Month: September 2010

I talked to my mother this afternoon.  Every year, I receive a call from her so she can tell me I was a beautiful baby.  That is the best part about my birthday.  I love my birthday.  One of the epiphanies of middle age that I hold most dear is the realization of how important it is to embrace and enjoy one’s age.  Tomorrow is my birthday.  I will be 55 years old.  I am very thankful to be 55 years old.  We are going to have a small dinner party to celebrate with a few of our friends.

After about my 28th birthday, I quit enjoying the celebration of my birth.  I am wildly thankful that I started to embrace the celebration again after about my 45th birthday.  I think some of it had to do with the fact that Lorena and I had kids.  They were getting old enough to want to be older rather than enjoy their current age.  That seemed like such a waste and it dawned on me that I should also enjoy my current age.  The reality is that I am happier than ever.  I LOVE the fact that I am 54 years old and will be 55 tomorrow.  I think part of the reason for my change in attitude is that I want my kids to embrace their age, whatever it is!

Lorena loves it, too.  Partially she loves it because I will be able to get that extra 10% discount for everything in the store on Tuesdays at Ross Dress for Less.  Then there are all the senior discounts at the about a million restaurants.  She also loves to go to parties and this is going to be a great one.  Einstein died in April of 1955 and I just like to consider that maybe I was born as his replacement.  Chevy was building great cars, although some would argue the best one came out a couple of years later.  Disneyland opened in 1955.  Elvis first appeared on television in 1955.  The conservative National Review was started by William F. Buckley, Jr. in 1955.  It was a great year.

It is great to have been born in 1955 and it is great to be 55 years old.  And thanks Mom!  I am glad to know that you STILL think that I was a beautiful baby.

Life is a little bit strange for us right now.  The big change is that the kids are full time college students now.  My primary responsibility with respect to schooling is to to pay the bills.  Loren will be driving the kids to school for just this year.  They will be able to drive themselves after that.  That transition has seemed very abrupt.  We went from reading together every day over a bowl of popcorn to intense individual study in separate rooms.  Strange.  We want to figure out how to schedule our time better so we can continue to read some of the books we like, but the first semester or two of college are pretty intense and the kids load will go up from twelve hours this semester to fifteen hours next.

Even weekends are different.  Typically, we spent leisurely Saturday’s at a bookstore or a library after breakfast at McDonald’s.  This last Saturday was the first “free” Saturday since school started because we have had some out of town events.  We decided to run over to the North Carolina State University main library in Raleigh so the kids could access some books they need for Christian’s report on the Cathars for his Western Civilization class and Kelly’s report on Puritan poets for her American Literature class.  I worked on the GaugeCam project all morning while the kids buried themselves in their studies.  No more showing each other funny comic strips or looking at fashion magazines.  Just serious study.  Gratifying, but weird.

When we got to the NCSU library, we found a room filled with computers.  There were at least two of them with 30 inch plus screens for playing video games.  We arrived at about 9:00 in the morning.  There was a guy on one of the game computers playing World of Warcraft when we arrived.  He played for another three or four hours before he left.  Another guy with pink hair got there at the same time as us and got onto the other game computer.  He was still playing when we left at about 2:00 PM.  Amazing.  I had heard that some kids waste their educations playing video games, but I had never really seen it in real life.

One of the things I enjoyed the most while we were there was watching three guys from a Senior level Chemistry class work together on a homework assignment.  To say they were different from each other would be an understatement.  One of them was a wildly gregarious guy from Thailand who appeared to know everyone in the building.  He greeted just about everyone that came through the room and often went over and talked to the gamers.  He also had Facebook open on his computer along with the homework assignment.  The other guys were your run of the mill gringos, but one of them appeared to know what he was doing while the other was trying to get his homework done by getting the answers from the other two.  They obviously enjoyed working together and spent at least four hours together working on that single assignment.

We are enjoying the transition from homeschooling to NOT homeschooling.  Everything is new and we are trying to learn how to use our time more effectively.  I think it is going to be a great time of life for all of us.

Christian has been taking classical guitar lessons now for about a year and a half.  He played us a tune to celebrate his 15th birthday.  Even though a lot of people have already seen it on Facebook, I am posting it here so people like Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah could take a look.