I turned 50 last week, and I’m perfectly okay with that. It would probably make a better journal entry if I were not okay and had something to rant or whine about. Sure, I wasn’t delighted to see the invitation to join AARP show up in my mailbox earlier this month, but that was mostly because I can’t actually retire yet. I also wasn’t delighted to be sick on my birthday; this particular set of cold germs knocked me back so much that I actually took two days off work, which is something I really hesitate to do because we have no sick days here at Purple Systems and do have a weekly e-mail reporting everyone’s hours to the whole department. I did login to my work computer both days, but I didn’t go in to the office, didn’t put on clothes (shoes? I don’t need shoes; I’ve got slippers), and just answered a few e-mails and did my afternoon system performance monitoring shifts. By the weekend, I was feeling well enough that Mr. Karen and I went out to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day (at a Thai restaurant—there were some people in there wearing green striped Dr. Seuss hats, so it was festive enough) and had cake and ice cream and presents at home. Mr. Karen is good at gift shopping, so I wasn’t surprised that I liked the things he got (only one of which I’d mentioned I wanted—most of them were things I’d never seen before but surely would have been tempted by if I had). He added an extra touch for this milestone birthday and arranged the gifts into groups to represent each decade I’ve been around, complete with wrapping them in paper with increasingly grown up motifs. I don’t know that I can pick a favorite, but the baby sock monkey for my first decade and the Kindle Touch for my fifth were certainly standouts. So now I’m 50. It’s a nice number.