Just Call Me Popeye

This weekend we had my sister, brother-in-law and kids over for Easter. I was playing with my 3-year-old nephew, Drew, when he curled up his arms, with his fists by his ears, and said "Feel my muscles!" So I dutifully squeezed his teeny arms and told him how strong he was. Then he wanted to feel mine, so I did the Popeye thing. He reached out his hand and squeezed my elbow, very impressed, saying "whoa, Kelsey's got hard muscles!"

Before I Die

Out of boredom I pulled out a list that I made as a grade 10 English project of 50 things I want to do before I die. I love doing things like this, sorting through old papers or computer files, I guess, and being confronted with your younger self. The most obvious things are the outdated ones, like wincing at bad jokes. There are some things that are very immature, like wanting to be on the Oprah Winfrey show, swim with dolphins and have a holiday named after me. Some stuff I'm just not interested in anymore, like living with an aboriginal tribe in Australia (I would in a different place), speaking Italian and winning an archery competition.
Some stuff, wierdly, happened that I didn't expect. The first thing on my list was to receive a bouquet of roses from a mysterious stranger. Well, I didn't receive roses but I did get a bouquet of flowers sent to me from a stranger a couple years ago while I was on holiday in Brazil. For three weeks it drove me crazy, because I didn't know who sent them. Turns out it was the family of a boy I'd helped that summer at my cabin, which I don't think was exactly what I had in mind when I wrote my list, but it counts.
Some of it, I still want. I want to talk to a ghost, see every picture in the Louvre, travel in the Middle East, and it would be fun to discover a new planet although I would NOT name it after myself. I still want to make a full-length film. Most of all, though, after friends and family, I want a library like the one from "Beauty and the Beast". That's it. That would fill me up.