You have to have goals. These are mine.

These are my goals. I don't care when they're accomplished. Maybe I'll be done in a year, maybe a decade. But you gotta have goals, right? Yes, you do. I know, because Mr. VanBelois*, my high school counselor, drilled that into my head, semester after semester.

"Don't you have any goals?" he'd ask, looking over my transcript.

And I'd think about it, and I'd answer "no."

And then he would get all red, and blow out his cheeks and look at me down the end of his nose and say, "You HAVE to have goals! Don't you want to go to college?"

And I would think about it some more, and I'd answer "no."

"What about a job? Don't you want to have a good job someday?"

And I'd put on a face like I was thinking, and I'd answer "nope."

"Well then," he'd huff. "Isn't there anything you'd like to do?"

"Yeah," I remember saying. "I wanna go to Burger King for lunch."

Mr. VanBelois and I were not very good friends. So I think he would be surprised to learn that despite my non-existent high school education, I figured out how to set goals. (I can also conjugate verbs and do sentence diagramming, and I even remember the nitrogen cycle from biology class. That that, Mr. VanBelois.)

Here are some goals.

1. Take the Master Gardener class through the MSU extension. I just learned they have a Master Naturalist class too, and I might do that before the gardener one.

2. Open an all you can eat buffet restaurant, but instead of having crappy buffet food, have really good food that people will want to eat. Like homemade mashed potatoes and gravy and fried chicken and pasta salad.

3. Walk to the Canadian Rockies. If you feel like donating, I need forty pairs of shoes and one of those machines that turns pee into drinking water.

4. Build a log cabin with nothing but hand tools. Then build another and another. That way when I get to the Canadian Rockies, I'll be real good at building cabins, and I can whip one up right quick before the snow flies. (Another goal - quit talking like a damn hillbilly.)

5. Go on Wheel of Fortune, and while I'm there, ask to buy owls and repeatedly call Pat Sajak "Alex."

6. Go ghost hunting at Gettysburg.

7. Buy forty-three acres of land and get it certified organic, and plant and harvest tons of organic vegetables, and sell them in a little market. Also I will grow pumpkins and in the fall I will have a corn maze and a petting zoo, and I will give people free glasses of apple cider, because I hate when you go to those things and they charge you four dollars for a dixie cup full of apple cider. In the winter I will sell Christmas trees and wreaths and in the spring I will sell seedlings and gardening stuff.

8. Spend at least one week in bed. I will get out a couple times a day to use the bathroom, but otherwise, I will stay in bed. I won't even take a shower, because that's too ambitious. When I finally do get out of bed, I will wash my sheets with lots of Clorox. (Oh, and I will need someone to come over and cook for me and bring me ice cream a couple times a day.)

9. Get a cream colored Pomeranian and name it Jack, because last night I dreamed I had a cream colored Pomeranian named Jack, and he was so cute and he cuddled with me and he never pissed on the floor. When I woke up I was so mad because it was only a dream. I won't be able to get a Pomeranian until the kids are grown because of the hair issue. I bet it would get stickers and pieces of candy canes stuck in its hair all the time. [I only capitalized Pomeranian because spell check told me to. I think it looks kind of stupid like that, but it got me thinking - is there really a place called Pomerania, and do you call peope from there Pomeranians?]

10. Come up with a tenth goal - a good one, not the one I was thinking of, which was to help my brother build the biggest Fig Newton ever and get in the Guinness Book of World Records. (See, my brother has goals too.)



* Yes! That's his real name! You can google him if you want to, but he isn't very interesting.