Mark Your Calendars

Tomorrow is a momentous day for all kinds of reasons, but it's best known as my official half-birthday.

It used to be much more important, back when I was six or so. Now I don't even remember how old I am and have to calculate my age whenever I'm asked. I'm not sure when that happened, how old I became before I lost the obsession or just stopped caring, but I'm fairly sure I never told anyone I was forty-eight and a half.

I think part of that may be because when I was five, each year represented twenty percent of my life, so each one was a pretty big deal and just about everything I ran across was new. Now, each year's less than two percent of my life and while I still discover new things daily, I also see a lot of repetition.

Someone (Dave Barry?) once said that there's an age when you should stop celebrating your birthdays and making a big deal about them, and that age is eleven. I should make an earnest effort to remember that six months from tomorrow.

Tomorrow being the first month means I'll be busier than usual. Not only do I have laundry to do (light, unbloodied things), but I also need to change the filter in the heater, go grocery shopping, and update my online resumes. Timmy will want some playing and it may be a good time to begin my spring cleaning. No, it's not Spring, not yet, but today it was supposed to rain and is, instead, gloriously sunny and clear, so I'm thinking winter is over. It may still be chilly in the mornings, but it's not raining, which is about the difference between summer and winter.

March, of course, means wind, so I'd best get busy securing the tarp that acts as a cheap replacement for a real roof on the carport. I have plans, of course, on someday replacing the roof on that, but like all good plans that can be put off for a while more.

What can't be put off is rewarding myself for surviving another six months.