My 36th Year

Well, I'm now twice as old as a high schooler. That's pretty old. Feels pretty old any way. I'm quite happy with what I did last year. Among other things, I learned to juggle and play the violin. One mental skill, one physical skill. Neither one of them particularly useful in any meaningful way, but both of them fun.

I need to be better at this.

I've been wondering if that was my mid life crisis. An affirmation that I can still accomplish a task that is usually accomplished by a much younger person. If that's what it is then I'm ok with it, and I think I should continue crisising. What do do this year? About a month ago I started working on doing handstands with the idea that I can eventually work up to a free standing hand stand push-up. Since I can't yet hold a handstand for more than about 5 seconds, that seems like a pretty good road to continue down for the year. What's more useless than a handstand push-up?
I'll tell you what, clocks. Not that clocks aren't useful, but building a clock, that can't be a functional use of time. And I'm not talking about building a cabinet and putting a movement inside. No, I want to build the movement, from scratch, from wood. I'm thinking of starting by asking for a pre-cut kit for Christmas and assembling it to get a feel for what's involved. There's lots of gears and the pendulum and the escapement and a lot of stuff that I've read about, but I think I need to handle to really wrap my mind around it. Then I need to figure out how to actually do the work myself, to cut and shape the gears by hand and assemble it into a working clock. That sounds like a task that I can really immerse myself in.
Stay tuned to watch a very small mid life crisis unfold.