TWENTY SIX AND A HALF MARTIAN YEARS AND CHANGE

This whole turning fifty thing is a little weird. It happens on an individual basis but it also happens, when it happens, to lots of the victim's friends. Hardly a surprise, right? Most people in your sixth grade class were your age, most people in your year when you were a freshman were your age and most people you graduated from college with were about your age too. So most of your grammar school, high school and college friends are still about your age. And even those who time and distance have rendered less close than they once were all sort of pop up on the Turning Fifty Horizon just about the same time you do. Funny, how that works.
Well, turning fifty might be a fine time for navel gazing, deep introspection, reflection, and words of great wisdom to be thought up and written down. Unfortunately, there's also the just-another-day aspect to it, and so I still have work to do on my friend's book, editing to do on my book (all these blessed editors to keep happy, don't you know..), laundry to be done, children to be ferried to Sunday School (why is it called Sunday School if it falls on a Wednesday? Please, please don't ask me.) and then later ferried home, dinner to make, dishes to wash, home work to oversee and poof, one's 50th Birthday has whizzed by like so many other of one's first 18,250 days.
On we go.