My Life To Do List – Christopher Wink

Horse tales

Riding outside West Fairmount Parks Belmont Stables, in early spring 2005 — Riding outside West Fairmount Park’s Belmont Stables, in early spring 2005

It took me to leave rural northwest New Jersey, where I grew up, and to go to Philadelphia, where I went to college, to saddle up and actually develop a small knowledge base about Western-style horse riding.

I cleaned stalls and helped out Ike Johnstone at Belmont Stables, an historic West Fairmount Park building where Johnstone hosts the Bill Picket Riding Academy, through which he teachs anti-violence and communication to North Philadelphia kids. In exchange, Johnstone taught me some rudimentary riding skills.

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Eight Days in Spain: Running with the Bulls (and more)

My trip to Spain in July was full of lots of the new, but, as you’d expect, plenty of the old too.

At the most recent Story Shuffle, I told the story of lessons I learned from Running with the Bulls in Pamplona. But I got to do plenty more in little more than a week.

In fact, eight days in the hub of ancient kingdom turned struggling modern Western European stalwart Spain proved to be among the best trips of my life.

In addition to the Running, in Pamplona I saw the first bullfight of my life. I also had suckling pig at the oldest restaurant in the world, saw more Picassas and Dalis than ever before, ordered tapas, sangria and paella in Spanish, swam in the Mediterranean, visited Gaudi and, of course, did so while reading Hemingway’s the Sun Also Rises for the first time. Below are a view videos and takeaways.

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My Life To Do List got a face life; you really might not care and that’s OK

The online documentation of my pursuit of accomplishing items on a Life To Do List that I made as a kid has moved to a subdomain of this site, at list.christopherwink.com. I first brought it online earlier this year and have since updated it.

It gives me more flexibility, control and organization. I have no expectations or desire for that blog to be any regularly updated place, but rather a true chronicle of meaningful experiences. If you find that at all interesting for whatever reason, there is an RSS feed here and an email blast here.

A few good recent examples might be my post on attending the competitive eating Wing Bowl and being part of the Mummers Day and a review of backpacking Alaska. I have only posted four times so far in 2011, and I figure that’ll be about average.

Otherwise, I wouldn’t worry about it too much, as this here will remain my focus of professional work.

The old WordPress.com that I first shared in 2008 is now dead, though the experiment with distinctions between personal and private seems to be alive.

This is just about the last online piece of my January resolution to update my archives, which also included shifting over my college thesis to thesis.christopherwink.com and getting online my work from Japan. Those are just for archiving purposes, as those projects are finished.

Professional versus personal: My Web presence explained

Last month I introduced a personal blog, where I intend on updating about meaningful experiences in my life, as part of pursuit of a Life To Do List.

In truth, I tend to lose interest when someone has a legion of online presences, blogs begetting other blogs.

That’s not what this is meant to be. Instead, I believe a professional outlet is of paramount importance — develop and share perspective on your industry, become a thought leader and all that good stuff. To do that, you ought not muddle it all up with too many personal stories. …I think.

To be honest, I’m still figuring it out. While our brands need personal attention too, of course, I think there’s a line. I suppose that’s what I’m trying to figure it out.

If you’re going to have a professional and personal split online, that’s one I can understand, though I am still developing an opinion on whether I agree with myself.