My cat has circumnavigated the globe. He went from Romania to Malaysia to San Francisco to DC to Greece. Just a couple more miles eastward and he'll have done it exactly.

Offer~ma, Nora! You deserve a great one.

For Life Lists, I really highly recommend the book No Opportunity Wasted, by Phil Keoghan. (Yes, that Phil. The book is full of adorably Philly goodness, and there's a picture of him on the cover. Which is adorable.)

t joins Jess in uberdorky Phil love

I've been thinking a lot about Phil lately, particularly with the whole climbing above the light grid thing I did last week. He was on a local radio station recently talking about TAR, and his book, and talked about how getting rid of your fears isn't really normal, or usually possible, but confronting and overcoming fear is something he rocommends highly. He also talked about how that's really what The Race is about in a lot of ways (as well as communicating and working together), and that just about every team in every Race has had to confront some kind of fear or another, and that he's always astounded at the myriad effects this has had on the teams in the Race.

That is one well travelled cat. But does he have a passport, like Misha and Vitya?

Ask her what she wore to the exam, though. Decidedly UN-academic, IMO.

I think it was the last time she was allowed to dress like that.

I was thinking about that recently also, although I didn't know who Phil was until I just clicked Jess' link. Mainly I was thinking that it's more impressive to be brave than to be fearless.

My DH really really needs that book, although if I gave it to him I'd hear all these reasons why he couldn't do any of that.

Ooh, I'd forgotten about that book, and I need a b-day present for a friend who's a big fan. Thanks, all.

(This is my friend C, who had her pic taken with Phil at a book signing or something. She emailed it to her family, and found out the next time she went to visit that her grandma had it posted on the fridge and was telling everyone that it was her boyfriend.)

The thing that makes the book (and the show, short-lived though it was) worthwhile and not just another preachy self-help book, is that he really does genuinely care about this stuff. He really wants everyone to live life to the fullest, whatever that means for them -- on the show, very few of the goals were physical stunts like "I want to overcome my fear of heights by jumping out of a plane." (Though some of them were.) Most of them were things like "I want to fulfill my dream of owning a restaurant," or playing in a band, things like that. I wasn't surprised when it got cancelled, but I was disappointed.

(My one quibble with him is that the oft-repeated story of how he "almost died in a shipwreck" is a bit misleading. He wasn't "in a shipwreck" in the sense that the ship he was sailing on crashed and sank, he was "in a shipwreck" in the sense that he was scuba diving in and around a wrecked ship at the bottom of the ocean. The ship was already wrecked when he got there, and he had a bad scuba diving accident while exploring it. Still a very real brush with death, but not the one you picture when you hear the phrase "almost died in a shipwreck.")

Almost died while diving? Not sure how to say it better, but yeah, point taken.

Kitty passports! Must head home and Photoshop Legion into a dip passport.

Yeah, the Russians do manage to find whole new untapped worlds of potential bureaucracy. Hence, cat passports. (Catports?)

They need to have cat student visas. Or guest-worker visas. ("Occupation: mouser" etc.)