You Know You're Fifty When...

#7 Like writing down the parking garage its self........big malls!!!!!

8.trying to remember if its ,saturday or sunday! oh!,CBS sunday morning with charles osgood. must be...........

gone fishin all day, with a boat load of fish........and forgeting where the freankin frackin boat ramp is !!(done that last weekend).

Going into my office or my shop, or anywhere for that matter, and forgetting WHY! your there(keys, pen, whatever!).

I "find" my hair in the shower drain!!

I know exactly what you mean. It migrates from your head down to the rest if your body.

Mick, I love your response. Part of what gave me the idea for TBD was seeing a speaker hold up a measuring tape to an audience of people our age. He asked that if an inch is a year, what is our expectancy? (Most said around 85.) When you look at the tape, and see where you are on that continuum, it can be inspiring or anxiety-provoking, or both at the same time. I am with you.

Here's one

The Doctor sends you

for some tests and you pray to god

that it is just a gall bladder thing.

Yes! so true. I also find it takes longer to get ready for bed, all the routines, potions and products to apply!

once you own a glue gun, sticking flowers on a piece of driftwood can't be far behind

I never thought of that, Adair!

But think of how much fun it will be to gather the driftwood to glue the flowers onto!

I like glue guns, too, Carol!!

You know you're 50 when ... you begin to finish the statement and the next thing you know you're talking about flowers and driftwood. :-)

chain saw can be fun! If you need to heat your house!

I don't get a "glue gun" either?

I want a glue gun! It comes in handy when you do a dumb thing like accidentally ramming your left-side car mirror against a metal thingie when you're punching in security code numbers and the whole darned mirror breaks off -- that actually happened to me last weekend, and if it wasn't for my friend's husband's glue gun, I'd have been up the creek and without the left-hand mirror!

does that count as something that happens when you turn 50?

re the class reunion, you wonder who all those old people are....

You are invited...

There are 83 days before I turn 50 so I feel like I'm almost a part of this discussion. If you'd like to share your half-century insights into politics...email me and I'll invite you into my new group. Here is the opening slavo for the group...

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Are you a Heffalump or Wozzle?

Regardless of your political moniker I'll bet you find these finite boxes others try to place us in feel too confining and entirely incomplete. Akin to the 12 zodiac signs, The name "Scorpio" falls woefully short as an adequate description even if you toss in an ascending sign.

These limiting labels are by nature a disservice to any useful dialog and serve to tie each of us to all the things a certain box entails. We then struggle to be disassociated with some of our boxes contents we struggle like a polar bear in a poorly tailored suit. If your like me even the parts of the box that appeal to you come with incomplete descriptions articulated by woefully inadequate representatives.

So, the first assignment to you as a new member of this newly formed group comes as a friendly request from your "oh so humble" administrator.

In this age of cloning, take a moment to describe yourself in poetically waxing terms, animal terms or any combination there of. Feel free to discard the limits of the approximate 48,000 phyla of the animal realm. Toss in colors, imaginative parts of seemingly unrelated mammals even go mythological if need be.

In short, describe to the group your political species in terms a bit broader (and hopefully more humorously) than the moronic and confining bifurcation of Donkey or Elephant.

Here's an example;

A Republican by birth (meaning my mother and father were Democrats), I broke away from the crowd in a very tangible sense. In 1960 during the Kennedy/Nixon campaign, then NY Governor Nelson Rockefeller came to my little old home town of Dover, Delaware. There amongst the throng of supporters were my mother and father (wearing Kennedy buttons) and me their 3 year old child. I got away from my mother just long enough to toddled up the steps of the dias where "Rocky" was all too eager to pick up a suspender clad tot for the proverbial "baby kiss". Unfortunately for my parents the next day their child appeared with Rocky on the front page of the Delaware State News. I'm sure it was a tough thing to explain in the "Kennedy for President" campaign office and Colt Lanes bowling alley bar on that faithful day.

In 1976 I was finally old enough to vote. Ronald Reagan was running against Gerald Ford for the GOP nomination (ironically Rocky was the unelected VP). My first vote?...a write-in vote for Ronald Reagan. In the GOP primary Reagan had been barely defeated by Ford who was then trounced by Jimmy Carter.

That said, I am one part GOP, with a Teddy Roosevelt slant, hence a bit more than miffed with the current White House resident. One part Southern Democrat (after all Delaware lies on the Mason-Dixon line). In fact the books I've read show the line coming to Delaware and stopping. There were gray states and blue states but in my history book in Dover Middle School Delaware was shaded light purple. That probably is the reason I am a long suffering lifelong Minnesota Viking fan :(

You see Delaware never left the union but weren't exactly antislavery (lots of agricultural interest in Southern Delaware),

Then add one part New England "don't tread on me". The end result is a sort of Libertarianism tempered by a pragmatic 21st century view. My tequilla/gin/vodka/single-malt Bourbon enhanced brain has been formed by 32 years of experience in this fluid and ever changing dog-eat-dog business world.

So, I'm a red, white and blue Elephant wearing P-and-L rhinestone laden ballet shoes...always trying to gracefully carry my enormous girth. This "ELE-RINA" remembers a time when conservative meant lesser government, a fair but laisse-faire business landscape and staying out of others peoples personal business.

How about you?

You know you are 50 something when someone asks you if you were alive when JFK was shot.........

Or if you were alive when the 1st man walked on the moon.................

Or if you were alive when the 1st Ford Mustangs came off the assembly line................