Project Permagrin

with eternal gratitude to @jenniferalaine for snapping this pic!

This girl is happy. Yes, she’s exhausted and her liver is sobbing quietly and pleading for mercy, but more important is that awesome grin. She kept it well into her first few days home from Vegas and the the sparkle slowly faded. Oh, the tragedy.

I started thinking about that happiness and how to keep it around more often, for longer. As much as I wish I could go to Vegas with fifty-odd fabulous people once a month, both my liver and my budget would soon revolt. Enter Project Permagrin. Is it a life list? No, I’m thinking it’s a life well lived list. Because life is the stuff we do to survive, and these are thriving things. After today, it will live on as a separate page and a breathing document that I can make additions or changes to. Feel free to make suggestions for additions, and/or tell me how pretty and interesting I am. I could use an extra dose of self-esteem today.

ring a chapel bell
have my picture taken under the Eiffel tower
follow the fall color from Maine to Georgia
stay in a Ritz Carlton hotel
visit a topless beach
publish a book
drink in Casablanca
make a family
take a retreat at a monastery
spa treatment from Grove Park Inn
learn to waltz
get another tattoo
hike Cattails Peak
spend Independence Day in Boston
swim in the Pacific Ocean
and the Mediterranean
pet big cats (preferably mountain lions)
send a card a week for a year
own a greenhouse
write a poem every day
have another German Shepherd
visit all the Great Lakes (i’m missing a few)
visit Alaska
family vacation to Tahiti
take a solo vacation every year
assist a beekeeper
visit all of my grandparents’ graves
receive a standing ovation
study botany
keep an orchid alive
camp in every mountain range in the contiguous US
pay it forward- mental health care
own an Ingrid Bergman Mont Blanc pen
stay at Peaks of Otter lodge
drive the Pacific Coast Highway
learn to throw pottery
visit Israel
establish a second chance fund
photograph bears in the wild
photograph edelweiss in the wild
meeting a sitting First Lady
visit a planetarium
drive cross country
go storm chasing
visit Scotland
knit a sweater out of fisherman’s wool
attend a rose bowl parade
see the northern lights
spend a week in Scottsdale
have a koi pond with a pagoda
ride in a hot air balloon
roast a whole pig
do a perfect cartwheel
hand feed ducks
swim with dolphins again
be hypnotized
take my sister to Rome
go ice skating again
take a hot yoga class