growing older but not up

We are growing old together with something less than grace, my appliances, my husband and I. Although not necessarily in that order.

And while as a rule I like to ignore this sad fact of life, I was forced to confront it yesterday when an abrupt reminder arrived in the form of a cheerfully insulting 'welcome' letter from AARP. It was a harbinger of doom that I chose to take personally.

"What the hell?" I cried, flinging the temporary identification card away from me as if it were on fire. Turk, seated at the kitchen counter opening his own mail gave me a knowing glance as I raved on. "I am not old enough for AARP! Why would they think I am? Who are these people and why are they saying such terrible things about me?"

"You think that's bad?" he asked, eyeing a pretty cream-colored piece of stationary in front of him. "This is from the Trident Society. They want to incinerate me."

"I don't think they want to incinerate you. I think they want to bury you at sea."

"I don't see that that's any improvement. And it's definitely incinerate. But that's not the point. The point is, why are they in such a hurry to bury me in the first place? Where do they get these lists? My accountant? My doctor? What do they know that I don't know?" He paused. "I'm not dead yet."

"No, honey. Indeed you're not! And I'm not old yet."

And thus it was unanimous. We remain, as always, untouched by time or mortality. We smile, happy in our shared delusion.

Meanwhile, in another room the family Dell is dealing with it's own issues. Running slower and slower of late, it's been creaking and groaning loudly enough to hear the little hamsters that power it chugging along in their rusty cages. Being online is becoming a painful experience, and I'm afraid an intervention may be in order. Pages load like lava flows when they load at all, after which they disappear in a slow fade from top to bottom. Error messages abound, and Windows sends up ominous flares warning that I am dangerously low on virtual memory. If it only knew.

So I am in the process of uninstalling obsolete programs (at least I hope they're obsolete and not, you know, essential...) and deleting ancient files. I am not sure how much good it will do. What I would really like to do, while I'm at it, is to purge all AOL programs from the system, but I'm afraid that doing so would also remove my control over the old AOL blog, which I should but can't bring myself to delete. (I know. I'm just sentimental that way.) But if anyone has any information regarding the issue, I'd love to hear it.

In the meantime, it looks like it may be off to Rehab for my poor geriatric Dell 4500S, which takes me out of the blogging game for a bit. But that's the trouble with interventions; they're always hardest on the family.