142. Go to a foreign country with no hotel booked

I went to Vancouver and stayed at the hostel closest to the Amtrak station.  I can't really recommend it.  There was only one women's bathroom for the whole floor, the shower water didn't get warm enough, the single, bare lightbulb in my room was broken, and there were bedbugs.  So gross.

407. Create or help edit a page on Wikipedia

Well, I've edited spelling and grammar on quite a few Wikipedia pages--not all of them, but when I feel like it.  I couldn't tell you how to put in footnotes or start a new article, though.

596. Sell my own jewelry on Etsy

I make friendship bracelets out of cotton embroidery floss.  They're similar to ones you see for sale in Mexico.  They consist of large numbers of clove hitches and lark's head knots, and an overhand knot at the beginning and end.

182. Spend 24 hours naked

No picture, shockingly enough.  I had to put down all the blinds and not go outside, but I wasn't as cold as I thought I would be.  Of course, I lived in a studio at the time, and could turn the heat way up.

93. Eat in an upscale restaurant that serves courses

This is the view from the restaurant on top of the Space Needle.  It was pretty swanky and had courses.  The food was quite tasty, and you don't have to pay extra to walk around on the viewing deck once you've been in the restaurant.  They also have a recommended wine for every course that you can get.  I'm not sure if anyone orders a wine for each course, because that would be an awful lot of wine, but I just had one glass.

604. See the Space Needle

This was taken from Gas Works Park in Seattle, which used to be an old gas works.  There's lots of old machinery there.  Also, lots of Canada geese pooping everywhere.  I went just before Christmas and it was pretty deserted except for a few sketchy-looking homeless people, so I wouldn't recommend going there at night, or going there if you're one of those people who lacks situational awareness.  I really liked the monumental ironwork.

39. Go to a drive-in movie theatre

Apparently Washington state has quite a few drive-ins left over from the 1950's.  The one I went to is Port Townsend, and has been operating since that time.  It had both the individual speakers and a radio broadcast of the soundtrack.  Since it was summer, and so far North, it wasn't dark enough to run the movie until almost 10 o'clock, and it was a double feature.  The first one was a Shrek movie, and the second one was Iron Man II.  There were lots of kids running around in pajamas, so apparently they watch the first movie, go to sleep, and then their parents either drive home or stick around for the second movie, which is for grown-ups. 

638. Try Korean BBQ

So many side dishes!  There was seaweed salad, and about four kinds of pickles, and tofu, and kim chee, and small fish, and a red sauce that was not as spicy as I expected.  I had worried the barbecue beef itself would be horribly spicy, but it was totally fine.  Maybe they gave us the non-spicy version, or maybe it's always like that, but it was not full of chiles, and only mildly spicy.

136. Take a cruise of Alaska

It was definitely expensive to take all the side trips on the Alaska cruise, but if you buy the trips from the cruise company, they'll wait for you if the trip is late getting back.  I would recommend the Skagway side trip to see the Yukon and the lumberjack show in Ketchikan. 

280. See a Cirque du Soleil show

I saw "Totem" in San Francisco.  It was pretty expensive, but it's pretty obvious a lot of money goes into the show.  They had a huge hydraulic centipede as part of the stage set.  It could extend out like a lengthening diving board, or curl up, and it could also wave up and down.  They also had a huge jungle-gym type frame that they did parallel bar tricks on, and then lifted up above the stage for most of the show.  Those people must practice about 48 hours a day in order to avoid killing anyone.  The people who were dressed up as tree frogs, doing flips, were the ones who attached the lines to the jungle gym to raise it above the stage.  I'm not used to performers who understand anything about stage sets, but I guess acrobats of necessity are different. 
Another gimmick I really liked was that one performer's top hat was rigged so that the inside was full of LEDs, and he could hold it up to spotlight other performers.  The theme of the show was some kind of Native American-type thing, and although I wouldn't consider tree frogs or moon men to be especially Native American, it was a pretty good show.   There were up to four of the tree frogs on the same set of parallel bars at the same time.  A pair of tree frogs also spun around on the same bar at the same time, which is definitely not something you see in the Olympics. 
There was also a flying ring performance, with a beach theme.  There were two guys, and the muscliest girl I have ever seen.  It was exactly the sort of thing my mom would hate, because they swung out over the audience for part of the performance, and they weren't wearing any safety wires, and had no net.  Sort of makes me wish I could do a chin-up.
I also really liked the hoop dancers.  There was a man, and for the second performance, both a man and a woman, dressed up as Plains Indians, and they had hoops about 18 inches wide which they climbed in and out of very fast, all while dancing.  The reviewer in the San Francisco Chronicle seemed really fond of the roller skate dance, but I wasn't as impressed with it, possibly because I had heard about it ahead of time. 
I really liked the trapeze artists in yellow.  There wasn't any swinging of the trapeze involved, but they were climbing all over each other, and the guy would hold the girl under the trapeze by one arm and one leg, and she would spin around, and the guy would hold her by a different limb each time.  It was really something to see.  They reminded me of otters.
There were also girls on six-foot-tall unicycles throwing bowls to each other, and catching them on their heads.  One girl stayed still in the middle and the other girls drove in a circle around her, and she pitched a bowl to each of them while they moved, then as they drove behind her, she pitched a bowl backwards over her head to them, and they all caught them.  For the finale, all the girls threw about 20 bowls to the girl in the middle, then a teapot, then the lid.  It was awesome.
I also liked their unisex restrooms.  They looked like they were about half-shipping-container size, and they were all either/or bathroom stalls, so there's not a huge line for the women's bathroom while the men have no problem getting into the bathroom quickly.  It would probably be pretty convenient, too, for people who don't subscribe to traditional gender identities.
The circus tents themselves weren't rigged too differently from ships.  They had turnbuckles and shrouds.  There was a sign up that said the tents could only be used if the wind was less than 56 mph sustained, but it's usually not more than 25 knots at the Golden Gate, so they'll probably be fine.  The tent stakes looked like extra large versions of duplex nails.  They were driven right into the asphalt of the parking lot.  I wonder what they used to drive them in.  I was sort of surprised how many of the lines were touching the air conditioning units, which aren't exactly structural.  They had four towers inside the tent, two of which had followspot operators in chairs on them, and one of which had a pedestrian bridge connecting to the central unit.  Many of the performers entered and exited from this central unit, and some of them stayed up there for quite some time.  I wonder if the show came by train, since it's not very far from the San Francisco Caltraiin station.  All in all, worth going to.      

608. Dine at the Cheesecake Factory

That's the Oreo Cheesecake in the foreground and the Pineapple Upside Down Cheesecake to the rear.  I also highly recommend their avocado egg rolls, which are pretty much a huge blob of guacamole wrapped in a chip.  Also, their menu is horrendously long, so start perusing it while you're waiting in line.

260. Make a scrapbook

Page 1: Carpets of Craigdarroch Castle.

561. Make an apple pie from scratch

I baked this following the instructions from Joy of Cooking--an edition from the 70's, not the new one.  It's a negative lattice, with spaces where the crust would be on a usual lattice, because I didn't have quite enough dough for a typical lattice.

74. Collect seashells on a beach

These are cowries from the West coast of Mexico.  There were a surprising amount of cowries on that beach.  In the water nearby, there were also dozens and dozens of dead squid laying on the bottom with no legs.  I don't know if it was from fishermen or sharks or what.  It was strange.

644. Go to the smallest desert in the world in the Yukon

You can take a bus trip from Skagway, Alaska to see the Carcross Desert.  It's on the far Southwest corner of Yukon Territory, and there's a little chunk of British Columbia between Yukon and Alaska.  We also saw a really large black bear crossing the road on the way there.

17. Weld something

Yep, that's something, alright.  A plant can sit on it.  This is stick-welded, which is pretty fun.  When you start a line of stick-welding, it's like striking a really big match.  I think I like TIG-welding better though, because it comes out neater, and stuff doesn't spew everywhere, like with stick.

589. Read 52 books in one year

The year was 2008.  Those were heady times.

1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.  Junot Diaz
2. Reflex.  Steven Gould
3. Charity Girl.  Michael Lowenthal
4. Aspects of War: Trench Warfare.  Stephen Bull
5. Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's.  John Elder Robison
6. Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident.  Eoin Colfer
7. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Malcolm Gladwell
8. Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is.  Friedrich Nietzsche
9. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Novel.  Susanna Clarke
10. The Farseer: Assassin's Apprentice.  Robin Hobb
11. The God Delusion.  Richard Dawkins
12. Intimate Behaviour.  Desmond Morris
13. Dune.  Frank Herbert
14. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water.  Marc Reisner
15. Attacks.  Erwin Rommel
16. Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus: A Practical Guide For Improving Communication and Getting What You Want In Your Relationships.  John Gray
17. So You Want to Be a Wizard.  Diane Duane
18. The Red and the Black.  Stendhal
19. The Speed of Dark.  Elizabeth Moon
20. The Existential Joss Whedon: Evil and Human Freedom in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly and Serenity.  J. Michael Richardson and J. Douglas Rabb
21. Guerrilla Warfare.  Che Guevara
22. Rite of Passage.  Alexei Panshin
23. The Alchemist.  Paulo Coelho
24. The Devil and Miss Prym: A Novel of Temptation.  Paulo Coelho
25. Schools and Masters of Fencing from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century.  Egerton Castle
26. The City of Ember: The First Book of Ember.  Jeanne DuPrau
27. Armor.  John Steakley
28. Athens and Jerusalem.  Lev Shestov
29. The Sociopath Next Door.  Martha Stout
30. The Aeneid.  Virgil
31. Faust I & II.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
32. Saved.  Kate Morgenroth
33. Quest for a Continent.  Walter Sullivan
34. The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness.  Elyn R. Saks
35. Alive in Necropolis: A Novel.  Doug Dorst
36. The Silver Chair.  C.S. Lewis
37. A Beautiful Blue Death: A Mystery.  Charles Finch
38. The Tale of Genji.  Lady Murasaki
39. The Last Apprentice: Curse of the Bane.  Joseph Delaney
40. The High House.  James Stoddard
41. The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed.  Michael Meyer
42. Vigilante Justice.  Alan Valentine
43. The Last Apprentice: Night of the Soul Stealer.  Joseph Delaney
44. Notes from Underground.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky
45. The Double.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky
46. The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Book Two: The Golem's Eye.  Jonathan Stroud
47. Gas City: A Novel.  Loren D. Estleman
48. Guerrillas: Journeys in the Insurgent World.  Jon Lee Anderson
49. Wood: Craft, Culture, History.  Harvey Green
50. Twenty Years After.  Alexandre Dumas
51. The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Book Three: Ptolemy's Gate.  Jonathan Stroud
52. Life Science Library: Machines.  Robert O'Brien and the Editors of LIFE
53. InkSpell.  Cornelia Funke
54. InkDeath. Cornelia Funke
55. The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug.  Thomas Hager
56. UnLunDun.  China Mieville
57. Walking Shakespeare's London: 29 Original Walks in and Around London.  Nicholas Robins
58. Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It.  Joan Williams
59. The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks.  Susan Casey

175. Carve a whole family of pumpkins for Halloween

I was a little hurried carving these, because it was getting dark, and I was worried the skunk would come through my yard soon, but I think they went well.  The orange pumpkin all the way to the left is French, as you can see by his mustache.

281. Build a piece of furniture

This is a step-stool I built out of scrap 2x4's and OSB.  I guess that qualifies as a piece of furniture.  I'm working on a tansu, but it's nowhere near done yet.  And that heart cut-out is a handhold, which makes it a lot easier to carry from place to place.

394. See a Civil War re-enactment

There was so much black powder smoke at the re-enactment it was hard to see.  They also had several cannon and two horses.  Some re-enactor told me off for wearing a bag with the Japanese rising sun flag on it, but failed to notice that the Civil War killed more Americans than both the Germans and Japanese did in World War II.

Intro

I was wandering the internet, trying to find if any mosques in the U.S. had permission to use a PA system to broadcast their call to prayer.  Then I came across someone else's bucket list, and one of the items listed on it was to hear the call to prayer in Istanbul.  I scrolled through the list, counting how many things the list writer had accomplished, and how many I had accomplished.  I had about twice as many things done as the original writer of the list had, so I decided to do the rest of the tasks on someone's else's bucket list.