Author: daniel

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Bucket List – Lifetime Lists for Travel

I love to go travel and I have goals to travel to various countries. I also happen to enjoy photography and often find myself looking at national geographic pic of the day and other wonderful and beautiful photos. As a result, I also keep separate bucket lists for each country or city that I plan on traveling to in the future. So for Ireland, I would like to see the Giant’s causeway, The Cliffs of Moher, O’brian’s tower, Kildare Abbey, the Poulnabrone dolmen, among other places. These help me plan out my longer term vacations. I often will work with my travel partners and we’ll go over each other’s lists and make sure that we visit somethings from everyone’s lists, hit up the common things for sure, and an ideal vacation we’d hit up everything and still have a couple of “down” days to rest and enjoy some leisure time. The great thing about maintaining these lists is that it allows you to make sure that you visit what you wanted, and gives you a starting point if it’s going to be several years/decades before you make it to that place.

My current lifetime lists for countries contain: Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, England, Scotland, Norway, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Korea, China, and East Asia.

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Challenge – Screaming

This challenge is simple. It is simply to scream. At the top of your lungs. As loud as you can. I’m not expecting you to go to a crowded place. Do it alone in your car. I find that in today’s society, we don’t scream a lot. In fact, many people who are shy or introverted are very quite people and will have difficulty trying to do this. But go ahead, do it. If you can’t try it again and think about how it was difficult to you. Did that surprise you? It did me.

Another part of this challenge it to find a song that you like and sing it as loud as you can. I noticed when I was younger I would sing alone in my car, but if another car approached, I would stop singing. I didn’t want to look like a fool and it made me feel like an idiot to be ‘caught’ singing alone in my car. But when I got older and began to appreciate people’s vocal talents I realized that being able to sing is a gift that few people have. So I started to sing in my car regardless of what everyone else was thinking around me. If they want to be shy or feel weird, it’s on them. Even so, I didn’t sing at the top of my voice. That was until I crossed over my comfort line and joined a choir. Then I had to work on projecting my voice. I could have counted the number of times I’d done that on one hand in the previous five years. So now in my car, I sing as loud and proud as I would in a choir.

Don’t let fear of random strangers keep you from exercising your vocal talents. Try screaming and singing at the top of your lungs and let your voice out.

Was it hard for you to scream at the top of your lungs? Surprisingly it seems harder for men than women to do this.

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Happy Memories – BBQ in the Summertime in Colorado

One of my happy memories I have comes from when I was five or six years old. We were living in Colorado at the time. I don’t remember what I had been doing during the day, but I was outside playing on my bike. I would ride it up the street and then coast back down. I remember it was in the evening and the sun was beginning to set over the rocky mountains. I was physically tired, but having fun so I didn’t want to stop. My mom was calling us home and the neighborhood smelled like fresh cut grass and people grilling barbeque. I loved steak so I was looking forward to dinner. That’s all I have of that memory left.

Do you have any happy memories of playing outside when you were a kid?