The not-bucket list?

It isn't something I have given a lot of thought to recently but it came up yesterday when a friend was mentioning things she would like to do when she turns 50. What, she wanted to know, would we want to do?
Fifty? That was a very long time ago. It was the year in my life when my mother died. The Senior Cat has outlived her by many, many years. It was the year in my life when I had no chance of doing anything I might have wanted to do because I was trying to keep on top of work, nurse my "Christian Scientist" mother  (who refused to even acknowledge she was ill, let alone how ill), care for the Senior Cat and try to keep the Black Cat from causing even more chaos.
When V.... asked about the not-bucket list I realised that things have not changed much. The only thing I am not doing is caring for my mother. I have added some other responsibilities. In all that time I have slept away for five nights - the trip Middle Cat, the Senior Cat and I took to a neighbouring state. I'm glad we did that trip then. We couldn't do it now and I wouldn't want to do it again anyway.
No, if the increasingly frail Senior Cat is still with us, I won't be going anywhere next year. 
So the non-bucket list has to be the sort of thing that I can do here. 
Write more...knit more...write more...read more of the ever increasing pile of unread  books....write more....teach more...write more...cut back on work...and did I say, write more?
The real bucket list may never be achieved. It is the stuff of day dreams...the things I would like to do given the time, money and physical capacity.  But - is there anything wrong with dreaming?
A little while back now a friend of mine went to China. It is somewhere she had dreamed of visiting for years. Once she had dreams of going there alone but she decided she was much too old for that now. She went on a tour instead. Enjoyed it? Yes - and no. She is glad she went but it wasn't the experienced she imagined it would be. Group tours are not really her thing. It didn't give her the time and the space she needed.
     "But, better than not going at all," she told me. She has crossed it off her list of things to do. (Hers is an actual physical list. It includes things like "fly in a glider" and "visit Easter Island" - both crossed off.)
So should I write an actual list? No. I would look at it and think, "that's not likely to happen" or "I don't have the physical capacity to do that". 
It's better to dream...and you never know...