Hitting 40 is beginning to take its toll

Turning 40 is turning out to be harder on your humble editor than it first appeared.
Despite some rather deceitful and sneaky tactics employed by my wife, family, and friends five months ago, the big 4-0 seemed like no big deal. It wasn’t that much different than 39 really or 38 for that matter.

A relative told me that, for him, 40 didn’t matter because it wasn’t until 50 that he really started to feel his age and began to think about life and death, etc. And I recalled my own father telling me that 50 was when he got his AARP card, so I figured old age was another good ten years down the road.

Oh sure, my hair was graying and thinning, but that, one family friend told me, was simply due to the fact that I now have a daughter. (Sorry, Ella.) He said, and his wife confirmed, that he only had a smidgen of gray in his beard when his own daughter was born, but within a couple of years it had gone almost completely white. This seemed to make sense to me, and I accepted it.

So all was well with my soul. But in the last couple of weeks things have changed. After building a new sandbox for my kids, I began to notice a sharp pain in my right knee that had never been there before. There is no obvious reason for it, but it now hurts like crazy when I kneel on it. Could it be age? No, I refused to accept that. I must have injured it or something.

But then on Saturday I began to experience what can only be described as the early onset of senility.

After a late night at the circus, an early morning to make sure the circus site was cleaned up properly, and a long day of yard work, we began to make preparations to enjoy cooking some burgers on the grill. I lit the grill and went inside to the kitchen where I put some tea in the microwave to brew and commenced to making hamburger patties.

Right away I noticed a slight strange odor but dismissed it as something from lunch that must have sloshed onto the microwave tray. But from across the house my wife yelled, “Is something burning?”

“No,” I replied, “I don’t think so.”

“Maybe you better check your grill,” she said.

Okay, so I went and stuck my head out the back door and asked my four-year-old, “Is the grill on fire, son?”

“Yes, it is!” he exclaimed.

Well, of course it wasn’t technically on fire. It was just smoking as barbecue grills typically do. So I went back inside the house, which by now reeked of something terrible. I returned to the kitchen to discover smoke in the microwave. To my great dismay and humiliation I had not put water in with the tea bag. I set it out, confessed my mental lapse to my wife (who laughed about it), and then went back outside to put the burgers on the grill.

I came back in just a minute or two later to find the house really stinking now, and Ashlee asking, “Are you sure that wasn’t on fire?”

Well, pretty sure. But I proceeded back to the kitchen to find it smoking up a storm, and then picked up the tea bag to discover a nice orange glow in the middle of it.
“Oh, crap!” I said as I tossed the malodorous tea bag out the front door, raised the
windows, and turned on the vent fan.

By then we both had massive headaches, the wife was nauseated, and enjoying burgers on the grill was a bust. It took about three or four hours before the house was tolerable again.

Later that night, as I was getting ready for bed, I suddenly realized I couldn’t remember whether I had taken my allergy medication just moments before. I found myself actually counting the pills in the bottle and thought, “My Lord, I’m going downhill fast.”

Three days later, the fate of the microwave is still up in the air. It was probably 30 minutes after the initial accident when I realized that smell was still wafting out of that beautiful, nearly new appliance. It smelled worse than any nasty ashtray ever thought about smelling. After a night on the front porch, it seemed fine. But five seconds of running and it was stinking up the kitchen again Sunday morning.

Internet solutions of nuking baking soda in water and lemons in water have helped somewhat, but the scent still lingers. A vinegar solution is now apparently our only hope, but we haven’t tried it yet. I’m giving it another night on the porch before we go that route.

In the meantime, we do have a backup. Mom’s old Amana RadarRange one of our many treasures in the basement. The thing is too heavy to carry to the kitchen, so I trudge up and down the stairs whenever we really need something warmed up quickly.
Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be helping my knee any.