Golden Birthday Challenge: Day 2-4
Day 2: Nail decals
I set the bar (no pun intended) pretty high on day one with the importance of the “new things” I am trying to experience every day until I turn 31. So today, I decided to adjust expectations. Lest anyone think that I have 31 truly significant ambitions in life, today I did my nails.
Obviously, I have done my nails before, but this time, I used the sticker nail decals that my sister in law introduced me to about a year ago. I’ve been meaning to try them out, and today, for the first time ever in my life, I have fancy decal nails.
The process should have been simpler, but I used my complete ignorance of all things cosmetelogical to make it slightly more fumbling and awkward.
In the end…I have bold Golden Birthday Challenge nails.
Day Three: Watch “Raiders of the Lost Ark” with Lewis
Over time, I’ve seen pieces and parts of all the Indiana Jones movies. If you’ve ever killed time in a hotel room with basic cable, so have you. But I’d never seen 95% of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and when I confessed this to Lewis, he seemed genuinely wounded.
I’ve never seen a lot of classics. None of the Monty Pythons, the Exorcist, Robin Hood Men in Tights. I spent the 80s as a preschooler and the 90s begging to be allowed to watch Rugrats (occasionally) and Ren and Stimpy (never). By then, everyone had already seen all the classics, and I was on to “serious” movies. I did manage to piece together the original Star Wars trilogy and Animal House. It was like finding the Rosetta Stone of my family’s pop cultural heritage.
But, I married a movie buff. And Indiana Jones was a big deal to him at a formative time. So, we pulled out my MacBook Air, rented the movie from Amazon, and after only 30 minutes of reloading, updating, and hand-wringing, (“Have we been reduced to this?!?” (me) followed by a monotone, “Yes,” (Lewis)) we watched the great adventure classic in miniature.
Tiny or not, what a fun movie!
The fact that the final battle escalates into claymation is, quite simply, amazing. It made me wish CGI had never been invented.
Day Four: Go to a new grocery store to buy the week’s groceries
I think the success in this challenge is going to be not just finding extraordinary things to do, but doing my normal things in new ways. And few things are as alien and mind-blowing as an unfamiliar grocery store.
Years ago, my friend Rachel was trying to talk me into going to Sprouts, one of the few non-HEB grocery stores in San Antonio. Sprouts calls itself a farmer’s market, and it’s supposed to be a mysterious combination of fresh, organic, local food and low prices.
It’s a little far from my house, but so are all the decent HEB’s, so I went for it.
It was small, friendly, and had every single thing I needed. And I found a box of cereal that I can usually only find at Whole Foods for $5.99. The Sprouts price: $2.59 (it was on sale…but still).
It was packing up my Sprouts groceries that made me think that this Golden Birthday Challenge might lead to some more permanent life improvements.