#53 Start Investing

Fantastic news everyone! I saved enough money to start investing.

Which I have indeed started investing already. I started small by putting a small portion of my savings in a low risk investment portfolio and just let that sit there.

But then as investing goes you start getting more curious about stocks and then you do some research. End up buying more and more. Which then I took about half of my savings and spread out investments all over.

I’ve set myself up for mostly long term investments as I would rather try to place my bets in a safer place. Alas markets can always change so there is nothing that is actually safe, but for the most part my investments are in low risk areas which I feel better about.

There isn’t much else to say on this goal, but a quick update for it just to show that it is in motion.

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#16 Scrapbook

I’ll be honest right out the gate: technically this isn’t fully accomplished yet and there is a very just reason!

My brother actually has all the old photos and I’m near a desperate state to steal his hard drive and go through a decade worth of photos. I haven’t entirely reached that point yet, but I would really love to finish the scrapbook I am working on.

I have put together a scrapbook of my brother’s and I Comic Con adventures and for some odd reason I have 0 photos and he has them all. What I do have however is loads of artwork and the professional photo ops, as well as all the random cards and stickers from booths over the years. For the most part I kept everything we ever got from any con in my bottom dresser drawer and now all that hoarding has paid off!

It has given me plenty to begin this scrapbook, enough that I feel confident in sharing some of it! So here it is y’all my first ever scrapbook.

I know it still needs lots of work and lots more photos and probably some stories. The thing is I haven’t accomplished a goal for my list in a while and I really have been trying to cross this one off and right now I am settling for close enough because I would feel better seeing progress.

Though not entirely right, I do feel I have made the effort to check it off and since this is my list and my rules I can do what I want. That settles that then.

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#79 Dating

All right y’all back when I started the master list I put dating on there and lemme tell you I had no idea where that would lead me! I really thought I would go out casually and have some fun dates and come back with entertaining stories.

But you see I am way too particular for that to actually work. I mean I went on a dates and was really hoping to get some enjoyment, but I just never really clicked with anyone.

I went to dinner with a stand up comedian and I was like heck yes this is gonna be a great, but nope. Guy turned out to be one of the dullest people I have ever met and we just operated on different wave lengths. Plus don’t get me started on the guy who was apparently married and going through a divorce which he stated while we were eating dinner (don’t worry, I called for the check immediately). Hell at one point a guy told me he was planning to go vegan soon and I needed to bail from that (no offense vegans, just not the lifestyle I want).

Honestly, I didn’t get much out of these dates (except that one guy that showed me the existence of fried mac and cheese) and I went on most of these dates a couple months after I had made the list really hoping to just figure out what all this relationship nonsense was about. But after many failed/weird/boring/uncomfortable dates I decided to just focus on my life and just have Future Lauren deal with dating.

Which brings me to September 2020 in the midst of a pandemic.

I was obviously not looking for anything, so when a boy from my past (that sounds dark, he just went to the same high school as me and we had recently reconnected back in August) comes along and asks me out I am shooketh.

But ya know what!?

WE CLICK!

The interaction was easy and not uncomfortable and I wasn’t sure about him, but I knew that we got along and had wonderful conversation. Fast forward another month of seeing him and I realize I like him and he’s what all this relationship stuff is supposed to be. Now here I am dating him. It’s still new, but it makes me feel confident in being able to check this off because dates with him are fun and just make sense.

I could never be a casual dater, because I think I was always just holding out for a relationship.

Don’t get me wrong I have no idea what I’m doing and I know it’s still new, but this introverted dork is dating and y’all I am so proud of me. I’ve come far. I could probably go on about my new found dating life, but that seems a smidge weird, especially if he stumbles upon this. So best just end this and cross this off the list!

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#91 Have a Car Chase

It has been brought to my attention that I have in fact done this and completely forgot!

Before I begin my narrative let me introduce you to my friend Emily. Emily is hilarious, beautiful, joyful, so randomly brilliant, and so unbelievably crazy that she is one of my favorite humans to be around. She forced her way into my life and I love her for it.

Back in high school and probably even now Emily’s type of man was a Bearded Gentleman with a Big Truck.

Long ago when Emily and I were in the same state and I did not have a driver’s license and for reasons I can’t really remember we had my mom’s Scion XB. Which is basically just a car that looks like a box and doesn’t have any necessary need for speed that would be desired/ideal for a car chase. So of course that was the car that we had on this day.

Now if I’m being honest I have absolutely no idea what we were doing that day, but I can tell you exactly where we were on the highway when Emily spotted a good looking truck that passed us and she swore the guy driving it was just her type. So of course she speeds up to try to pass him and get a proper look at him. Now the Scion isn’t good with speed, she’s getting the Scion up there, but this guy is hauling. Full on does not care what the speed limit is and our tiny box car is not even on his radar. Of course Emily doesn’t care about that and guns the Scion and pursues the heck out of this truck.

Does this story verge on stalker territory? A little, but the reason it doesn’t is cause remember that I said we were in a Scion, well we were also going up a highway that is 65mph that heads into elevation. Now this isn’t a problem if you have a car that has power and has no problem with elevation increase. Ah but the lil Scion does not have that power. Going up a hill it drops 20mph and you sitting at a comfy 45mph til you can make it to where the speed limit is actually 45mph.

So did we even get close to this guy? No. Not at all. Did we make an effort? Yes. Did we have the worst possible car for a car chase? Absolutely. Should we still have tried? Yes, that could have been Emily’s future husband and we had to give it a shot; even though it was a fail.

So there ya have it y’all I was actually involved in a car chase back in the day. Maybe not super dramatic, but not everything in life has to be dramatic. Plus a casual car chase just happening sounds like the ideal for a circumstance goal.

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#10 Yoga

I’ve decided I will never properly get into yoga, but I will admit as a fitness I do see the benefits of stretching.

I never really cared for yoga and it’s peaceful, meditative lifestyle. I am an anxious person so yoga never resonated with my sense of always wanting to do something. Even sitting in silence is a difficult task for me and that just comes from my mind always thinking. In this challenge I was just going to focus on learning yoga poses and just see if I could actually vibe with yoga. Spoiler alert: I didn’t.

Honestly, it wasn’t until I picked up a different fitness hobby that I really learned the importance and value of yoga and how much of necessity it is to stretch out my body. As a fitness I definitely acknowledge yoga, where as before I didn’t care for it much entirely.

I will say that I will never properly get into yoga and I don’t see myself ever doing just yoga for a solid workout, but I will definitely keep in in my routine as it is important to stretch out muscles and make sure the body is okay, especially after a workout.

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#96 Have someone tell me their life story

Oddly enough I had 2 very different people in the past month divulge their life story to me and it wasn’t even by my prompting. It just sort of happened. Don’t know if I was just the kind of person that they wanted to listen or they just needed to talk and I was there. Either way I really didn’t expect how willingly these people told me their stories. I am a reserved person and I’m not really good at telling my own story, so hearing others so easily divulge their life was fascinating to me.

One of these people I am slowly becoming friends with now and then the other I had met them the night before and then the next day it became very obvious how similar we were. Based on those similarities I think it was easy to talk to me and trust me because it was almost like talking to myself. The conversation was flowing in a way that I had only experienced with close friends and this interaction happened with a stranger. Granted I would not classify them as a stranger now after the talk we had, but it’s kind of up in the air if I’ll ever actually see this person again.

It’s kind of crazy how one of these people shared their life with me and just vanished and then the other I’m trying to form a friendship with. They both had such interesting lives and gave me perspectives that I am aware of, but am not directly familiar with. I’d like to talk to them often and see where their lives go. I obviously don’t want to divulge their lives to the internet, but I wanted to reflect on the interactions and their lives.

I am thankful they talked to me and I am grateful to have had such conversations with them.

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#26 Zip Line

Hello Blog! Hello Goals!

With the world being utter chaos and a lot of my goals involving social aspects I didn’t know what to do about my goals. I wasn’t motivated to do much during this time (except get into dancing, which has been great for me mentally) and everything was just making me too stressed.

Right now I am a little bit behind on my initial plan of getting a goal accomplished every 4 weeks, but I’m starting to get my motivation back and I’m hoping to be knocking out a few more goals in the coming weeks.

Speaking of these goals! Let’s talk about Zip Lining and how have I never done this before!? I feel like I’ve missed out on so many zip lines and needless to say, next time I’m on a road trip and there is a zip lining attraction I’m going. Don’t care if I need to be somewhere, I gotta go zip around.

I’m normally such a baby with these sorts of things, but I only had a little bit of jitters for a moment and then no problem. Heck by the end of it I was running and jumping off the platforms. Plus I was the first person in our group to zip line today. I was with my friend who was the first in line to go down the zip lines and she full on stopped and had me pass her, I paused to look at her and all she said was “You’re going first.” Later she told me she was actually super nervous and I was apparently blind to it cause I was too excited and to focused on getting on the platform.

Without further ado, here are some dorky photos to prove that it happened:

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#6 Dance Everyday for a Month

Originally this was run everyday for a month and then I remembered how much I hate running every day. I could go a solid 15-20 days, but I would just get more and more annoyed with running. I never became one of those people who loved running and got the runner’s high. I just got pissed and would drop running everyday and do it every couple of days a week instead. I’ve tried so many times, but no matter how many times I have tried I just can’t make it a full month.

Which led me to changing it to a different form of cardio that I actually like: Dance! Listen, I don’t need to dance well to dance everyday. I can line dance, salsa, hip hop, flail about like an idiot, etc. Dance as a form of consistent cardio was way better for me because though dance was consistent the type of dance was ever changing and I never got stuck in the state of mind I did when I was running.

It was so freeing to spend an hour everyday to dance. I wasn’t trying to impress anyone, I was just doing something to better myself and it allowed me to have fun. Dancing is fun and you don’t have to be good at it to have fun and get a good workout in.

1 Million Dance Studios always inspire me to learn their hip hop choreos and dances. I can always bust out a line dance the moment country music touches my ears. Somewhere deep, deep, deep inside me is a Latina and I swear when I hear salsa or reggaeton I try to call upon my inner Puerto Rican and get those hips going (note: it doesn’t go well, but it is hilarious).

Doing this challenge gave me a hate for running, but a love and passion for dance. I think it worked out much better that way.

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#90 Teach dog utterly useless trick

This isn’t actually cool, but it is something that is useless and was done incredibly by accident. It is also funny so I think that will suffice for the cool.

So fun fact: I pace. A lot. I make sure to get in my steps in everyday and sometimes that means that I pace around my room or my kitchen or around the whole house for random intervals of time throughout the whole day.

Any one see where this is leading?

My dog, Lois, has picked up on this habit of pacing so she follows the same routes as I do when ever she is bored or is stressed about something.

*Video footage to come*

On a completely not useless skill note. I’ve also taught her bedtime is at 9pm and so she gets antsy when people are in the house at that time and this probably isn’t the best thing, but she barks people out of my (her) room. So if there are people in the room after 9pm she is not about it and starts terrorizing them so she can get to bed. Which allows me to get to bed too. So, it works in my favor as well.

Blog Update: Sorry not a super long post, sadly I’m just not accomplishing too much as of late. Working on plans for a lot of goals, but kind of hard to do things with stay at home order. Hopefully I’ll be crossing more off my list soon!

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#14 Finish a full art journal

Y’all it has been a hot minute since I’ve made a post. This year has already been so chaotic with work and now with covid19 I have absolutely no idea what’s going on anymore. But what I do know my challenges and goals are super important to me, so I want to take some time and refocus and try to get some things accomplished. 2020 has been a year of work and stress so far and I feel like I haven’t moved forward and right now I need this list to motivate me to go forward and to do things.

Now onto the actual post!

I don’t wanna bombard you with the full thing, but here are some of my favorite things I’ve done in my Journal.

First Here is my Art Journal:

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Cue collage!

A lot of this isn’t my original work or anything, it’s stuff I’ve followed along off tutorials, or stuff I saw on pinterest and tried my best to copy. I am not good with calling images to my mind, so I always need a reference to do any sort of art, but this wasn’t for me to show off my art. This art journal became a place to distract me from stress or boredom and it was just something fun to play around with. There was no pressure for it to be good and it’s not like when I was in grade school where it would be graded on based on assignments. It was just whatever I felt like doing and that was so freeing.

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