating scents of polished wood, leather, and books old and new. On the table before him are the paraphernalia of his profession: stacks of books, pads of paper, writing implements, bookmarks, his laptop computer. Lost in thought, he stares out the window, but he’s not seeing the cityscape. Now and then he rises, and paces between the table and the stacks. At the end of the day, he reluctantly packs up, puts on his coat, and steps into the outside world, blinking owlishly and realizing dimly that time has not stopped for others as it has for him.
It's a lovely way to make progress in one area, but it leaves the rest of life at risk of disintegrating around me. Clearly, I need to figure out how to divide these projects into tiny parcels, in addition to giving them higher priority for next year.
Still, as I said, I'm overall very pleased; that is, inspired to begin another such project immediately, with modifications based on experience. Further ruminations are in a companion post to this one: 95 by 65 - The Analysis.
Excerpt: My 95 by 65 project is complete. The two and a half years have flown by, and suddenly I am an official senior citizen, with all the discount privileges thereof. (Along with the thrills and expense of being on Medicare, but that's another story.) ...
Weblog: Lift Up Your Hearts!
Date: July 3, 2017, 4:44 pm
