Time for the rest of us to create a 'bucket list'

It feels like we're all supposed to have a bucket list, even though very few of us do.

Maybe 2021 is the year we start.

The idea of a "bucket list" has been around for a long time, but it really took hold in 2007, when the Jack Nicholson-Morgan Freeman film with that title was released. Thirteen years after the movie came out, you still see references to bucket lists, usually by people who share things on media.

A bucket list, of course, is a list of things you want to do before you die. Great big things.

We see people share/brag about "bucket-list" items all the time. It's slowed during the pandemic era, but you've seen these.

"Another item checked off my bucket list – a trip to Buckingham Palace," someone will share on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. "Visited Graceland. Another bucket list item," or "I can't believe I parachuted. Another item off my bucket list."

The rest of us sigh. We've never made a "bucket list" and we aren't that adventurous. Other people's bucket lists just make us feel unaccomplished.

Well, things have changed. We've spent much of the past nine-plus months at home. We're not going to Graceland or Buckingham Palace.

Heck, we're not even going to Buckingham Charter School in Vacaville, am I right? Hello?

So how about if we concocted a bucket list that isn't so crazy? A bucket list of things we can brag about achieving without making ourselves uncomfortable? A COVID-19-era bucket list, even if some of the things were done before the pandemic?

What about a bucket list for the rest of us?

You can come up with your own, but allow me to propose a bucket list of things I can achieve, but are worth telling people that they were on my bucket list.

Here's a working bucket list, with several items already achieved, to make it seem well under way:

• Be good to the Earth by going a month without gassing up my car (accomplished in 2020!).
• Watch an entire sporting event without leaving my chair.
• Go to the dentist twice in one calendar year.
• Meet Tony Wade.
• Clean out my email inbox. (If you include putting things in folders as "cleaning out.")
• Successfully complete a Sudoku puzzle in the newspaper without crossing out numbers and shouting that it requires witchcraft to do so.
• Iron clothes that need it before a second round of laundry is cleaned.
• Spend 45 minutes awake without checking my phone. OK. Twenty-five minutes. OK. Five minutes.
• Sleep through the night without getting up to go to the bathroom (minimum four hours sleep).
• Read multiple novels by the same author.
• Clean the gutters on my house before the first rain. (A goal for 2021!)
• Forget meeting Tony Wade.
• File my taxes before the deadline. Barely.
• Grow my hair for months (accomplished in 2020!).
• Stay at a hotel and remember my room number.
• Lather, rinse and repeat.
• Remember a computer password that I haven't used in a while.
• Refrain from rolling my eyes at someone else's "bucket list" post on social media, after remembering that time I went 45 minutes without checking my phone. OK. Twenty-five minutes. OK. Five minutes.
• Survive a global pandemic.

Bring it on, 2021! We've got some bucket-list items to complete!

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

Time for annual Solano County knowledge quiz

It's the penultimate Sunday of the year, which means – even in a year of a pandemic – that it's time for the longest-held tradition of this column.

The annual Solano County quiz, a tradition that goes back to the turn of the millennium.

Following are 20 questions about Solano County, followed by the correct answers. Get out your No. 2 pencils and keep track of how well you know the county that is home to two former state capital cities (not one of the questions).

QUESTIONS

1. What are the seven cities in Solano County?

2. What are the only two cities in the county with more male than female residents?

3. In what presidential election did Solano County last vote for the Republican candidate?

4. What two members of the House of Representatives represent Solano County?

5. Within five days, on what day did Solano County first issue a shelter in place order due to COVID-19?

6. Are there more McDonald's or Starbucks in Fairfield-Suisun City?

7. Within five spots, where does Solano County rank among California's 58 counties in population?

8. What was Solano County's largest agricultural product in 2019, determined by earnings?

9. Which city is the county seat of Solano County?

10. Within 1,000, how many active-duty personnel are stationed at Travis Air Force Base?

11. What five counties border Solano County?

12. What is the wettest month of the year in Fairfield?

13. What is the hottest month of the year in Vacaville, Solano County's hottest city?

14. By what other name was Chief Solano known?

15. Name the four interstate highways in Solano County.

16. In what decade did Fairfield experience the greatest population growth by percentage?

17. Which Wade brother am I thinking of right now?

18. Which Solano County city has experienced the greatest percentage growth in population since 2010?

19. Within 10 years, when did the McNaughton family purchase the Daily Republic?

20. What is the closest city of more than 200,000 residents to Fairfield?

ANSWERS

1. Benicia, Dixon, Fairfield, Rio Vista, Suisun City, Vacaville, Vallejo.

2. Vacaville (due to the presence of the two male prisons) and Dixon.

3. 1984, when Ronald Reagan won the county. Richard Nixon (1972) and Reagan (1980, 1984) are the only Republicans to have carried the county in the 23 presidential elections since 1932.

4. Mike Thompson, John Garamendi.

5. March 18 (get credit for March 13-23).

6. Starbucks, with 12 outlets. There are eight McDonalds.

7. Solano ranks 19th, just larger than No. 20 Santa Barbara. So if you guessed 14th through 24th, give yourself a point.

8. Almonds, at $55 million.

9. Fairfield.

10. 7,400.

11. Napa, Contra Costa, Sacramento, Yolo, Sonoma.

12. January, with an average of 4.77 inches. There's still hope!

13. July with an average high of 96, which beats August by one degree.

14. Sem Yeto.

15. I-80, I-680, I-505, I-780.

16. The 1960s saw the biggest percentage growth with a 380% increase. The 1980s and 1990s has the largest numeric growth at 19,112 18,967.

17. Harpo.

18. Rio Vista, by a large margin, having grown 32%. Dixon is second at about 12%.

19. 1960.

20. Oakland is 41 miles away. (Sacramento is 43 miles and San Francisco is 47 miles. San Jose, by the way, is 79 miles.)

SCORING

15-20: Genius level

9-14: Passing grade

4-8: Pay closer attention

0-3: Did you really try?

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

As bad as 2020 seems, there were some remarkable events

By about April, it was fashionable to complain about 2020. By summer, it was a cliché. By now, it's exhausting.

Sure, 2020 has been a difficult year. The worst pandemic of our lifetime. An ugly election season with a surge in meanspirited, partisan politics. A toilet paper shortage. That day we woke up with a eye twitch and were uncomfortable.

It's been year that most of us will be able to complain about for the rest of our lives ("Sure, this is bad, but it's nothing like 2020!").

However, as the leader of the made-up organization Optimists Helping Build On You (OH BOY!), allow me to remind you that 2020 wasn't all terrible. Remember, with months remaining before any sort of "return to normal" life is here, that this is the only chance we get to live these months. While it's been terrible to not see friends and family, to have to wear masks everywhere and to be limited in our opportunities to go anywhere, it's not all bad.

Before we relegate 2020 to the historical scrap heap of worst years ever (along with 536, when a fog plunged much of the Earth into darkness for two years, leading to mass starvation; 1347, when the Black Death erupted, eventually killing about 50% of Europe's population and spreading elsewhere; 1919, when the Spanish flu roared through most of the Earth, killing millions; 1943, when World War II was raging and the Holocaust was in full motion; 1968, when America's cities burned and it appeared we could be on the brink of a revolution), let's appreciate some good things that happened.

Because there were some good things:

• Despite two threats of severe toilet paper shortages, we made it (at least of this writing). It was stressful, but did anyone actually run out?
• Most of us became reasonably comfortable wearing masks in public. Think about how uncomfortable you felt about a mask in March compared to now. Progress!
• We put significantly fewer miles on our cars. I've filled my car up with gas three times since March: In June, September and December. Yes!
• We got more proficient at technology. Many of us hadn't participated in video calls before the pandemic, now we do it routinely. Progress.
• We gained an appreciation for traditions that we took for granted. Will you enjoy the next July 4 more? What about the next big birthday party you attend? How about next Halloween? The answer to each is yes.

But mostly, this:

In a matter of months, with support from the federal government, our best and brightest people created a vaccine for a virus that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. The death count is heartbreaking, but think of that timeline: Months.

It took centuries to create a smallpox vaccine. It took more than 35 years to develop a typhoid vaccine. There were more than 20 years between the first attempt at a polio vaccine and when Jonas Salk's vaccine was distributed. The plague has killed hundreds of millions of people throughout history and there's still no vaccine.

But the time from when our first quarantine began and the Food and Drug Administration approved the first vaccines was nine months.

Nine months!

We live in the age of miracles. There was plenty of bad stuff in 2020, but this was a year when scientists created a vaccine for a deadly virus in NINE MONTHS.

Let's see 2021 go bigger than that!

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

When having a smoking area near my desk seemed normal

 

The good news: Only 14 percent of American adults are smokers, down from 43 percent in 1972.

The bad news: The number of smokers increased during the pandemic, even though COVID-19 harms your lungs. Boredom and stress, I guess.

More bad news: The first few years I worked at the Daily Republic, the sports department was the newspaper building's designated smoking area, so I inhaled enough burning tobacco during that time to qualify as a smoker.

Yes, my workspace was the smoking area.

Yes, it seemed like progress. Yes, the entire sports staff at the DR was subjected to hours of carcinogens every day, since any smoker in the entire building – any reporter or editor, any advertising sales representative, any front office employee, anyone who smoked – stood and puffed next to our desks.

The weird thing? It didn't seem weird. It seemed kind of normal.

Granted, this was in the mid-1980s, so everyone on the sports staff (there were five of us in those glory days) likely grew up around smokers. My dad smoked cigarettes, cigars and pipes for years – until he got cancer and quit cold turkey. (Decades later, the smell of cigars still makes me nauseous because I associate it with him smoking cigars on trips while I got carsick. I regale friends with an impersonation of my dad yelling over his shoulder for us to roll up our windows because "that just sucks more smoke back there, dammit!").

Smoking areas were a reasonably new thing when I started at the Daily Republic, baby steps to treat nonsmokers as having rights to avoid cancer-causing chemicals. Restaurants had non-smoking areas (usually a couple of tables surrounded by people who smoked like Don Draper). People occasionally asked if it was OK if they smoked in your house. Heck, it's possible that by the time I was inhaling co-workers' smoke, the cigarette machine at the pizza parlor where I worked in college was being loosely watched to ensure that a 10-year-old didn't buy a pack of Camels.

Maybe.

My first few years at the Daily Republic – until the building was remodeled and had a second story added – were spent with people hanging out and smoking while I worked. For them, it was a nice break and a chance to visit. In the pre-Internet era, they could talk sports with us and ask what happened during the day. The business writer nervously smoked while talking about what he had to finish that day. Several ad representatives talked about the 49ers or Giants or A's with us. Others merely stood there, not acknowledging anyone as they blew their toxic smoke into the room.

And it seemed normal.

In 2020, as we wear masks to avoid being exposed to a dangerous virus – and as smokers are required to huddle a long distance from the rest of us – it seems insane that in the not-too-distant past, it was considered progress to merely expose sportswriters to cigarette smoke. All day. All night.

As the advertisements for Virginia Slims (women's cigarettes!) used to say, "You've come a long way, baby!"

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.