Okee, so like I turn 41 today. Nifty. *yawn*

Unsurprisingly, it’s just another work day, and I say that with no chagrin whatsoever. I’ve allowed myself to get too far behind this autumn, so I’m going to be playing “catch-up” for another couple of weeks at least.

Sherri admonished me this morning: “…as you take time today to reflect back (and I know you will) on the many, many years you have spent on this earth, try NOT kicking your own ass for a change. Try acknowledging all that you have accomplished and all the good things in your life.” Easy enough for her to say, since she turns forty in five days and thus is 370 days shy of my ability to screw things up. But, I’ll try to give it a whirl while I’m letting a batch of photos run here.

Things I have accomplished in life:

1. I have managed to live significantly past my 25th birthday, and not even in a wheel-chair or mental institution. Let me tell you, as I contemplated this fact on my 25th birthday, it was such an intellectual surprise that it became one of those “pivotal moments”.
2. I have, for the most part, managed not to emulate my adoptive parents in the rearing of my own children. I haven’t chased my kids around the house with a belt yet, threatened them with relatively implausible bodily harm for disobedience, or attempted to shame them into compliance to such a degree that their self-esteem evaporated.
3. I have not kicked, drowned, strangled, tossed off a balcony, dumped in the forest, or otherwise rid myself of the charming-but-annoying felines in my life who insist upon climbing up my leg to greet me, walking across the keyboard in the middle of a PhotoShop batch and stalling several hundred photos in process, sitting on my face in the middle of the night, randomly attacking my toes as I’m walking by, attempting to lay upon my feet while I’m walking (especially at the head of the stairs), bringing half-dead animals and insects into the house, shitting on the bed after we’ve been gone on vacation, peeing on our luggage before we leave for vacation, and playing war games across the entire house at full speed and volume in the middle of the night.
4. I have remained faithful to my wife, but that’s less of an accomplishment as it is an acknowledgment that most other females in my life have had a better sense of discretion than she has, and I felt so lucky when she chose me that there was no way I was going to screw that up.
5. I have tried new foods throughout my life. Some of them, I even liked.
6. I quit smoking over a decade ago.
7. My kids still think I’m relatively cool. I know it won’t last, but it’s still kind of neat if you ask me.

So there. That’s seven accomplishments I can at least be proud of. I had thought of a couple of others, but there was this g@dd@mn3d kitten crawling up my leg and it kind of distracted me. Besides that, I’m actually a bit sick today. Me and the Amoxicyllin are trying to kick a throat infection. Germs are bastards. Hence the wording of the title of this post. That’s about what I sound like right now.

I have several important things to do today, but when I woke up this morning and realized it’s the fifteenth of October, my stomach lurched a bit. That was a surprisingly fast eighteen days since I last noted the date on the calendar in relation to tomorrow’s date and the importance of it, so here I am the day before the Elder and Unknown’s eighteenth birthday and I am, in several ways, unprepared for it. The story of my life, I suppose. I have this wondrous capacity for being able to WAY overthink a situation for days, weeks, months or years on end, only to be frightfully unprepared for it when it finally happens.

Except I’m really not unprepared. I just wish I could legitimately spend the day in some level of focused concentration on it. I’ll have to put that off until tonight, though. Today, I have to straighten out an issue with my driver’s license (referred to in the previous post) and I have a doctor’s appointment early this afternoon to see if we can figure out what is going on with this insidiously pervasive tinnitus in my right ear that I can’t seem to get rid of. I would say something vapid like, “It’s driving me crazy,” but we all know that is a) a rather short drive, and b) redundant, because I’m already there. Atop that, I have a wedding to finish up, now that I have the computers and processing space back in working order so that my workflow is back on track. #1 Son and I are both supposed to referee tonight, but the seemingly incessant rain down here (most of which I missed while up in Aberdeen) will likely have the fields so soggy as to be unplayable. I have to admit that with the High School season being over, I’m about two shakes from being ready for the rec league schedule to be over as well. I very much enjoy refereeing the younger kids, but I’m tired.

Wow, how was that for a long-ass paragraph with virtually no cohesion? Sorry, Bing. I was well educated, but I get lazy.

So, tomorrow is her eighteenth birthday. A funny thing: I honestly cannot remember what I did to celebrate my eighteenth birthday, and at the time, in Texas, that was full, legal adulthood like 21 is now. But I really don’t remember doing anything special. I hope the Elder and Unknown gets to do something special and memorable on her eighteenth birthday, and I hope it’s basically meaningful for her. But I could say a hundred million other things like that, and they would be basically as personally frustrating for me. For in truth, all I really want is to be able to let her know, personally, how much she will always be such a fundamental part of me.

But, I will wait. I’ve waited this long, after all. So, what, really is the difference?

She begins her nineteenth year tomorrow, and nineteen is the number of the Sun. I wonder what her radiant light shall be, and what she shall become. Whatever the answers to those questions, I hope she knows that she is loved beyond imagining, and not just by the ones whom she currently knows.