Day 9: Rebooting the Fridge for 2016

Even though today was a stupid day with all the rain and the wind and none of the more than 80º temperatures we saw over this past glorious weekend, I'm still enjoying the fact that we're here in May and summer vacation is getting closer with each passing day. I have a few plans in mind for how to spend vacation this year (which reminds me, I gotta start pricing some airfares). Definitely one thing I'll be doing, just like I did last year, is turning my refrigerator into one big experiential to-do list of vacation bliss. 

First, a reminder of what I had going on last year: 

Here you see my fridge covered in sticky notes in my unremarkable kitchen. By all means, feel free to spend a few idle moments taking in the beauty of it all. 

This turned out to be a pretty good idea: Come up with a fairly ambitious list of things to do over the summer and write each thing on a sticky note. Some of the sticky note ideas were there to add fun adventures into the routine of summer, some were to meant to expand my boundaries in some manner, and some were there just as to-do list items that I wanted accomplished over the summer because they really needed to be done and I tend to procrastinate a lot of things like that during the school year. I was pretty happy with the results of this experiment by the end of the summer, but of course once I decided to do it again for this year there were going to be a few things I'd want to do differently.

*Last year the colors indicated different categories of tasks or adventures. I'll keep to that idea again, but I'm already thinking up a new set of categories. 

*Too many of my notes listed "safe" adventures -- things that would be easy to reach because they didn't require much effort and didn't challenge me to step too far out of my comfort zone. I think I need more challenge this year to really make this project worthwhile.

*I had a disproportionate amount of notes on the fridge that listed jobs that needed to be done, like a real to-do list. This sucked a lot of fun out of the whole endeavor. I still think I need to include some things like that on the list, but I have to come up with some acceptable ratio to keep it more about the fun. 

*It felt very satisfying to peel a note off once I had accomplished that goal. When I did that, I'd just crumple them up and throw them away. This time I think I'm going to save them all somewhere, just as a record of what I actually managed to get done by the end of the summer. 

Since May isn't even half over yet, it might seem somewhat early to start thinking about this, but I'm pretty serious about planning things out in advance to get the most out of them. Because of this, I'm going to start working on categories, deciding on colors to assign, and even come up with a rough beginning list of the things I'd like to accomplish. 

And if anyone has any suggestions of things for me to add, I'm all ears. How far do you think you can get me to step out of that summertime comfort zone??