OK, more like 99.999% of the time. You see, yesterday I celebrated my 64th lap around the sun. In other words, I’m getting pretty close to becoming an old fart. As I just mentioned, 99.999% of the time I have been blessed with joy. Well OK, I’ve just been blessed, period. That’s not to say that I’ve had absolutely no sorrow or sadness. Don’t know how anyone can go this far on the road of Earth life without some icky stuff. But the blessings are real, the joy is very real, and those icky life things have nowhere near the power over my psyche they once enjoyed.

Life is very good these days. Sure, my wife and I still bicker at times; but those little roller coaster rides are very brief and always end up with us remaining best friends. She even lets me snuggle, and get this: I get to smooch her!! We even have silly conversations that make us both laugh with great bigness:

Me: “Honey, will you please tell the firewood downstairs to bring itself up to the wood stove?? I don’t feel like going in the basement right now. They need to start coming up on their own.”

Her: “Ummm… no… they know you are just going to toss them into the fiery furnace!!”

Me: “Oh! FINE!! They can just stay down in the basement… and I will call them really nasty names and stuff!!”

Her: “Well, who’s gonna be our friends???”

Don’t try to make any sense out of that. It was just an actual silly exchange we had the other day that gave both of us a good belly laugh.

Then today I composed a very silly instant message and sent it to many of my friends via good ol’ copy-and-paste:

I can’t seem to decide on the best type of arm pits to use. Peach? Plum? Avocado?? Any suggestions??

I got several nice replies, all of which gave me wonderful smilings. Hopefully my friends got a smile or two also. I confess I’m not always sure what this aging stuff is supposed to mean really. I feel great, I can do pretty much everything I could do when I was much younger, although sometimes it takes a bit longer and other times it hurts. But when I pass a mirror there’s some old geezer gawking at me like I’m the Hunchback of Notre Dame or something. When that happens, I stop and look the old fart straight in the eye; and say with a threatening sneer, “alright old man, what did you do with the body??”

But of course, it’s just me; a child in old man’s clothing.

I even went for my very first stress test after seeing our new doctor about some chest pain I’ve been plagued with for lots of years. Never have an difficulty while exerting myself; but it’s often given me pause about what might be happening. Our previous doctor heard about it too… but she after carefully checking me over she was convinced that my heart was not going to implode. I saw our new doctor about it very shortly after a friend of ours died suddenly of a heart attack. After an EKG, our new doctor saw an anomaly on one of the waveforms and she thought I’d better get a stress test. I went, I tested, and I figured I must have passed because nobody freaked out or sent me to emergency surgery or anything.

Although I thought I had an inkling, I knew pretty much nothing about the procedure of this test. Turns out the hospital staff isn’t allowed to tell you diddly-squat about the results. You get to wait for a few days. OK, so I got a message from the patient portal thingy that “the first portion of the test was within the normal range.”

That’s nice…

Then I replied to the message and asked, “so the second portion is the imaging?”

“Yes that’s correct,” was the reply.

So then I sent another message asking when the results of the imaging portion would be known. Mind you, this is 4 days after my deductible for the test increased my credit card debt to the tune of $670. Seems like I should be able to get results in a timely matter, right?? Well, the reply I got was, “the results have to be finalized and signed and we will let you know when that is complete.”

I found that to be a rather stress-inducing answer.

Breathe… let it go… breathe… (sheesh!!) Hey, looks like I’m writing so I guess I ain’t dead yet.

Well I must be doing something right, I got a very nice compliment from the Nice Restaurant Lady when our Beautiful Friend treated my Beautiful Girlfriend and me to dinner last night. The Nice (older) (as in older than me) (I think) (OK enough with the parentheses) Restaurant Lady said, “it’s your birthday?? HAPPY BIRTHDAY!! How old are you? No!! Let me guess… 50??”

I told her, “we can be friends!!”

For this week’s video I did a search on the YouTubes for some cartoons about aging, but found out about this lady. She made me laugh…