Life Goals and How I Plan to Reach Them

I thought a good way to kick-start this blog is with some vision...so here are my current life goals:

• Run a Marathon (To be accomplished by this December...if not before)
• (with an additional goal of qualifying for and running the Boston Marathon...but I'm going to have to train like mad for that.)
• I've gotten more serious about my running. Rather than just running to exercise, now I have more purpose as I go. I started running a third time a week doing intervals (as in, run fast, then slow, fast, slow, etc at a certain pace). The other two runs a week I haven't been as intentional following a program...but I will. :-)
• Get a Master's degree in French
• It's not really for professional gain, but it's just something I need to do for me. That's in progress now.
• Have a couple kids and a happy marriage
• No babies yet. The above two (excluding the Boston bit) should come first. A very happy marriage we have...I do know it takes work to maintain that.
• Write and have published a book (specifically a young adult fantasy series) I already have in mind the plot sketch, setting the main characters, etc...It would be a trilogy, based in Paris.
• I read/listen to mass quantities of young adult literature. The most famous current example of the genre would be Harry Potter, but there's a huge amount of pretty recent, quality books in the genre. I remember from a creative writing class in college one of the best things I can do to prepare for writing a book is to read, read, read the kinds of books I want to write, and so, even though it's for entertainment, I can consider my love of 9-15 yr old's books research. My book idea isn't a wizard/witch series, even though there are a lot of those out there. I'm apprehensive to say more...but I will write it, someday.
• Live in the Park Cities
• I'm not doing a ton to accomplish that...other than I am extremely thrifty and Casey and I live well below our means. We have been deliberately paying off debt and buy nothing on credit (except a car, which we absolutely needed and paid off in 9 months). So, we live off my income, and Casey is soon going to go into paying off the mortgage and building up equity that way so we can get a house in the Park Cities in 8-10 years.

Hmm...once that's accomplished...or abandoned...I'll come up with new ones. But that's plenty for now.