I'm 32 years old and I don't know what I want to do when I grow up, Part 5

This one's about pipe dreams.

Things I (and sometimes Andrew) wish we could do if we had the time or money.

First, there's the pretty obvious: I want to be a writer. Okay, I guess in practice I AM a writer. I write almost everyday, but I want to be a writer in credentials (does that make sense?) too. I would like to see books I've written available in print or e-book. I would like to earn enough income from them that I don't have to work full-time (that might be a tall order as advances and royalties aren't large). It might be nice to receive the occasional piece of fan mail.

Then there's the baking-related pipe dreams.

Opening my own bakery. In some ways, baking for a living is extremely appealing. I'm a morning person anyway, and I'd have a reason to make all those deserts I see in my (now defunct) Google Reader subscriptions. As I said last week, I'm particularly proud of my breads.

A variant on the bakery I've been musing about recently is the Pain a la Panier idea I threw out several weeks ago. Instead of actually having a shop I could sell my product in a street vendor set up--out of the paniers of my bicycle. Of course, in Edmonton I'd have a somewhat limited selling season, and Andrew doesn't think I could carry enough on my bike to make any money.

Whether I could make any money from a bakery business at all is questionable. I don't have much in the way of business sense; I don't have any notion as to how much I could sell my stuff for; and everyone thinks they're a baker these days. Really, have you been to a local farmer's market recently? How many stalls of baked goods are there? Lots? Yeah. How many of them do I think produce goods better than my own? None.

Finally, there's the B&B pipe dream.

This is where Andrew comes in. This is more of a retirement idea, one that is only half-joke when we talk about it. We'd love to find a for-sale B&B in the Niagara-on-the-Lake region and take it over. As a retirement gig, we'd only run it from March to October, then travel for the winter. Again, I could bake to my heart's content for the second part of the 'B' and we've even toyed with the idea that we could offer a dinner option on certain nights of the week. There's something very appealing about this, especially if we could take over an already existing B&B. We'll see, maybe one day.

"For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."
~Steve Jobs

Ciao