53: My year of curiosities, learning and adventure

Y'all spoil me. I had the most amazing birthday, capped off my a wonderful visit from Emily. Before I get into our schenanigans, I wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who helped make me feel so special on my birthday.

From a sweet breakfast brunch with mom and dad (and my annual thank you to mom "for squeezing me out of her hoohah"... And yes, she absolutely hates that, but for realsies, I did it twice myself and I know who the true heroes of a birthday are.)

To Stacey's team picture memory which will never stop being funny

To the package of amazing farm goodies and homemade surprises from Pam

From the way that my Splash cohorts celebrated me all day with unexpected gifts, cake, and Singing.

To my badass gang's sweet messages

And way too many other kind things from everyone. I am truly humble and acknowledge how blessed I am to have such amazing people in my life.

Jacki, a dear friend of mine, sent me the following birthday message:

That. That right there. That's what I want my life to continue to be.

How can I live up to that?

I'm happy to announce that this year, I want to keep up with the Badass spirit and relaunch a series of personal curiosity-themed challenges. All of which YOU, dear reader, are welcome to join me on.

The past two years have been focused on COURAGE and getting out of my comfort zone.

This year, my theme is the word CURIOSITY.

What can I learn?

What can I explore?

I did 120ish badass adventures since 2021, but I still have not done everything on my original bucket adventure list. I need to get everything crossed off, so I'm rechallenging myself with a new set--still adventure seeking but more about stoking my curiosity. Got my very self a list of 53 new challenges to tackle. You in?

Challenges don't need to be formal affairs. For example, last weekend, Kristin and I did a spur of the moment Curiosity Virtual Adventure©.

We explored my local Oriental Market together--doing a virtual scavenger hunt to track down the ingredients to make sushi at home, and then actually seeing if I was able to make sushi from what we picked out together. Spoiler - - yes and yum!!!

So I'm asking you to keep sending me ideas of things to explore. This is going to be a fun year, y'all!

To start my 53rd birthday out right, Emily came for the weekend. This person is utterly remarkable and she inspires me deeply to live my best life. She is living her best, fullest, most meaningful, most curiosity-driven life that's just right for her, and I want to be her when I grow up.

One of our favorite things to do together is to take on an escape room. We decided to do a first - - two escape rooms in one day. Lucky enough to live under two hours from Orlando, one of the escape room capitals of the world, we headed there to Doldrick's Escape Room.

Y'all, if you like escape rooms, you must go here and try these out. I'm not going to do spoilers, but let's just say that the puzzles were super unique and über creative and definitely made my curiosity run wild.

The first game was a train theme and was like you stepped into a cartoon. It involved intricate props that made us laugh and we were able to solve it with 4 minutes to spare.

The second one was even better and was a pirate theme where we both started out in separate jail cells on the ship and had to solve problems together just by using our voice to communicate with each other. And yeah.. We solved this one with 6 minutes to spare.