Jordan (or Dr. Jordan as he is known to the science world) works as an environmental researcher for a university. On any given day he can be found walking through the forests in search of bugs, counting grass seeds in a lab, working on the computer with thousands of data points, or writing journal articles.

 After many years of fighting within the family it has been decided that Jordan (i.e. NOT the one writing this entry, which will become relevant in the next part of the sentence) is the smarter one in the marriage (yes Emily, i.e. the one writing this, must give credit where credit is due).

 Spiderman says “with great power comes great responsibility.” In that case, great smartness seems to come with a lack of adventure. Or at the very least a greater probability to be scared of adventure.

 The most adventure Jordan usually sees is hiking, biking, running, or using an ax for his research projects, which has been known to lead to visits to the ER on occasion. Slowly he’s been dragged (unwillingly at first) by his wife to various countries and now has more desire to try more non-traditional adventurous activities.

 He’s not entirely sure he can work up to things like skydiving, but he might be able to try indoor skydiving (which, hello, is still scary). And he hopes this will finally give him something worthy to share at the office lunch table, instead of every one automatically asking, “Which movie did you see this weekend?” Because up until now, they were correct and that the most likely thing Jordan would have done on the weekend was, in fact, see a movie.

Emily leads a fairly low-key life as a librarian. Known for her “shushing” ability and love of horn-rimmed glasses, she can be frequently found with her head buried in a good book. When she’s not reading, she’s feeding her pop-culture and entertainment obsession by watching way-too many episodes of The Hills, Gossip Girl, Lifetime TV movies, and Chelsey Lately.

 So basically, she leads a life of watching other people have fun and exciting adventures.

 Emily (i.e. me—the one writing this) caught the travel bug at age 14 when all of her friends were traveling to Germany for a school trip. Never the one to be left out, she decided to tag along, merely to hang out with her friends. What she wasn’t expecting was to fall in love with different cultures, adventures, and a love of travel. For the past four years, she’s determined to visit a new country a year and has succeeded, sometimes with her husband (the more non-adventurous one in the duo) sometimes without. Despite traveling all over Europe, Emily has to admit she’s not very adventurous.

 For a long time she believed that she’d get out of her non-adventurous comfort zone if only a cute Italian tour guide (or her husband) approached her and Triple Dog Dared her to run with the Bulls in Paploni, sky dive while wearing pink polka dot shorts, or even stick her tongue on a frozen pole as Schwartz did to Flick in A Christmas Story.

 After 28-years of waiting for suggestions that have never appeared, she finally realized that in order to be a true adventurer you have to be the one creating them.

 Which is why she came up with the idea for this blog.

 As an aspiring writer, she also believes that in order to have a story worth telling, you have to have a life worth living. And she’s hoping after this year, she’ll have more than enough stories to share.

Blog Experiment: Can one boring scientist (Jordan) and one boring librarian (Emily) become more interesting people by completing a year’s worth of crazy, scary, and just plain new adventures? 

How the Blog will work (starting January 1, 2009!): For the entire year of 2009, one or both of us will be completing at least one new adventure a week. It might be something that scares us (or both of us), it might be something new, it might be an ancient culture or custom we wanted to try, or might be something from Emily’s Things I Want to Do Before I Die list she created in high school. From skydiving (we’ll see if we can face that much fear in a year) to polar bear diving, sticking a tongue on a pole, or eating exotic food only seen on Survivor and the Amazing Race.

Whatever it is, we will also share it with you and let you know if you should try it yourselves. You can laugh with us (or at us—we aren’t picky), you can try it too, or you can think us stupid for thinking about doing the adventure in the first place. Whatever you choose, we will be here all year try to improve ourselves and our lives together one adventure at a time!

Our Top 5 Reasons for Doing this Blog:

1.)    To give our family a reason the next time they ask, “Hey, you guys have been married 8 years. Why haven’t you had kids, already?”

2.)    To have an excuse to do crazy things.

3.)    And then when people look at us very strangely for doing said crazy things, we can laugh it off and say “Oh, it’s for a blog experiment.”

4.)    Because we will NEVER do any of this stuff if we don’t blog about it, and…

5.)    We are sick of coming home to watch television every night, forgetting our dreams, and watching life pass us by. So we’ve decided to do something about it!