Getting old. It's one of my aspirations; cruel people will say, "Lookie there! It's done happened!" But I'm not nearly as old as I want to be...

But I'm willing to be patient. Rome wasn't built in a day, y'know, and these wrinkles are yet young.

Patience, in fact, is the main component of a plan to get old. Impatient people... well, they have a tendency to die young, y'know. Mostly because they irritate the hell out of us patient people, and we help them along.

Well, not really, physically, actually. That is still illegal in most states. No, there are more subtle ways, and we patient people have learned them.

If you're patient, you will learn them too. No, you will not discover those ways here...

A common misconception about aged people is that they have acquired wisdom along the way. This is mostly bullshit. Well, that's admittedly a rash and erroneous statement... it's all bullshit.

It is entirely possible... and in fact, likely... that most old people have gotten that way without the acquisition of wisdom. They are, quite simple, just old people, as unwise as they were at age thirty.

Sorry, but that's the way it is.

Wisdom needs to be gotten when you're young. If you're not at least somewhat wise by the time you're thirty, you can pretty much forget about it.

I, for example, have had certain parts of my anatomy called wise from the time I was twelve...

But let's move on to the "physical ailments" suffered by the aged. They are many and varied, but there is a common prodrome: life. Essentially, if you live long enough, you will start to hurt and your various and sundry facilities will cease to work as well as they used to, if at all.

Deafness is a common affliction of us older folks, if you would believe us. You really shouldn't do that, though, because we're mostly lying to you. Y'see, after so many years of chatter chatter chatter we're just damned tired of responding to you younger folks stupid questions. You can never make the assumption that we can't hear your whispers just because we appear to not hear your shouted views pertaining to the human condition or local politics or our personal hygiene.

It's called selective hearing loss, and we control it, not you. And don't you forget it!

And yelling at old people just generally amuses us. If we really want to be irritating, we will lean forward, cup our ears as if to hear better, and say "Wha? Wha? Wha 'chew 'say? Huh?" This is similar to the method used by patient people when dealing with impatient people...

Well, I have to admit to a little deception here... I'm not old... yet. I have a ways to go before I consider myself old. As this is written, I'm 52.6 years old... kinda the median age in these United States.

Strom Thurmon recently celebrated his 96th birthday. Surrounded by the cheerleaders of the Naval Academy, he was heard to utter, "I still like pretty girls... dabba dabba do!". Well, OK, I added the dabba dabba do, because I couldn't understand what he really said...

And Dr. Kavorkian is in jail for Murder #1.

So, a really general conclusion on my part: If you're happy, it's OK to get old. If you ain't, what's the point? I plan on being happy for the rest of my life... after all, it's up to me...

So much for getting old. Today, I'm planning on getting stuff done. It's already after 09:00 and I haven't got started yet, so I need to get moving.

More later, after it happens...

14:24...
Damn. There's too much stuff that I want to do, need to do... I'm sitting here spinning my wheels because it's a beautiful day and I can't decide what to work on because I really just want to be sitting on the front deck with a cuppa coffee...

I did get a lot more mudding done this morning, though, and I bought the windows for the front room. I might not have mentioned this, but I'm going to replace three panels of three single-pane heat-eating windows with two R-11 ones, reducing the total energy needed to heat and cool the house and also eliminate an eyesore... the old windows. While I'm at it, I'll insulate the wall and re-wire it.

But I'm not at it yet, and I just might not be today. There is some inside construction that I need to do, but it requires at least one more person here before I can get started... and I'm here by myself.

So far, I've pretty much cleaned up the front deck and junked up the back one... funny how that works, ain't it? O'yeah, and I've done a lot of thinking. Some of it was fun thinking, too...

So now I'll make another pot of coffee and go sit on the deck and watch this beautiful day go by.

More later, maybe...