What's with age

So what's with getting older?  There's the physical aspects that remind you more often that it's happening but there's also the psychological side to it.  We change so gradually over time that it's hard to see the difference.  Every so often I run into an old colleague or someone I haven't seen in a while and they sure do notice the difference.  I like getting older; every year it seems that i'm more comfortable with my life and what i'm doing.  Lately i feel like maybe i'm getting too comfortable with it to the point where i'm not paying any attention to making new goals for myself.  I'm just becoming more content and happy with life in general.  It probably helps that I'm quite happily married and have an interesting and stable job at the moment as well.  Living in America and working in the tech industry sure does make the time fly by though.  It's hard to take that time out to look at the outside.  Lately I often find myself looking at a nice sunset, viewing a strange cloud or just noticing that it's a clear sky way more often.  I'm not sure what it means but it is a large moment in my mind.  Something is telling me that this has meaning and it's important.  Why?  I don't know.

I think part of it is my deep conscious giving me a wake up call to pay attention to the world as it goes by me.

Also; lately, everyone seems to be turning either 30 or turning 40 around me; i'm turning 40... wow.  Maybe when you do you notice other peoples age a bit more often.  Or it might just be that my boss sends out birthday notices at work almost every other day too.  Whatever it might be, it sure does appear that people are getting older more often around me than they used to.

What if we didn't even have birthdays or have any idea on how old we were.  Would we pay anywhere as much attention to it if we didn't keep track of a number?  What could we say about our age then?  Things like.. i've lived about half my life maybe or i'm pretty much all grown up now might be a bit more common.  We place maturity and things to numbers.. I don't think that makes a whole lot of sense though because so many people age differently.  Our age really applies to our conciousness; not our physical age.  When it comes down to it; we are all the age we feel... not the age we are.

The life rut

I've been getting into quite the rut lately.  I find that my schedule is pretty full with work and kids; but I don't think there's anyone in the world that doesn't think this so there's nothing unique about my busy life.  I liked a post from a friend of mine the other day.  You have to focus on a few important things that you care about in life and allow yourself dedicated time for just those things; cut out the million tiny things and it'll help focus you on some goals.

I'm really dragging to get motivated to do anything these last 6 months.  I guess I'm putting a lot of energy into my new job still and getting the webkit business off the ground there.  At the end of the day I'm pretty zoned out and just watching a lot of TV to still spend some time with my wife. 

Kids soccer started up again and so weekends soon will be taken up with soccer.  They need it but I lose even more time to focus on anything for myself when they play soccer every weekend.  This year is likely to be even more busy as both my daughters are playing now.

I have a few projects that I want to get started on; I'd like to do some upgrades on the house including painting and stuff but my wife and I still have a lot of work to come to the point where we both like things.  We've finally compromised on some colors for painting, but not really, I get one wall the color i like and she is doing her own.  Is that a compromise?

I'd like to work on some HTML5 web apps too and have a few fun projects in mind.  Carving out that time do it though seems to be pretty elusive still.  I probably need to set aside a few days and times in the week and really schedule it in.

Then there's my exercise routine.. The usual thing that we all have, i haven't exercised much at all for quite a while; i have a great YMCA membership but haven't used it very much.  It's sort of adhoc so this needs to be set in stone.  I have at least 3 days a week that I could stick with going but I need to cut down on the vino in the evenings to get up early.  I think this coupled with some of my friends training for marathons and continually blogging there 5 mile runs on facebook it's a total discouragement.  It doesn't really sound to me like your doing something for yourself if you have to continually tell the world about how great you are and the last mountain you climbed.  Maybe if it's not your regular routine I don't mind hearing it; but over and over every day is just a tad pompous.

All this rut with life is also killing my relationship with my wife.  We need to try and do some out of the ordinary things.  I think i just have to take some time each week and try and plan something different that we can do away from the ordinary; no effort in means nothing out so I need to put some effort into it.

Ski trip to Yakima

So what started off with a good idea to go off with the my Mum and Nephew (Ryan) to some skiing turned out with the usual headaches having the kids with me.

We had a great drive out to Yakima with some awesome scenery; snow dusting all over the mountains and a bunch of alpine lakes that were iced over; truly magestic to see.

I've learnt it's not such a good idea going somewhere with my kids though if I don't have activities planned. We arrived after lunch, went and had lunch, they played in the pool for a while but being done for the day around 5pm gave them a little too much time on their hands and they truly don't have any ability of finding things to do (other than watching TV all the time); or at least trying to find things to do that don't involve annoying everyone around them and each other. I sometimes wonder if everyone with kids has to deal with this type of problem or is it particular to my kids.

On top of this Ness had to work so she isn't with me to enjoy the fun times (and help out with the bad :-)... Having her working weekends is rough.

We found that the roads from Yakima through to Crystal are closed through winter so we can't make a trip from here to Crystal (the most direct route is almost 4 hrs drive apparently). So tomorrow we are going to try out White Pass; which looks like a smaller family type of mountain with only a couple of chairs. Hopefully the kids will be better behaved tomorrow; which i'm pretty sure they will as they usually are when they are busy with stuff to do.

I'm guessing they have a bit of attention defecit disorder (says me as they yell at each other right now to go to sleep). Too much candy and no sleep again.

The holidays

So after 5 days off from work it's back to work already.. 5 days really isn't long enough to unwind in my opinion. It takes 3 just to feel like you don't have the weight of work on your shoulders. For these 5 days too I had my Mum and my mother-in-law here along with looking after my two girls most of the time so I didn't really get a whole lot of downtime. I feel like I could still sleep for another couple of days just to unwind. But, it's life that I'm part of this rat-race and have to go back to work on Monday.

I just got a call today too that another one of the guys on my team has quit. So now I'll be pushed even harder to try and make our delivery dates. My other coworker also doesn't look like he's excited to take on the job full time past his current contract so I'll be looking for more people. The work is definitely very challenging; but it's also very rewarding and interesting. It takes the right kind of person I guess since we've had two people quit in just the last month to go to other work and one a couple months before that.

I've got to get back to the gym... the holidays and my friend being close haven't helped with my weight; we need to lose this extra inches I've added to my tummy, and soon!