Things I've Accomplished...

...And Many More I Haven't (yet)

My last year of college, I lived with two (super awesome) girls. We had a blog. Naturally, it was super awesome, too.

One day, October 21, 2008 to be exact, I wrote a post titled: 30 Before 30

I intended to make a list of 30 things I wanted to accomplish before turning 30, but I only made it to 25 (you'll see why).

I was thinking about this list the other day and decided to dig it up and see what kind of progress I was making.

Let's have a look, shall we?

1. Graduate May 2009. Check!
2. Anna, don't fail math. B+. boo YAW.
3. Make it back to Yemen. dangit!
4. Master Arabic. Not yet, but have an action plan in motion and a goal to be proficient by the end of 2011.
5. Read all the books on mah list (which has grown to include Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls and Wicked. Thanks, Megan! :) Will address this in another post.
6. Go to Grad School, ya bum! Got accepted! Will go in another year or two, I'm thinkin.
7. Go Skydiving. Did iFly this summer! Now for the real thing...
8. Get SCUBA certified Wanted to do it this year. Spent all my money in Egypt instead. But I still got time!
9. Then dive in the Red Sea and Australia. See above.
10. Make it back to Guatemala, Egypt twice!, Italy, Jordan , Lebanon, Oman (Salalah) August?, Turkey November? and Mexico July?.
11. And while I'm at it, see North Africa (Morocco, mostly), Russia, Hungary, Switzerland, Spain--aw heck! All of Europe, Kenya, Australia, Brazil, Honduras, Beliz, CUBA so that I can be just like Matt. Whoa. I'm way behind on this. But! Did add Germany and France to my list of European countries :) (new total: 17!)
12. Live in New York. 2012 goal!
13. Spend some time as a professional writer of some sort. Or have writing be part of my job. OR! Just make some sweet moolah for blogging. Really, any combination of money and writing would be *great*. Done quite a bit of writing for my current job. Not exactly what I had in mind when I wrote this, so I'm not crossing it off, but it's been accomplished.
14. Spend an extended period of time (read: more than two weeks)traveling abroad solo. See: Summer 2009
15. Maybe stop talking so much about travel. Yeesh. So for #15: develop new interests! like Quilting!
16. Work in DC. For a human rights organization. Hm...
17. Live outside the country! For a few years. Bada. BING.
18. Hike all around Southern Utah (Canyonlands, ZION, Bryce, Arches) Only did Arches. And it was before this post was written. Doesn't count :(
19. Take up surfing. Even for a day. Oo fun!
20. Oh yeah, um, get married. TDH, that's all I ask. Okay, and smart and funny and interesting and adventurous, too. But that's a topic for a different post :) haha. going to get this as close to 30 as I can...
21. Eat lunch at the top of Half Dome. Oh California. I have big plans for our reunion.
22. Watch the sunrise over the Empty Quarter. Totally must do this year!!
23. Eat Nutella on French Bread while looking up at Mt. Rushmore. This will be fun, but before I'm 30? Not so sure.
24. Road Trip the entire length of Highway 1--So Cal to Canada. Woot! (hey...sounds like a good post-grad vay-cay! Huh huh?) Okay, maybe not to Canada. But all the way up the California coast, then Oregon and Washington and ultimately wind up in BC. Heading up to Vancouver in May, but not by way of Highway 1. Boo.
25. There I go with the traveling again. Um, maybe I should take a break and think things over when I'm not ITCHING TO GET OUT of this great little city I call "home". Hokay, see ya next time!

Completed: 4 of 25

Progress: I have a long way to go.

Analysis: I am totally getting there, though. I really wanted to travel, and look at me! Living in Dubai, spending my leave galavanting across Egypt, heading to Canada (country #18! woohoo!) this summer, GETTING PAID TO TRAVEL. I've done so many cool things since writing this list, and still have plenty of time to finish it off. If I weren't so strict, I could have crossed off a few more things even.

All in all, I'm pretty darn proud of my accomplishments and look forward to the rest!

A Quick Brag (or: I'm Kind of a Big Deal) (Again.)

Encounters with Sheikh Mo and Barack Freaking Obama.

Guys, I know I suck at blogging these days. Actually I have like 3 drafts that I've never finished, and several cool stories I never even started! I'll get to those one day. Tonight, I'm just here to brag.

I spent the weekend visiting long lost friends in Abu Dhabi. Tonight, one of these friends and I drove out to a sports bar on a Yas Island to watch the Chelsea-Stoke match (draw!) (also cricket was on. Does anyone even understand that sport? I mean, besides the UK, Australia, and the billion+ inhabitants of the subcontinent?), and afterwards we sat along the harbor talking. In fact, see this purple structure center-right? We were sitting (bottom left corner) looking across the water at it when a man stopped a few meters away and interrupted our conversation.

Excuse me, he said.

I looked up and saw a stylishly-bald fellow in a pink dress shirt who looked kind of like...

My friend* was immediately on his feet. Mr Zane! Wow! How are you? And shook his hand. I was just thinking maybe he didn't look familiar after all when my friend turned to me and said, Rayzzle! This is the guy from Titanic!

And I was like, What?

And then I said, WHAT?

And do you know what? HE TOTALLY WAS! And there was my friend, standing with him like he was some old friend and pointing him in the direction of whatever hoity-toity place he was looking for.

Only then did I get on my feet--he was gone by now--and my friend was like, Can you believe that was Billy Zane?

I was like, I can't believe you even know who that is.
We were both like, That's the closest I've ever been to Leonardo DiCaprio.

Isn't that crazy? Such is the glam life I live over here in the UAE. My weekdays are spent handling paperwork for royalty (<--yes, that is an allusion to a story I will not be publishing here EDIT: two stories) and my weekends are spent running into celebrities I can't recognize.

Life is good.

Brag brag brag.

*I'm not being intentionally cryptic here. No wait, yes I am! But only because I've recently decided not to use real names here and it being the wee hours of the morning, I'm not witty enough to come up with a good alias.