28 Things I Want To Do Before I Die

1. Visit Italy again. While in Italy, I want to see some of my extended family and take lots of pictures
2. Push a slinky down the CN tower stairs, in order to raise money for charity. Video tape the slinky as it goes down the stairs and hope that it succeeds.
3. See the Northern Lights twice
4. Try out vegetarianism for 30 days
5. Fold a 1,000 origami cranes and give them to someone special
6. Watch cherry blossoms in Japan
7. Own a samurai sword and hang it on a wall in my home
8. Own a crazy awesome expensive camera
9. Own exquisite art supplies
10. Ride in a red hot-air balloon with someone I care about
11. Go to Paris with a close female friend that speaks fluent French and English. While in Paris, we will go on many shopping sprees, spend a lot of time eating and visiting many art galleries. I will also make sure to see the Mona Lisa while I’m there.
12. Visit every Province and Territory in Canada (I’ve already been to about half of them, but I’ve yet to visit New Brunswick, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, Yukon and Nunavut.)
13. Get Married
14. Adopt a girl from India
15. Own a black top hat, black cane and tiny tuxedo jacket. While wearing the following articles of clothing, I will enter a parade uninvited
16. Decorate my house the way I want
17. Learn how to traditionally air brush
18. Support a missionary overseas
19. Sponsor another child through Compassion
20. Go to England for a month
21. Be an extra in a film
22. See a lunar eclipse
23. Experience weightlessness
24. Photograph an endangered animal
25. Meet my grandchildren
26. Own a pet snake
27. Own a friendly pet cat
28. Catch fireflies in the summer




Adopt a girl from India
India has been urging couples in developed countries to adopt children that are seen as unwanted orphans in order to save them from a life of povery and emotional destituation. There are more than eleven million abandoned children in India! About 90% of those abandoned are girls whose poor young mothers cannot afford to keep them. They face a bleak future as beggars, prostitutes or menial labourers if families cannot be found for them. When I become older, I wish to adopt a girl from India and save her from this grim future.
There is a great deal to consider when it comes to adoption, which is why I would wait for the best time in my life to adopt. You don’t have to be married to adopt, but I would like to be married because I believe it would be easier raising the child if I were not a single parent. To adopt a child from India, the couple must be financially secure and must have been together for more than five years. They also must be between the ages of 30 and 55. It usually takes around 12 to 18 months from selecting an agency to arriving home with the child. I would want to get a really well-known, customer oriented agency with whom I could feel free to ask a lot of questions. You have to pay some fees to the agency but I believe it would be worth it because I don’t think my husband and I could handle the paper work by ourselves.

To adopt a child from India costs somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000 for the complete adoption, spread over the entire period of 12 - 18 months. There are a lot of different fees to think about. Just to apply can cost up to $300. Between adoption studies, document processing services, travel, and adoption study updates, things can really add up. Along with the costs, there are lots of documents that need to be filled out, in order to be qualified for any adoption. Things I would most likely be dealing with would be home study backgrounds, letters of reference, birth and marriage certificates, tax returns, other financial statements and health information and other valuable assets that would be reviewed and addressed . Having everything in writing is always important as well. Near the end of the adoption process, I would need permission from India’s child protection service for the child to leave the country. I would then be assigned a child worker, who would come to my home every so often to insure that the family the child is living with provides a safe, nurturing and loving environment.

India faces a major problem with increasing birth rate - the total increase is 1.9% . This number may not seem very large, but it really adds up when the population is so large to begin with. There are little resources to educate all of the people because there are so many. Along with this not all citizens are treated as equal, like the women. I believe that if the women in India could be more empowered if they could have an education. Being educated, they would be able to enter the work place, have money to take care of themselves and ultimately have smaller families because they would not have enough time to invest in every child. Children in India are seen as insurance because most Indian couples want at least two boys to take care of them (two in case one dies) when they get old. The girls are seen as just an expensive burden for the family because they have to arrange a marriage for the girls, which do not bring income to the family. With more than 25% of India below the poverty line, simply because of the lack of resources, it is estimated that by 2050 India will have too many people for it to handle. The quality of living will plummet ever more and greater poverty will exist. Maybe taking one female child away from this won’t make a huge difference but at least it’s something that my husband and I could do to help the situation.




Decorate my House the Way I Want

I could never decorate my house the way I dream it could be like. What comes to mind when I think about my dream home would be something like the following: I would want a white fence going around my solid gold house and have golden gargoyles on the roof of my home. Inside, it would look like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory with a life sized chocolate waterfall! Along with this, there would be hired oompa loompas to clean and take care of my home. Art would be a huge factor of my house, as it would cover almost all of the walls. Through-out every room, there would be a panel that looks like the control pad on an iPod. I would be able to blast music in whatever room I would be in. The bathroom would be the best because I would install not just a white light switch but a strobe light switch as well. I could have techno music blaring and strobe lights going on and off while I would be taking a shower! In the family room, there would be one of those moving sidewalks so I could just stand up and be moved from the TV to the kitchen to get a drink. In the basement, I would have a crazy awesome drum set, with a ton of cymbals and five cow bells. I don’t even use cow bells when I’m playing - I just want to say that I own five of them in my solid gold house. Lastly, in the garage there would be a red corvette that has hovercraft technology installed in it.

As completely awesome as this house sounds, I could never accept the amount of money that I would have to truly put into it. Although, I’m keeping the strobe light idea in the huge bathroom, art everywhere, having a white fence and the speaker system through-out the house. I would want a green style home, using mostly solar power. Green buildings significantly reduce demand for energy, water and materials because of the building’s life cycle. Passive solar heating can generate up to 30% in energy savings while reducing carbon emissions by 35% , reduces water use by 30 to 50% and can save 50 to 90% in waste disposal costs ! Along with all of this, I would like the house to be fairly small, so it would be easy to clean and won’t take up a lot of land. All of the light bulbs would be compact fluorescent with low mercury models. I don’t want any carpet in my house, besides maybe the stairs, because I find carpet annoying to vacuum. My realistic draft of my dream home is not nearly as exciting but it’s a lot more sensible.




Try out Vegetarianism for 30 days

One of the main reasons why I want to become a vegetarian for a month is because PETA's devised a sort of pledge deal: if you agree to give up meat for at least 30 days, they'll make a donation to the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation, a charity that strategically plants fruit trees in poor areas where locals are undernourished. The trees will then provide fresh, healthy food for numerous harvests.

Honestly, I like most meat products but I also know that there are a lot of negative effects from eating meat. Soy may have its problems too, but the fact remains that the cost of mass producing cattle, poultry, sheep, and pigs is highly unsustainable due to our inefficient use of freshwater and land, along with soil erosion and heavy pollution from livestock waste. According to the PETA’s website, if the entire US were to become vegetarians, we could feed 1.3 billion people with the grain and soybeans that instead goes to livestock!

I would first get some vegetarian cookbooks and look for some alternative recipes that interest me. Doing a bit more research on it would be helpful too; reading up on vegetarian nutrition and vegetarianism in general would be a large benefit to me. I would also tell my parents around my temporarily new dietary choice. I am going to keep a very close look at my diet to make sure that I am eating enough. There are several non-meat sources of protein like legumes, nuts, beans and seeds, so I would need to include these in my plan. I also want to include a good variety of fruits and vegetables to make sure my levels of B vitamins, iron and vitamin Cs will be acceptable. I also would like to invest in some good quality multivitamins from a vegetarian company like Rainbow Light. If I find I am having a hard time not eating meat, I might try some good meat substitutes. Different companies like Quorn, Boca, and Yves make good substitute chicken patties, nuggets and beef products that tastes very similar to meat. Along with all of this, I think I would like to try some Indian vegetarian foods because the majority of Indian dishes are not spicy or strong and there are literally hundreds of vegetarian dishes which are a much better alternative to salads. I think the only thing I would have to be careful about would be some cheese that list enzymes as microbial or vegetable-based. Most cheeses are in fact not vegetarian, as they contain animal enzymes derived from killed calf stomach. I think becoming a vegetarian for a month would be challenging but definitely worth it.