025 - Complete two oil paintings

I've never had the nerve to paint with oils.

Or maybe I'm too lazy to clean the brushes.

Arcylics and watercolors, even housepaints, have been part of my attempts at paintings, but never oils.

Over the next 1,001 days, my goal is to complete two oil paintings. They won't be very large, I expect. The largest will be a 24" x 24" more than likely. Maybe, if I feel good about it, I'll do a larger canvas.

At some point, I will actually post some of my paintings. Like everything else that I do with a modicum of creativity, I take my inspiration from the things that I like and I try to copy them. That at least gives me the confidence to begin.

Painting, like any form of art, isn't about creating the masterpiece, it's about losing yourself in the process. It's not about being courageous or fearless because courage and fear don't even enter your mind. Questions of good or bad are best left to people with nothing better to do.

The quote on the poster (that I made at one of my favorite websites) captures the essence of the amateur artist. It's easy. Just do it.

So, I'll hold my nose and get out the turpentine and have patience with the long drying times and paint a couple of oils. I'll post the results.

020 - Give up deep fried food for Lent

I am not a religious person, let alone a Catholic. But I think I understand the value of Lent from a secular viewpoint. The idea is to give up something that you believe you love or need for 40 days, to be able to resist the temptation.

This personal sacrifice during Lent is intended as an exercise in spiritual growth. When Easter rolls around, you should be a stronger person for having eliminated something from your life or diet that you desired or even craved without thinking. Successful completion is proof to yourself that you can overcome any habit and that you are strong enough to grow beyond your physical and emotional needs.

I view it as a way to stop a bad habit and develop a new one. In this case, it is goal #20 of the 101 things in 1,001 days. Each year, for Lent, I will not eat anything that has been deep fried. This includes my beloved chicken, french fries, fish, hush puppies, and even donuts.

This could be difficult, especially around lunch. On Wednesday I had grilled chicken, yesterday I snacked on pears, bananas and almonds while missing lunch, and today I had a broiled cod fillet. Did I mention that Popeye's reopened a store about 10 miles from my house? Or that I have a neighbor who makes incredibly tasty Buffalo wings?

I can do it. I'm hoping 40 days is long enough so that there isn't a slingshot effect. By that I mean that I don't want to eat a whole bucket of spicy Popeye' s the day after Easter. This is why I chose an unflattering image of frying chicken, rather than a lovely plate of succulent golden brown pieces piled high on a plate.

These goals do tie together. There will be a few other diet and health-related goals to come. Now, I need to go have a banana. I'm suddenly hungry.

067 - Build a CD ladder

We don't want to limit our investments to stocks and bonds. There are other ways to sock away money and earn a little interest.

This isn't intended to be a primer on investing. This is simply one of my 101 in 1,001 goals.

While we'll keep most of our money in growth investments, we do want to earn a little in a relatively safe, insured investment.

A good vehicle for that is a certificate of deposit, or CD. CDs are issued by banks and credit unions or other savings and lending institutions, though only banks are FDIC insured.

When you buy a CD, you are really loaning money to the bank in return for your principal plus interest. Very similar to a savings account, except that you can't withdraw the money until the CD matures. Because of this, a CD has a higher interest rate than a savings account. CDs can have very short maturity times, such as one week, to longer times of up to 10 years or more. Usually the longer the maturity time, the higher the interest rate. Here's a quick set of tips from the SEC about CD investing.

To spread the risk (and to have a little fun) I set a goal of creating a CD ladder. I planned on investing in four or five CDs. The first CD will mature in 3 months and each CD after would be three months beyond the prior CD.

That means if I bought one today, it would mature in May. CD 2 would mature in August, then CD 3 in November, CD 4 in one year and CD 5 in May, 2009. As each CD matures, we purchase another one that matures 3 months after the last one.

Many people ladder their CDs in yearly increments, but I'm not that patient and I want the thrill of rebuying every three months. This link contains a list of CDs available through Fidelity. Note that they are issued by a wide variety of institutions.

We'll see when I will pull the trigger on this one. The recent market downturn has taken chunk out of the old net worth. Plus, other goals are for other investments.

We're not putting all of our money into a 3.1% CD. Just a little bit.

Have you purchased CDs before? Kind of boring, isn't it?

035 - Prepare unfamiliar cuisine

(too lazy to photograph my own books, this set belongs to The Flying Dutchman on eBay.)

See these books? I own a set of these books. I bought them one volume at a time, at full price plus shipping and handling, every five or six weeks until I had all 28 volumes (Soups is shown here twice.) I learned how to cook with these books. With these books I have tackled everything from a cauliflower mold to a batch of ginger beer. They are collectively considered one of the most complete cooking references ever produced. Filled with color photos and step-by-step instructions, they are supposedly a standard in most serious kitchens.

Have a look at those titles: Breads, Sauces, Pork, Salads, Lamb, Variety Meats (that's the various organs that most people don't care to eat), Fruits, Vegetables, Beef & Veal, Wine, Candy, and on and on. I love these books. I'll never part with these books.

At the end of each book is a section containing previously published recipes. These are for everything from basic broths and ketchup to major constructs like beef tongue stuffed in a turkey. The recipes represent cuisines from all over the world, though regional American and French tend to dominate.

This brings me to the purpose of this post: goal #35 of the 101 things in 1,001 days.

Jocelyn and I will prepare at least one meal each month for six months from a cuisine that we don't know very well. We'll use this set of books for the recipes. We were leafing through them earlier and we are overloaded with options. This should be fun. We're going to involve the kids, too.

Who knows, we might discover a dish that we add to the regular family menu.

Recommendations? Anyone else out there experimenting with their meals?

101 things to do in 1,001 days

Today is February 4th, 2008. 1,001 days from now is November 1st, 2010.

I've built a list of 101 things that I would like to do (or make a habit) by 11/01/10. Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing this list with you. The list is in no particular order; I typed them as they came to me. Building a list like this, without taking the easy way out, was a fairly large task. Bigger than the 100 nouns post for sure.

Actually, I'm a bit embarrassed by how difficult it was to produce. Don't we all have pent up wants and desires of things we want to do, places we want to visit, entertainment and sports that we feel compelled to consume?

Not surprisingly, my list contains a lot of things that I want to purchase. Thankfully though, it also contains a number of key "stuff purging" activities. The purging activities will be tougher to do than the acquiring activities. That's how we found ourselves with so much stuff in the first place.

There are a LOT of writing and creating tasks on the list. So many that I wonder how I'll do them in 2.75 years. Only one or two job-related activities made the list, which makes sense. I am not attached to my occupation. That fact also influenced my decision to omit anything related to selling our home or buying a new primary residence. Something we are considering, but it will take more than our simple desire to drive us to do it. Moving is more stress than I want right now. Maybe that changes over the next 3 years.

There are no alpaca related items on the list either.

What triggered this? Well, the notion of 101 things in 1,001 days has been around for a few years. I was perusing various lists and I thought, this would be a good thing to do in order to keep me from wasting time on some seriously non-value adding activities and it would provide grist for the old blog mill. So, here I am.

This handy-dandy date calculator figures the target date for you.

I'm interested in your lists. You don't have to post all 101 things. For me, after about 6 (six, just six) things, I started struggling with deciding what I wanted to do. So, just post, in the comments, a couple of things that pop into your head. Just stating them will make them more real and give your brain a chance to figure out how you'll accomplish the task.

These activities need to be specific. If you think mine are not specific enough, then let me know. Already, I can see that I didn't pick a target date for the sprinkler system installation.

I'll be building my list over on the right column as I post about them. (This blog will continue with non-"101 in1001" related posts, too.)

Up next: cooking with Jocelyn...

006 Irrigation irritation

Over the years, I have been incredibly stupid when it comes to my lawn. I've seeded, weeded, raked, mowed, trimmed, limed, sprayed, conditioned, and dressed this lawn spending large sums of money and investing many many hours of labor.

All for nothing.

Because I didn't water the lawn. Oh, I would try. I'd set out a sprinkler, move it around, but not consistently. And who wants to trot around their wet yard, moving sprinklers and dealing with 150 feet of hose. My front yard is fairly long. I always gave up after a few days. Truly dumb. All that work, some of it back breaking, like spreading soil to dress the lawn, came to nothing because I was too inconvenienced to water the lawn.

No more. This spring, we are going to do what our much smarter neighbors have done already. We're going to put in an irrigation system. We won't use it everyday. The lawn really only needs about 1/2" to 1" per week to stay green and healthy.

This is item #6 (in no particular order) on my newly created 101 things in 1,001 days. I'll be sharing the list with you over the next few weeks. It's all written. I've spent the past week writing it, but I didn't want to dump it out here as one huge list.

Details to follow.

A whole far greater than its parts

Rice Krispies is a type of cereal that I dreaded eating as a kid. Nearly, if not completely, sugar-free, the cereal was tiny, made weird noises in milk, needed a tablespoon or more of sugar in order to choke it down, and the last bits were always mushy and soggy. A pile of undissolved sugar remained in the bottom of the bowl as a testament to the cereal's need for sucrose supplementation.

Marshmallows are gelatinous sugar cubes with a texture that induces my gag reflex. I've never liked their taste. The dusty powder feel over the spongy texture makes me cringe. Marshmallows are one of the few sweet snacks that I don't just avoid, rather I never even consider.

Yet, both of these substandard foods, when combined by heat and a wooden spoon, form one of humanity's greatest snacks. A snack that rivals chocolate bunnies, marzipan, and the glazed doughnut:

Rice Krispie Treats

I like these so much that they nearly made it as one of the Secrets to Happiness. Then I realized that those secrets should be somewhat universal in nature. It occurred to me that some of you might not like these crunchy chewy concoctions. My guess is that this isn't true, but I didn't want to chance it.

The basic recipe can be easily found. There are also many variations that include things like peanut butter or M&Ms. Food coloring can be added to batches to make holiday themed treats. Be careful with that though, because as the sugar melts, the food coloring spreads to fingers and serving dishes.

If I had to list a drawback for these things it would be that I cannot stop once I have started. They are so easy to consume that a whole sheet will be gone before the day is out. For that reason, we don't make them very often.

Hey, there is a major sporting event occurring today in the United States. Rice Krispie Treats could be just the sweet snack that you weren't thinking about when you were building your chip & dip, deli, and chicken wing trays.

If you have a special recipe for these, point me to it or leave it in the comments. If you don't like them, tell us why.

The last issue of the last man

This is the cover of issue #60 of Y: The Last Man, written by Brian K. Vaughan with art by Pia Guerra. Yes, it is a comic book. But this isn't a superhero fantasy comic. This is a serial graphic (just means drawn, though there is violence and some nudity) story, that has been told in monthly installments over the last five years. I should add: this is not for children.

Let's cover the story setup and then I'll tell you why you should, and how you can, read it.

The man in the straitjacket appears to be our main character, Yorick Brown (get it? "Y"...which also happens to be the second chromosome of a male's gene pair "XY", women's genes are "XX".) Yorick is an escape artist magician type, living in New York. He has a Capuchin monkey named Ampersand (also male.) Yorick also has a girlfriend, Beth, who is traveling in Australia for an anthropological study.

In issue #1, the event happens. Every living thing with a Y chromosome dies. Except for Yorick and Ampersand.

The story takes place across the USA and the globe. Yorick's mother and sister play supporting roles along with a geneticist, Dr. Mann (Vaughan likes the little ironies) and a bodyguard, the unnamed Agent 355.

There's no need to go into the story, if the setup doesn't interest you in at least checking it out, then telling you more of the plot certainly won't help.

Like many adult-oriented comics, the longer story is told within the context of many smaller stories that last anywhere from one to five or six issues. Vaughan does an excellent service to us by providing a handful of one issue back stories for each of the main characters. This is a far more satisfying technique than having a character tell their story in a load of exposition to other characters. How often do we do that in the real world?

With very few minor exceptions, this is a satisfying, humorous, dramatic and tragic epic of a world without men. Vaughan (who, as of Season 3, also writes for ABC's television show Lost) is a master of the cliffhanger ending. He kept people coming back for more of this intriguing story.

You should read it just to see how vibrant and imaginative the graphic novel medium can be. Or because you like a good story to escape for a bit. Or because you really want to know what the heck killed all the guys. Why did Yorick and Ampersand survive? Where did Agent 355 come from and what is her real name? Oh, yeah, and what about those astronauts who were orbiting the earth when all this went down? See what I mean?

You don't have to buy 60 issues or visit a dirty smelly comic book store. Go to your local bookstore. They will have Y in their graphic novel section. Y will be collected in 10 softcover volumes. Nine of them are already in print. Volume 1, Unmanned, collects the first five issues and gets the story rolling. Amazon has the books for less than $11 each usually. If you don't care to buy, try your local library.

The story ends next Wednesday. That's good news for you, because you can forgo the five year wait to see what happens to Yorick, Ampersand, Beth, 355, and Dr. Mann. Lucky dogs.

UPDATE: Terrific ending. Used Lost storytelling techniques (even had a downed airplane fuselage.) You might not enjoy every bit of the story, but there is no doubt that overall this is a classic. Expect the movie in 2009.

I've been working on a "101 in 1001" list. More to come.

Olympic sport: modern pentathlon

The Summer Olympics are on their way, so I will be writing about some of the more obscure sports and events of the competition. The Olympics isn't all gymnastics, track & field, and swimming.

One of my favorite sports is Modern Pentathlon. I even use "pentathlete" as the first part of my personal email.

The sport is a creation of the founder of the modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin. It is a multi-discipline sport, comprised of...yes, five events.

They are pistol shooting, epee fencing, 200m freestyle swimming, show jumping, and a 3k run. Coubertin wanted this to be a military sport. The events are intended to simulate a scout carrying a message through hostile territory.

Men have competed in this event since 1912. Women started in 2000. In the early days, the competition occurred over a five day period with one event each day. Now it takes place in a single day with about an hour between each event.

The video is of Sheila Taormina, an American athlete who is trying to qualify as a pentathlete for the Beijing games. If she does, she will be the first athlete ever...ever...to participate in three different sports at the Olympics. She was in the triathlon in 2000 and won a gold medal as part of the USA women's swim team in 2004.

What kind of pentathlete am I? Well...I can shoot ok, I know how to fence, I am a terrible swimmer, I can show jump, but I don't believe I could handle an unfamiliar horse on some of the higher jumps, and I haven't been running for some time. Nothing insurmountable, but I won't be challenging anyone at any of these events anytime soon.

I've always thought it would be great to build an Olympic training facility exclusively for Modern Pentathlon, that could be used by other athletes for their various sports, too.

If you can swim or run competitively, then USA Pentathlon would probably be interested in talking to you about learning the other three skill disciplines (shooting, fencing, and riding.) Who knows? You could wind up an Olympian.

Suzanne and I will never kiss

Let me say, at the outset, that I am not a big fan of entertainment news and celebrity gossip. Who they are, how they live, and what they do, just doesn't matter all that much.

But when I was a kid, there were certain actresses that I always found attractive. I didn't know why I did. I only knew that when they were on-screen, I felt funny, the good kind of funny. The crush kind of funny. I don't think I ever voiced it much back then. Certainly not to my friends. They would be merciless in their ridicule. Maybe I told my mom, I don't recall. I probably insulted everyone else on screen and gave a noncommittal grunt of acknowledgement regarding the actresses that I loved.

There were a handful that kindled these feelings. The list included Debbie Reynolds, Stefanie Powers, Julie Newmar, maybe Claudia Cardinale. But the one that was never in doubt for me was Suzanne Pleshette.

When I was a kid, she was Emily Hartley, the wife of Bob on The Bob Newhart Show. Her humor was dry and sarcastic and she had that gravelly voice. Some of the best scenes were when she and Bob had conversations as they prepared for and got in bed. Her character served as the psychiatrist's psychiatrist. One of the great episodes featured a story where Emily outscores Bob on an IQ test. I've got to go to Netflix and find that one.

Oh, I just found a picture of Emily. See what I mean? How could an 8 year old not fall for her?

So what is this post about then? Well, Suzanne, as you probably have heard, died this past weekend. I know people die. Yet you can't help taking for granted that people will be around. Especially those that are imprinted in your psyche.

No, I do not and did not obsess about her. I'm talking about an image or idea of someone that is stamped into your thoughts and memories, whether you knew them personally or not.

I've been lucky enough to only lose grandparents so far. The toughest loss being my maternal grandfather when I was 16. Even then, it took about three years before it really hit me that he would never be back. Until that time, it felt like we were just apart. I was in the military. All that I had to do was to go home on leave and there he would be sitting on the couch talking about the news or music. You know, I think I've written about this before. I'll stop.

The key thing is, I just turned 44. I can remember when my grandfather turned 50. More often now, we'll be dealing with irretrievable losses until someday, I become one for someone else. I'm thinking that I would rather have memories. Memories of the people and the times we shared.

I'll always have my memories of walking to the corner store or the barbershop with my grandfather, of watching him play the banjo or casually bend bottle caps between his fingers (he loved RCs,) of hearing him call my grandmother "Lindy" (her name was Linda) and my mother "Rene" (her name is Irene) and of helping him mow the lawn and how he would get so upset if you took his photograph without letting him pose.

I wish I could talk to him today, if only to tell him how lucky I was to have him around.

And Suzanne Pleshette and I will never kiss. It isn't that I thought we would, it's that I thought there'd always be the chance.

Microlending around the world

I've been investigating setting up a bond ladder, a structure of bonds maturing at different times so that as each bond matures the funds can be reinvested in a new bond. This spreads the risk across multiple treasury or corporate bonds.

I'm also looking into investing a small amount in certificates of deposit. Oh, and the investment in Goldcorp is doing ok.

Then, I stumbled on MicroPlace. Here is a great idea: invest in MicroPlace and they make the funds available to organizations that make tiny loans to entrepreneurs in developing nations. The interest earned on the investment is between 1.5% and 3% per year. Modest for sure, but not unlike CDs and bonds these days. Plus, you get the added bonus of knowing that you're helping spread prosperity directly around the world.

I investigated a little more in microlending. And stumbled on another site, probably more popular than MicroPlace (which is an eBay company, by the way.) That site is Kiva.

Kiva works a lot differently than MicroPlace. On Kiva, you select the person or group top which you would specifically like to lend money. In this case, though, you, as the microinvestor, earn no interest. But making money on this sort of thing, and at these levels, isn't the point.

With Kiva, you loan funds in $25 increments. In fact, in order to give everyone a chance to make a microloan, Kiva tries to keep the loans to $25 per lender. The entrepreneurs are looking for loans of anywhere from $200 to $2000. Not a lot. Kiva usually fulfills the funding for a request within eight hours of posting it.

So, after talking it over with Jocelyn, who thought it was a great idea, we signed up and made a couple of $25 loans today. Pictured above is Nodira Samieva of Tajikistan. She operates a food market in Istaravshan. She wanted a loan of $1000 (already funded today) to expand her product line. She plans on repaying the loan over the next six months.

We made another $25 loan to Ajele Justina of Nigeria as part of a $1200 loan to help her buy textiles so that she can knit clothes to sell. That loan has been funded since I started typing this message. She plans on repaying it monthly over the next 8 months.

If you've done something like this, let me know about it. Or if you invest or loan through one of the many microlending organizations out there, tell me about it.

It literally took five minutes to make this happen today. Technology can be used for some amazing things at a very small transaction cost.

It makes me happy.