I don’t often think of myself as old. Okay, so as my mother gleefully pointed out at my last birthday, I’ve now entered medical middle age. And it’s not like I’ve ever been one of those women who is afraid to admit her age – heck, ask me how old I am, I’ll tell ya. No big deal.

But I just usually don’t think of myself as old. It’s helped by the fact that I know I don’t look as old as I am, nor do I probably act it (I have no kids, hence no need to set an example of maturity. Well, it’s a good excuse at any rate). And in my little office, I’ve been the ‘baby’ as long as I’ve worked there. Sure, we have a college intern, but among the consultants, I’ve been the youngest. It’s just something I’ve gotten used to.

So it’s a bit disconcerting to suddenly feel old in conversations. I’m working on this project with a large crowd of consultants from a number of different companies and backgrounds, and most of them are fresh-faced young men, full of energy, still extoling their days of college, still willing and ready to go out and party late on a weeknight, still relying on mom and dad to take care of things for them.

And I find myself feeling suddenly old. I find myself thinking things like ‘they’re so young!’ Which is a bit of an eyeopener if I actually ponder the fact that they’re only a few years younger than me. 18 is young – of course it is. But when did 25 join that category? It wasn’t that long ago I was their age. Why does it sometimes feel like a lifetime? I remember a time when 30 seemed ancient and now that I’m there, it doesn’t seem that old at all. Heck, even 40 doesn’t really worry me…mostly.

It’s not like I’m bemoaning a youth lost. In my life, I’ve learned that around every corner is something new to look forward to, and that getting older is actually a benefit at times, because it means more good things happen. But still, every once in a while age stares me in the face. It’s not a physical thing, I suppose it’s more mental. Despite best intentions I’m an adult and I’m more and more prone to think like one. And I guess that’s not always an easy thing to accept. It’s just something I wonder sometimes. Is there some magical age at which point we’re supposed to start feeling our age? At what age do you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and not be surprised at what stares back at you? I’d like to think that the adage ‘you’re only as young as you feel’ applies, but sometimes that’s easier said than done. Like when I listen to these kids (and I can’t believe I’m even referring to them as kids!) talking. And I feel old.

It’s Easter. And even though we’re all fully grown and no longer living at home, my mom still likes to put together Easter baskets for my sisters and I. And it is a requirement that we must sit on the couch in our Easter finery, baskets (or whatever counts for the basket that year) in our laps, peering inside with looks of wonder on our faces. We all know that we’re faking those amazed looks – we outgrew the Easter rabbit theory decades ago. But it’s tradition. So this afternoon, my dad and I sat on the couch while my mom took the requisite snapshot of us saying ‘Wow’.

The whole topic of tradition came up because my parents’ church is doing some sort of thing with family traditions, and they had this form they wanted people to fill out, listing what traditions each family had. And I’ll have to admit that at first it was hard to think of specific traditions that my family has. After all, what defines a tradition? Does it have to be associated with something, like a holiday? Or is it just something that your family does and has always done and you just don’t think anything of it anymore?

Some of my favorite traditions center around holidays. My family traveled a lot, since my dad was in the military, and both my parents learned early on what it was like to be away from their families during the holidays. So the tradition started back even before my sisters and I can remember, that after the Christmas Eve service we would all pile into the car and deliver plates of cookies to the gate guards stationed at the entrances to whatever military base my dad was stationed at, at the time. My mom still tells the story of one snowy Christmas Eve in Alaska when my little sister (who couldn’t have been older than seven or so) was given the cookies to deliver to the gate guard, who very obviously had never been away from her family on a holiday before. She broke down sobbing, and gave my little sister a bear hug. Those cookies made her night. When we moved off base, we included the fire station and police station in our yearly cookie delivery route. They don’t do this so much anymore – the fire station in my parents’ town is run by volunteers so there’s no one there on Christmas eve, and the police have a tendency to eye any free food with suspicion these days. But I’ve recently started to do it in my town anyway, just because it’s nice to see the look on their faces.

New Year’s Eve was another special tradition in my family. My parents don’t drink, so alcohol never enters their house. So instead of tossing back champagne on December 31, we would all head to the local ice cream shop, stock up on pints of our favorite flavors, and all the toppings, and then use that to toast in the New Year. Probably more fattening than champagne, but at least we all remembered what we did the next day. Fourth of July is another one. It’ was tradition that we watch the same two movies every year. The first one – “1776” – is appropriate to the season. It’s a musical about the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and one of my all-time favorite movies. I’m not exactly sure why it is that “The Great Race” is the other one that we have to watch each year, but for whatever reason, we did.

There’s other traditions that my family has had that are sometimes harder to remember because they aren’t associated with any particular time. They just happen. Like the fact that my dad used to play “Farewell to Thee” on his concertina at the front door as we headed off to school in the mornings at least once a week or so. Or the advice my mom would give us when we kids would head out on a date, or go on a trip. “Remember to put paper on the seat”, she’d call out. “And don’t put no beans up your nose.” I’m not sure any of us remember why it is that these started – they were always meant as a joke and had some relevance to something funny at some point….but it just became a standard farewell. Goodbye, and don’t put no beans up your nose.

When you think of traditions, it’s easy to get caught up in grand moments. But it’s the little things that become more enduring, and endearing. It’s somehow comforting to think that someday my nieces and nephews will be given the same advice about seats and beans. That they will learn all the words to “Where, where, are you tonight?” and how to sing it in the worst possible way, and why it makes us all crack up when one of us hollers “Push the button, Max!” That they will be the ones to initiate the Napkin Check routine at some random dinner, or join the clamor for grape Kool-Aid for Thanksgiving dinner, in that horrid old beat-up green pitcher that my mom threatens to throw away year after year and never will. That someday they will be bundled into a car after a Christmas Eve service or a Winter Solstice celebration to deliver homemade cookies to some poor kid in a police station or fire station or other public post somewhere, just to remind them that they weren’t forgotten. And that in their photo albums, each year, will be pictures of them staring into Easter baskets, pretending to look amazed.

I own a Palm Pilot and have for a few years now. Hey, I’m a nerd, and nerds love gadgets. It’s part of what makes us so unique, see. And I really did have a good reason for getting one – I was lugging around this huge and weighty appointment book and I had gotten to the point where I really wanted to downsize to a smaller purse and that meant the date book had to go, and, well……Palm Pilot. Ahem.

These little things are pretty handy for a number of reasons beyond the fact that they weigh lots less than that cumbersome datebook, and fit in a smaller purse. You can *beam* things at people! A few weeks ago at work, a few of us were comparing our various Palms and the discussion of beaming (using Infrared to transmit information) came up. Turned out none of us had tried it yet. So a small group of us stood around, beaming little test messages to each other (And you wondered how it is that nerds entertain themselves). Besides the amusement factor, that beaming thing has come in pretty handy to pass info back and forth, like business cards. I’m still working on learning how enter data using the ‘handwriting’ method, and there’s only so fast you can type using the hunt and peck mode with that teeny little stylus they give you. So beaming over a long list of contact numbers, for example, is a major plus.

Anyway, while I have adored synching this thing up to my computer so that all my email and snail mail addresses are current, and both my desktop and my handheld machines ding melodiously at me when I have something coming up, I really haven’t pursued adding any additional programming to the thing. Oh, I know there’s little expense tracking tools and a plethora of versions of solitaire out there but I really didn’t see the point in cluttering up my lovely little toy with all that sort of junk. I’ve already got four versions of solitaire on the darn thing and how many versions do you really need?

Ha ha. Silly clueless me. I made a dreadful mistake today. I went to the Palm Pilot website and checked out what they have to download.

Wow!!

There’s all sorts of cool stuff out there! Databases to track all kinds of things. Things to calculate expenses, divvy up a dinner check equally, list out collections, create shopping lists. Page after page of downloadable software to liven up my handheld organizer.

I found a few programs that I just had to upload. There’s one to track which of the state quarters I have, so I don’t have to go rummaging through the slowly growing pile in my purse pocket to see if I have whatever the latest quarter is that I happen to find. And if it can track that, I’m sure I can get a similar database to track things like book titles, CD’s, and other important lists like my Dad’s Pez collection so that next time I’m in front of a display of Pez dispensers I can see at a glance whether he already has the Blue Ninja Turtle before I fork over my 99 cents.

Then I got to the games. Like I said, I knew there would be card games. And there were – tons of ’em. But what I wasn’t expecting were the other games. Real games. Action and role-playing games. For a Palm Pilot! Wow!

I excitedly told my friend about this stuff as I was happily downloading executables.

“You’re lost,” he groaned. And after a pause, he added “It was nice knowing you.”

Aw, c’mon. It won’t be that bad. Really. My friends have no need to worry. I’m not going to be playing these games night and day…um….really. They ought to know when it is that they should start to worry.

See, these little handheld gadgets can be set up for wireless internet…..mainly for downloading email and surfing the web. Frankly, I really have no desire to do that on my Palm – I’ll stick to the desktop for that. But the minute these little suckers can handle a solid and fast telnet connection and I can mush on my Palm…..

Then I’m lost. Definitely.

On the very rare times that I actually get a chance to go to my office (not the place I’m currently assigned for this project, but my *real* office, where I have a desk and a door with a nameplate and pictures on the wall and everything), I drive through a series of back country roads to get there. It’s kind of fun to try to figure out what the farmers are growing, although I think they should be required to put signs on the side of the road with names or at least pictures so those of us clueless people driving by can figure out what the heck those green leafy things are going to produce someday without peering out the window and nearly ramming the big old faded yellow tractor that Joe Bob is tootling down the road at the high speed of oh……13 miles per hour. But other than that and yelling back at the roosters who continually do their best to prove that chickens really have *no* brains by running head-first into oncoming traffic, there’s usually not much exciting to see.

Until recently, that is. As I was driving to the office a few weeks ago I noted something rather peculiar going on. There was a large gathering of trucks and assorted big construction type gadgets assembled around a rather large pile of mud in the middle of a field. And on top of this pile they were assembling what looked to be some sort of tower.

The next time I drove by I had a friend in the car and so I slowed down to take a closer look.

“It’s like a rocket launcher,” she mentioned, and I had to agree. Granted the only time either of us has seen a rocket launcher was from watching old new clips of various spaceships taking off, but hey, this was the closest description we could come up with. There was this tall tower with steps and stuff and a whole handful of really long and skinny poles and lights and everything.

Of course this started the imagination going and we pondered why it was that someone would be building a rocket launcher in the middle of a farm field in the back of beyond that surrounds the town I live in. I mean, for all I know, this could be some secret experiment – someone finally figured out a use for all the road-kill tomatoes. Rocket fuel!

Those of you who do not live near a tomato processing plant are probably eying that last phrase in a bit of confusion, but trust me, anyone who has spent time in my part of California in the summer understands the concept of road-kill tomatoes. They hire college kids each year to drive the tomato trucks – big rickety trucks that sport two huge bins, which are piled high with tomatoes and then carted to the factories, where they leave their larval form and become what the Goddess intended them to be – sauce. In the process of taking the tomatoes to their final destination, however, sometimes these drivers are a bit too eager on the turns, and every so often a few dozen tomatoes grab their chance and leap from the truck to commit suicide on the side of the road. Their poor little bodies are then squashed to death by passing cars. Road-kill tomatoes. They are everywhere in the summer. You can trace the path from field to factory by following the trail of bleeding little red carcasses.

But anyway, back to the rocket launcher. It’s been there for the past few weeks and I’ve had fun trying to imagine just what it was that they were going to do with this odd tower. Sadly though, as I drove home today I realized I may never know. Whoever built it is now taking it down. The tower is lying on its side on the pile of mud, still surrounded by trucks and assorted construction equipment.

Sorry, NASA. Guess you need something stronger than ketchup.

Sunday I tried to finish my taxes. Yes, I know I put it off til the last minute, but every year I have done them myself and despite the swearing and grumbling and hair-pulling, I manage to get them done. This year was a bit trickier…so much so that I have sworn to never do them myself again. There are these wonderful people who are trained at it and I think I shall let one of *them* do it for me next year. Ugh.

But to cheer myself up after wrestling with tax forms and getting nowhere for hours on end, I decided to get my nails done. I had picked out a nice neutral color, suitable for a professional person, and then I saw this gorgeous deep purple and, well, it was a weak moment. What can I say?

On the plus side my nails have provided a source of amusement to my coworkers, most of whom managed to slip in some comment about the color over the course of the day. On the down side, going from very short, non-existent nails to longer ones has made things interesting. Like typing. If it weren’t for me tossing this text through spell-check before dumping it into HTML, this entry would be chock full o’ typos. Sheesh.

When I got to work today, there was a Nerf dart gun sitting on my chair. Turns out another coworker got a gun too, and a third got a Nerf football. Wow! Toys! Nerds looooove toys!

We were all good for most of the day. We eyeballed our new toys and very politely left them in their boxes, untouched. But hey, we’re only human – and nerds to boot. After lunch, the toys came out. This gun is COOL! It shoots little nerf darts that stick to things (well, if they were shot by someone with any semblance of an ability to aim, they would) with little suction cups. And the football is soft enough that even if you lob it across the room and bean one of the developers in the head (I was *not* the one who did this!), all it does is knock off his earphones. Otherwise, perfectly harmless. And then two of us had to go slunking around the room, lurking behind white boards and under desks, firing off darts at each other and laughing. (okay, I *was* one of those).

I’m pondering all the things I can do with this gun now. If I want to get someone’s attention across the room, *thwak*, there goes a dart to their computer screen. If we’re having a meeting and someone is being noisy, *thwak*. Suction cup to the forehead. Heck, the ramifications are endless. Hmm…..

Wonder if I can blame it on the purple nail polish?

Friday night, the Celtic rock band Tempest played in Davis, and of course a few of us went to see it. Hmmm. ‘Of course’ may not be the best way to put it – until last night I didn’t even own a Tempest CD, but at least I’d seen them before. The last time they played in Davis, to be exact.

The concert took place (this year and last year) in a tiny little building that looks, from inside, to be a converted barn, and a rather dilapidated one at that. It comes complete with a rather compact tortoiseshell barn cat who sauntered onto the stage while one of the band members crouched down to adjust some equipment before the concert started. In typical tortoiseshell fashion, she curved around his legs, rubbed against one of the mike stands, and then made her leisurely way down to the audience to demand attention from those seated and waiting for the show to begin. (Yes, I notice cats when I’m in places. If there is a cat there, I will see it. This heightened ability to narrow in on things feline comes with the addiction, you see.)

They put on a excellent show. Their music is very energetic and it would take someone with incredible self-control to avoid tapping one’s toe or clapping along. The lead singer and the fiddler (who, in my friend’s opinion, is a fiddling god, and frankly, I think she’s got it about right) are very in tune with the audience and tend to wander around a bit. In fact, the lead singer even came down and sat in my lap.

I suppose one might ask why I go to see this band whose music I don’t even know? Because my friends like them and invited me along, and so I went. We sat in the front row, which was an acoustical mistake in my opinion because we got blasted by lots of noise and it was a bit hard to distinguish voice from music, but to my friends – all diehard fans of this energetic group – this was a price worth paying. And I suppose they might be right. After all, the lead singer chose my lap on which to perch, and would that really have happened if we weren’t right there in the ear-bleeding seats?

I did buy a CD last night, simply because after two concerts (even though they were a year apart), they’re growing on me. Or maybe it was the up close and personal touch, jeans to jeans. Hmm

I had dinner with my old synchronized swimming buddies from college last night.

It was so strange that it had been 3 years since we’d all gotten together. And in a way, it is sad that we are all so busy that years go by in between gatherings, even though most of us live within 20 minutes drive of each other.

The dinner brought back memories:

• Swimming late at night, air so cold that our breath came out in little clouds every time we surfaced.
• Listening to music and visualizing choreography…and how that still happens when I hear an interesting new song.
• My duet partner and I frantically sewing the sequins onto our suits while flying to Ohio for the National competition.
• Listening to the soft ooh of amazement from the crowd as we executed a complicated maneuver, the lights turned off and they reacted just as we had hoped.
• Dashing through suit changes during the shows – peeling off wet suits and slipping into dry ones is not easy when you have to hurry, and we often wondered if that security camera over the door was on, and whether they were watching.
• Feeling smug amusement when those who laughed and claimed that what we were doing was simple, couldn’t even stay afloat for the simplest of maneuvers when they finally were coerced into trying.

I read, many years ago, a description of synchronized swimming, written by someone who understood the sport. It is dance in an uncertain medium. Ballet with no floor. Gymnastics without the balance beam or the parallel bars. A graceful test of endurance and the bounds of gravity.

We sat in the restaurant for several hours and laughed and caught up on the past few years. We all posed in a big group as the obliging waitress took our picture with all our cameras, then lingered outside the restaurant, exchanging email addresses, hugging goodbye.

I sat at dinner and listened to them and realized that they all have their kids and houses and all the other trappings of a typical family life, and I felt like somehow they have slipped away from me and gone down this path I will never follow, just as I have gone down a path that is very different from theirs.

I drove home with the songs from our last show together echoing like misty ghosts in my heads. It was bittersweet.

I spent most of today working on business process designs.

Are you just thrilled to pieces? Are you salivating to hear all about this fascinating topic? No, really. I mean it.

I didn’t think it would take that long. Seriously. I’m so naive. Or optimistic. Or clueless – I don’t know. But first there was lively debate on vocabulary terms. At that point I noted that I didn’t care if we called the steps George, Henry, and Fred – these were the steps we were currently using and could we get past this for pete’s sake. Then there was a need to find a white board and a projector. I do not understand this mindset. Perhaps it is the repressed science nerd in me, or else the code geek coming to the surface, but why must things be planned using white boards and projectors? Why can’t we all scribble it on regular notebook paper and think it through before making pretty diagrams on the fly? I suppose that programs like Visio are useful and all, but not for people like me who prefer detailed steps to flow charts. Flow charts mean nothing to me. They are lovely shapes on paper, yes, and make more visually appealing slides, but in reality they tell me very little information. Give me numbered steps any day and I’ll be much happier.

By the end of that lovely twelve-hour work day I was exhausted and really not thinking of much of anything except getting home and maybe banging my head on the most convenient wall for a while, just to make the pain all go away. But a friend invited me to go to a club with him, and on a whim, I said yes. It was amateur night and I’d never been to something like this, and well, it was on the way. So what the heck.

A handful of people performed at this club last night, and I think I can safely say that, with very few exceptions, the quality of the music performed was mediocre at its best. There was the guy who stood up in the beginning and started to make noise. I won’t even call it music – it involved random harmonic screeches and guitar strumming, but there was no tune involved. Then he got really annoyed because no one was paying any attention to him. I think that everyone was still trying to figure out if he was just tuning – because surely that wasn’t a *song*. So he stomped off in a huff. Later on, a woman sang who apparently believed that she was Ella Fitzgerald reincarnated. Except that this involved lots of hand movements, facial expressions that looked as if she had just swallowed something extremely sour, and then occasional bouts of bouncing about on the balls of her feet. I suppose I’ve got to give them all credit for enthusiasm, and for being willing to stand in front of a room of strangers and sing songs they’ve poured their hearts into. Anyway, the evening made the day that much better, so despite the occasional cringe at missed or offkey tones, it was well worth it.

I went to a Ladies Tea with my mom on Saturday. Her church women’s group puts this on every year, and it really is quite fun. Each table is hosted by one lady, who is responsible for decorating and setting it…and it’s a really good excuse for some of them to pull out all that gorgeous old china that they’ve had stashed in the back of their cupboards for decades. There’s a theme as well – one year it was fashions around the world, where people donated outfits they had from their travels, and were then modeled by volunteers from the group. One year it was a Mad Hatter’s tea party. This year it was a Victorian theme, with a trio of actors from a guild nearby, who came dressed appropriately and talked about Victorian dress, hair styles, and fan etiquette. Yes, I said fan etiquette. According to these people, there was this whole language associated with what a young lady did with her fan. Tapping it on the cheek, fluttering fast or slow, pulling it through her hand – all of that had secret messages. It sounded extremely complicated and I had to wonder just how many of the gentlemen actually understood all the messages that the ladies were sending them via fan-mail, but anyway it was an interesting tidbit of information.

These teas are always fun, and I think one main reason is that it’s a reason for a lot of these ladies to get out and dress up and actually *be* ladies. I don’t mean that they’re not ladies every other day of the year, but this is one of those rare opportunities for them to get all fancied up and wear their best hats and eat cucumber sandwiches and tea cakes from fine bone china and sip tea from cups so delicate you can see through them. It’s not a common thing anymore in normal society to have something quite like this, and the little old ladies all seem to enjoy it so much. The presentations are geared toward woman – there may be a few men involved in the tea, playing the piano or serving the food, but this is something done by the ladies, for the ladies, and it is no place for testosterone.

On a completely unrelated topic, in my brief time as interim manager, I had to change desks. The new desk is in the same big room that we’ve all been stuffed into. This means that, until this morning, I was no longer next to my phone. Oh, I was next to *a* phone, but not mine, and I couldn’t forward the calls to this phone because it went directly to someone else’s voicemail. I should point out here that all the phones in this room have exactly the same ring (and the acoustics in here are horrid, based on the fact that the walls do not go all the way to the ceiling, for example), so when a phone rings on this half of the room, it really is impossible to tell whose it is, and there are a number of us that go leaping for them. The fact that I’ve been sitting in a different desk only makes it worse because this means I’m forever rising from my chair to holler “Is that me?” when a phone rings. The people sitting around my old desk are probably rather happy that today I finally can get my own darn calls. The guy who came to switch my phone seemed very concerned about that fact that I won’t be able to transfer or get my messages without going through a complicated series of number punching until this afternoon. Heh. I don’t care! I can finally get phone calls without having to dash across the room, leaping recycling boxes and random laptop bags in the vain hopes of catching my calls.

I went grocery shopping last night.

You may not consider this a big deal. You may look at that statement and wonder just why it is that I felt I needed to devote a significant portion of a journal entry to such a mundane topic. I can understand this feeling. Really. It’s just that I haven’t had a chance to go grocery shopping since I returned from Singapore…and that was two weeks ago. When I opened my refrigerator, I could have hollered “Hello!” and it would have echoed bleakly. Over the course of this project my cupboards had been reduced to a few random boxes of pasta mix and the occasional can of tuna. In the refrigerator, all that was left was assorted condiments. Try scrounging something to eat from that.

Last night, I finally had time. I left the office while the sun was still shining. I went home and poured through a few cookbooks and wrote up a list. And then I went to the store and wandered up and down nearly every aisle.

There is food in my refrigerator now. An entire drawer stuffed with the makings of a fabulous vegetable soup. All the things necessary to get my bread machine running happily again. There are cans and boxes and bottles in the cupboards, and yes, even the freezer is looking full. I’m so happy!

Word is filtering down that there’s going to be yet more reorganization at this project. I’m the interim development manager (interim meaning that they were willing to give it to a consultant only until they could get an actual in-house employee to take over), but that may change fairly soon and I’ll go back to what I was before (and the amusing part, I suppose, is that the work I’ve been doing this week as development manager is exactly the same as what it was in my previous ‘position’ here). I’ve got mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, there would be a sense of relief if I am not in this position – managing friends is not always such a fun thing to do. On the other hand, I spent a bit of time trying to convince myself that I could do this job, and so there is a teeny part of me that at least wants the option of trying. Anyway, we’ll see. The reorg could take a few weeks or longer, and in the meantime I’ll just plug along doing what I’ve been doing, regardless of what title they want to give me.