I Blame Bill

 

Of course it is partly my fault. Over the past year, I have allowed digital chaos to creep into my life. Thousands of school and work photos remained scattered over 5 different devices instead of being regularly uploaded in an orderly fashion onto my laptop. Work and private files were saved . . . oh, wherever. (I’ll clean it up later.) Blog posts – finished or not – were also saved willy-nilly in various dark corners of my hard drive. Backing up files was something that could be perennially put off till some later date. I’ll get to it during my next work break, I told myself . . .

I never did.

And then came the ominous news that Windows 7 would no longer be supported after January 14, 2020. A few days later I discovered that the 2/” button on my keyboard no longer worked (which might have had something to do with the water I spilled on it the previous day). I found a workaround using Insert and Symbol, but it was (and is) a pain in the asterisk. To make matters worse, I started noticing that it was taking longer and longer for my laptop to fire up in the mornings. Between the moment I turned it on and the moment it was ready to accept my password, there was plenty enough time to take the dog out for a quick walk. Between entering the password and it being ready to use, I could go take a shower. After clicking on Thunderbird, I could go make my morning coffee and still get back before the Inbox showed up on the screen . . .

I put “new laptop” on my Christmas wish list.

 

December 24^th, 2019. 10:32 pm. My entire family has now gone to bed after our wonderful Christmas Eve. I plug my new super-duper laptop in and nervously push the power button. A screen appears and asks me if I want it to speak English or German. I choose English and a “Please wait . . .” message appears on the screen for a matter of seconds. Suddenly I hear a pleasant female voice.

“Hello,” she says. Out loud.

“I will be helping you through the process of setting up your laptop,” she continues. Then she asks me if I want to respond to her manually or by speaking back.

I am completely freaked out. And speechless. I just click my way through the rest of our “conversation”, feeling like a dork. I can tell she thinks I’m a loser.

Five minutes later I am immersed in the foreign-looking bowels of Windows 10 with offers of tips and random websites popping up on my screen, email notifications dinging one after another on my nearby cellphone. I am in over my head. I get the hell out of there.

Once she has gone dark, I lean back and my first thought is that my new laptop is female. In the future I’ll probably be referring to . . . her . . . as “she”. I’m pretty sure my old one was an “it”. My second realization is the horrendous amount of work ahead of me before I can make this transition. My third thought is that I should write Bill Gates a letter of complaint, asking him not only where he gets off gendering my machine like that, but also pointing out what should be obvious to him – the fact that a lot of older people also depend on computers and he’s putting us through some major stress. I’ll tell him it is his fault that the first half of my Christmas vacation is going to be spent carefully ordering all my files and readying them for the move from my old machine to my new bff. (Actually . . . more like “bf for 10” – or however many years she lasts till Bill decides to end her.) Then I will quickly thank him for all his good work in Africa and sign off with “Indignantly yours”.

 

Fortunately, the computer specialist in my husband’s school is willing to spend a few hours with me tomorrow, helping me find my way around this new terrain. He’ll show me how to install all the programs I need and to get rid of all the useless stuff that is already on there. I don’t suppose there is anything he can do about her being a girl.

 

Early Bird Special

I went out for dinner with two dear school friends last night and it was the fastest five hours of my life. They had arranged to go to a popular place that takes no reservations so we had to get there by 4:00 pm. As our plans were shaping up in a series of ping ponging WhatsApp messages, all sorts of idioms and cultural references to (mean and skimpy) old ladies popped up that were unfamiliar to me and needed explanation – finally prompting one of my friends to write “You have been gone too long.”

So, Blue Hair picked me up and we drove to the restaurant where Weenius would meet us. We all arrived within a minute of one another, but curiously, two of us spent the first half hour at a table with an empty seat while the third spent it on a bench across from the hostess station three feet away. We needed our cell phones to finally find one another. Another round of allusions to our aging processes ensued.

But at the same time, the rejuvenating magic of old friends started working. Conversation flowed fast and furiously, simply picking up where it left off last time. There was no feeling of “having been gone too long” – in fact, no time had passed at all it seemed. Giggling erupted and years started peeling off. Who is getting old? Not us! We are as immature as we ever were! And blessedly so.

The place was filling up and our consciences told us that we really should be leaving to free up the table for all the waiting customers. So we got our doggie bags and spent ten more minutes figuring out what 94 divided by 3 equals. Then we stiffed the waitress and left. Blue Hair drove off the curb with a clunk as we left the parking lot.

Senior Moments – Chapter Five

I went to the kitchen to refill my coffee this morning and while I was there, I saw the leftovers of yesterday’s chili, still on the stove-top. I thought I should probably transfer it to a bowl and stick it in the fridge, which was what I proceeded to do. Of course, in the process, I forgot to take my coffee with me as I returned to the library.

So I went back to the kitchen to get it. The bowl of chili was curiously still sitting on the counter and my coffee cup was nowhere to be seen. I tried to focus and mentally retrace my steps. I opened the fridge door . . .

Sigh.

This is just the latest in a string of my recent actions falling somewhere on the spectrum from merely “Absent-minded” to downright “Moronic”. Just last week I booked and paid for a flight with the wrong return date. Then I accidentally claimed to be the sole caregiver of the family in my tax filing. Days later I got tricked into an internet scam which necessitated locking down my credit card and replacing it with a new one. Which in turn meant changing my payment method in places like Amazon and Spotify . . .

 

Again. Sigh.

 

But before you start worrying about me, most of these things turned out to be fairly easy to deal with and filled with unexpected silver linings. Despite the mistake (or because of it??) this is first time I can remember that my taxes aren’t being audited – releasing me from the yearly half hour drive to the nearest Finance Ministry office, documents in hand. I also get an extra day in my upcoming trip to the States. And having upgraded to a Gold card last year, replacing it was free AND the fraudulent charge is going to be reimbursed. This episode alone more than covers the slightly higher credit card fees I have been paying.

Still! This series of brainless moments has gotten me thinking about mental and physical health. Rather than worrying about creeping dementia, I realized that a person can allow their brains go to seed in the same way they can neglect their physical bodies, and that I have been guilty of that. I’ve decided it’s time for me to give myself a kick in the mental butt.

It’s 6:00 pm on Sunday, December 1^st and my Christmas decorations are up, my advent wreath is made, my courses are prepared for both Monday and Tuesday, all the laundry and ironing is done, the house is clean, and I just finished a project that has been meandering from one To Do list to the next for the past 15 months.

Now hand me one of those mints!

 

Dejuvenating

Since the husband couldn’t come along on our trip to Milwaukee this year, it was up to me to get the bikes in working order for my daughters and me to use. I hauled them up from my sister’s Silence of the Lambs basement, removed the cobwebs and set to work. Tires were pumped up, brakes were checked, rust was WD40’d, chains were oiled, seats were adjusted, gears were tested. We were good to go.

Of course, one of these three bikes was my now 42 year old Takara ten-speed which I have affectionately named “The Rejuvenator”. And once again, he lived up to his name. When I got on him and started pedaling, the old magic of muscle memory kicked in immediately. He was perfection. This was how a bike was supposed to feel! I sped off into traffic like any 15 year old would, exhilarated by my newfound mobility, leaving my fifty-seven year old achy, gouty and bursitis-prone self behind in the dust.

Common sense says that a person can’t truly love an inanimate object, but I beg to differ.

On the other hand, I find myself wondering how long this magic can last. How long can those bald and ever so slightly flatulent tires hold out? His brake lines are also creaking more, the joints of his gear levers are stiffer and he is getting crankier when I shift. His handlebar tape is sagging and decomposing. His age is showing.

And what about me?  A week from now, I will take him back down to the basement before leaving to go home. At our next reunion, I will be 59 and probably as good as retired. Will I still tear around town on him when I am 61? 63? 65? Will the day come when I have to give up riding ten-speeds altogether? How will this end?

I almost hope he goes before my ability to ride him does. That a tire bursts and is too expensive to replace. Or that a part rusts through that is no longer produced. That when our relationship ends, it will not be me abandoning him. It will be his last full measure of devotion.

 

Die Dicke Oachn

All sorts of little milestones and round numbers have been reminding me lately of time passing. My thirtieth anniversary is in less than three days. My sixtieth birthday and retirement(!) are in less than three years. My daughter graduating from high school made me feel – among other things – well, . . . . old. And what was the final diagnosis of my joint troubles of late? Apparently, I am just aging.

I have also now officially lived in this house on a hill outside of Loopyville for thirty years – since 1989 – so for more than half of my life.  In all that time, whenever we drove somewhere northward (and that was literally hundreds of times), our route took us through a little village and past a sign with an arrow and the words “Europe’s Oldest Oak Tree”. We never once turned off to look at it. That is, until a month ago, when the husband and I were returning home all refreshed and relaxed from our spa weekend. On a whim, we veered off toward the oak.

 

I can say with 100% certainty that it is the most un-touristy tourist attraction you will ever experience. It’s just a tree. In a field. With one little information sign. From that we learned that the tree was between 1000 and 1200 years old along with its height and diameter.

 

We also read that this tree had briefly made international news. After being struck by lightning in the 1970s, someone tried to save it by pouring concrete into the trunk. But that cure turned out to be more deadly than the original injury. In 1989 (the same year I was moving furniture and all my earthly possessions into my new home in a nearby village), a massive rescue attempt was made to remove the concrete and restore the tree’s natural drainage. And it was a success. Thirty years later, the oak is clearly thriving.

I walked around the tree, peered up into it, felt the old bark and thought about everything it had lived through. The ground beneath it had been ruled by the Magyars, the Romans, the Babenbergs, the Hapsburgs, the Nazis, the Russians, and the Freedom Party. It had survived Turkish invasions, two World Wars, acid rain, a lightning strike, Chernobyl, tourists with pocket knives and being called fat by the locals (“die dicke Oachn”, which means “the fat oak”). It had scars and missing limbs, but it was still going strong. It was clearly planning on sticking around for a while yet.

While I was contemplating all this, the husband took this picture – which I just love. Maybe because I look so young!

Gerontogynophobia

 

It’s official. In the Best Vacations competition, Easter beats Christmas hands down. The weather is warm, the sun sets at 8:00 pm, there is no present-procurement stress, and no one asks if you want to go skiing. The supply of chocolate in the house grows dramatically, while the surplus of eggs in the fridge gets reduced. This last point is particularly fortunate, now that we are getting up to seven (!) a day (she says proudly).

Despite a long mental list of Easter vacation projects, including catching up some more with blog friends and long overdue house improvements, I — somewhat inexplicably — spent the first two days crocheting this giraffe. It is my very first stuffed animal:

This was all before Notre Dame started burning, before an overnight trip to Vienna with my two daughters, and before the Mueller Report landed with a thud, kicking off the collective hyperventilation of America’s journalists and pundits. No, for those two days, I happily binge-watched silly Sci Fi series and counted stitches. My greatest concern was what to do with the giraffe once I had finished. Gingerbread Man to the rescue! Since he is my only other crocheted stuffed animal thing, I introduced the two and they became immediate bff’s.

Speaking of new friends, I have one too. And it is none other than Mean Neighbor Lady! For more than two decades I suffered her Daily Disapproval Tours and disparaging comments about my (lack of) gardening skills.  Hundreds of times, when my Nice Neighbor Lady (NNL) and I walked our dogs past her house, I stood back silently while those two had a friendly chat or MNL gifted her a plant from her garden. All I ever got was half-nod and a grunt. MNL became a constant source of bemusement between NNL and me.

But then things changed. The thaw began with Dog Four and was helped along by the chickens. MNL and I began to have very short talks about various plants and I sometimes saw her bringing kitchen scraps to our goats. About two weeks ago, on my dog walk, I heard someone calling my name. I turned around and it was her. Up to that point, I wasn’t aware that she even knew my name.

I retraced my steps back to her. She wanted to know if it was true that the noise her grandson made when he rode his moped around the cornfields bothered . . . . . . my husband. I assured her that he had never complained. She replied, “That’s what I thought.” Then she offered me a plant from her garden. A week later she complemented my new flowerbed. On my next dog walk with NNL, she got the icy grunt and I got the friendly hello.

“I guess I’M her favorite now!” I crowed as we walked on.

 

I have no illusions that this new friendship will endure. One escaped goat munching on her flowers would surely be enough to end it. And then there is my well established fear of little old white-haired ladies, especially those with scowly faces.

I checked the official list of phobias to see if I could find my particular condition, but the closest things I found were a general fear of women and the fear of growing old. This made me realize something. Maybe it wasn’t the scowling little old ladies I feared; maybe what I really feared was becoming one of them myself. Which brings me back full circle to my giraffe.

Crocheting stuffed animals is something grandmas do!

In fact, my own grandma must have been almost exactly my age now when she made the Gingerbread Man. I did the math.  And in the ensuing years she proceeded to shrink as her hair turned white.

But then again . . . I came to think of her as one of the most beautiful people I knew – ever more so the older she got. She was still able to live on her own at the age of 90. She loved to dance. And she never scowled.

 

Fifty-five

I reached 55 today. It’s a good time to ease off life’s gas pedal and switch on the cruise control.

 

According to Merriam-Webster, today I also reached the status of “senior citizen” (synonyms: ancient, elder, geriatric, golden-ager, oldster, old-timer, senior). At least that’s the definition “for English language learners”. When I think of my very young students, it is probably true. My own Grade School teachers were a lot younger than I am now, but to me back then, they were all like Grandma. Sigh.

 

So today was also an especially good day to resurrect the vinyl with my new excellent birthday present/toy! For a few hours this afternoon I soaked in the sounds of my two-six-pack basement parties during high school, my college dorm rooms, my very first apartment . . .  In the vernacular of my newly rediscovered inner 15 year old, I was really rowdy and had a blast!