Well, there you have it. It’s midnight so it’s May 8th. My birthday. I’m fifty years old. Bring on the existential dread. Happy effing birthday.
Goodbye Forties, Hello Fifties
The Key
I found the key.
I Miss Them
I hadn’t even left yet and I was already missing them like crazy.
10 Hours to Go
It’s 2:00. I started lunch a little late today because I had a couple of meetings and my company officially announced the new post-Covid telecommuting policy. So I’m writing my lunch post at 2:00pm instead of 1:00pm.
Harry found his keys! WOOHOO!! They were in his backpack all along. Sweet. We still have to get him a spare, but for now all is well. We can get a spare at our leisure.
I haven’t played guitar in two weeks. The facebook mind reading last night had me inspired for some searching of the Google for some absurdly expensive vintage Les Pauls and now I just want to play and play and play. I made it worse by reading an article about the new Gibson Murphy Lab were Tom Murphy brings his aging process to Gibson Custom Shop guitars and, while I really don’t love the idea of artificially aged guitars, they look awesome. Maybe I’ll get some playing tomorrow.
Speaking of tomorrow. It’s now 2:15pm which means I only have nine hours and 45 minutes left in my 40’s. Shit. When I turned 40, Jen got a bunch of my family and friends together and we all went out to a fancy restaurant and had a great night. My 30th birthday was a shit show. I started freaking out about turning 30 on my 28th birthday. The idea of only having one more 20-something birthday left really screwed me up. I spent my 30th birthday… at Larry’s, I think. Pretty sure it was Larry’s old place on Chandler street. I think I was nursing a little heartache over some forgotten woman that I was much better off without. 30 was a bad time for me, but without it I wouldn’t have been where I needed to be for 36. My 36th birthday came about a month after I started dating Jen. They’ve all been pretty good since then. I have Jen and Harry and Bellana to thank for that. 50 will be fine too. It’s just that existential dread that comes from knowing, as Captain Picard once said, that there are fewer days ahead than behind. Harry has teasingly dropped the words “half a century” a few times. I’m fine with the reality of that, but the idea is pretty disturbing. Back in my late teens I convinced myself that I wouldn’t live to see 40. I don’t know why. Suck it, teenage self, how do you like me now?
It’s 2:30 now. 9.5 hours left in my 40’s. Oh well, what can you do, right?
The Last Day
Here we are. May 7,2021. The last day. The final day of my 40’s. Tomorrow is my 50th birthday. How’s my last day of early middle age going?
Harry lost his car keys. He took my car to school today. No big deal. He’ll come home today and dig through his room and find them and all will be well. We don’t have a spare to that car. We did, a valet key, but we’re not sure where it is. Purely out of a desire to always have a back up plan that has back up plans, we looked into getting a replacement key. The dealer told us we need to bring the car to them, buy a new key from the parts department, and then have the service department cut it. Expensive, but not the end of the world. Doing the math you’ll find that the difficulty is bringing the car to the dealer when we don’t have a key with which to start the car. They said AAA can tow it to them.
That brings up the next set of questions. We have a AAA account. We also have spent the last 14 months barely using our cars. Did we let the AAA membership lapse due to lack of automotive need? I called them up and told them I just wanted to see if we were active. I gave my name and address, they looked me up. Nope, our account was cancelled. Then I had a thought…
At some point in the past, a couple of years ago maybe, I needed AAA for something and found two different membership cards in my wallet. Same name, different account numbers, different dates, everything. If I remember correctly I called them to see which one was active and found they were somehow both active. I cancelled one of them. Is it possible that on the call today they were looking up the wrong account? I asked what membership number they were looking at and sure enough it was different than the one I was looking at. I gave them my membership and wouldn’t you know it? It’s paid up through September. What do you think of that?
So the moral of the story is, the last day of my forties is kinda being a dick, but at the same time if we need to do this crazy Rube Goldberg-esque key replacement, then we’ve got all of our ducks in a row.
Not too shabby.
Marketing Fun
Jen sent me a text today asking if I had made an appointment to have work done on my beloved 1978 Gibson Les Paul. Her message used the exact phrase, “Les Paul.”
Fast forward to bed time and she tells me that her Facebook feed is filled with ads for Les Pauls. Including some custom shop models. She was surprised by the high prices. I was not. I told her about a ‘59 I saw for sale online today for $400,000.
That doesn’t matter though. What matters is she typed and Facebook tried to sell.
Surprised?
Are We Down?
I just tried to upload a couple of cat pics and the images failed. I replaced them with Flickr links and tried to upload the post and that failed too
Is WordPress.com down? Will this post fail too? In the grande scheme of things, does it matter?
Super Hero Cat
Friday Dinner on Thursday
We have a little thing going on in 2021. Friday dinner with Jen and Harry is burgers and fries with a side of super hero tv shows.
Unfortunately this week Friday is a nana sitting night and I won’t be here for dinner. Harry suggested we do burgers and fries and super hero tv today instead.
If I haven’t said this before let me say it now. My step son is really good people.
Hidden in the Ceiling
This morning before work I went to the cellar to do some laundry. While there I took a few minutes to do some walking and start today’s exercise.
I was shuffling along, looking at the recently repaired duct work in the ceiling and checking out where they removed the ceiling tiles. That’s when I found this….
Huh? What the hell? What could that be doing there, screwed into the joist, hidden by the drop ceiling. I have no idea.
