Gotta Get Me Some Goals

********************

There's another new meme making its way around the Blogosphere and I got smacked tagged with it by Gail of Gem-osophy earlier today. This meme is about goals and is appropriately called "Gotta Get Goals." To quote Gail, "It requires you to list and write about five to ten gotta-get goals that will allow you to truly say you have achieved your wildest dreams in life -- the best, most exclusive, and over-the-top goals that you can pick off your goals list. Not as easy as it sounds."

It's especially not easy when the biggest goal I can think of at this point is to be able to get out of bed and walk without having my lower back screaming obscenities at me! However, let me put on my thinking cap and see what I can come up with so that it doesn't sound like my life is just one long aimless ramble with no particular rhyme or reason.

1. Okay, this is really going to sound bad, especially to those people who will jump up and say "ah-ha! I knew that was the reason she was writing this blog!" but one of my most important goals is to find someone with whom I can share the rest of my life in a loving relationship that doesn't require either of us to turn ourselves inside out to become the person that the other wants us to be. Fool that I am, I still believe that there is a good man out there somewhere who can love me for who I am and as I am. My goal is to find that man but I am not at all sure how to go about doing that and - no - this blog is not for that purpose. This blog is to kill time until he and his white horse gallop onto my front porch!

2. I would like to be able to survive my daughter's teenage years with my sanity and my sense of humor intact. There are times, especially when she is hitting me in the head with her new and still rolled-up My Chemical Romance poster, that I am not so sure that this is going to be possible! If she doesn't want me to say potentially embarrassing things to her friends then she shouldn't hand me the phone - hitting me in the head with the poster isn't going to take back what I just said!

3. I either need to learn to accept myself as I am or get the motivation to do something about it. I have made just about every excuse possible this winter as to why I can't eat right or go out and get some exercise. If I am going to be a lazy couch potato that fails to eat healthily then I need to embrace that concept but if I am going to continue to be uncomfortable in my skin then I need to get my skin and all of the muscles that it is covering into gear and quit whining about it. My goal here is to make a choice and stick to it.

4. With my best friend, Cyndi, by my side I would love to tour England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. My ancestors hailed from across the pond and I would love to go and see where it was that they came from. Plus I love early English history and touring those places I've only read about would be fabulous.

5. There are many, many Civil War sites in this very country that I want to get to and my goal is to someday finish the battlefield tour that my cousin Amy and I started seven years ago (holy smokes, it was that long ago??) when we trekked down to a good number of battle sites in Virginia as well as Antietam and Gettysburg.

6. Retirement with some sort of financial freedom is on the list but this one is going to be a toughie as I've only been at my current job for four years, I'm already close to 50, and my retirement fund is not exactly growing by leaps and bounds. I may very well find myself dispatching ambulances until I'm 72! Oh perish the thought!

7. I just want to be happy no matter whether I ever attain any of the above or not. My biggest goal is to be able to look back on my life when I'm leaving this earthly plain and say that despite all my life was relatively happy. Personally I think that's the best goal we could all attain.

Now I guess it's my turn to tag some unsuspecting victims bloggers that haven't already been tagged by someone else so I tag Akelamalu, Kai, and Dixie. Good luck ladies, this is a tough one!