Blogging on the Powwow

My 40th birthday turned out to be great. I planned what I hoped would be a wonderful day for myself and indeed, it was! When I was 29 and about to turn 30, I attended a conference in San Diego. I spotted a colleague, who I had only briefly met back at the research center at UNH, at one of the conference sessions. I wasn't as practiced at making friends back then, but I pushed through whatever hesitation I had about approaching this colleague and was greatly rewarded! I discovered that Wendy and I had so much in common: we loved rural areas, mountain hiking, similar foods, exercise, and were both partnered with men much older than ourselves.  Wendy and I had both, independently, planned to leave San Diego on the same day at similar times; in fact, we shared a taxi to the airport very early on what was my 30th birthday. Wendy and I have remained good friends, hiking together in the White Mountains, sharing marathon strategies, and having dinners together with our husbands. Thus, it s...

I am a woman of routine. I eat the same thing for breakfast every day, 7 days a week: banana, peanut butter, and OJ. I have no interest and no desire to drift from this routine. In my third and fourth years of college, I had the same thing for dinner every night: pasta, red sauce, broccoli, and skimmed milk. All of my friends and colleagues from UNH can order for me when we go out to eat: grilled chicken salad, no croutons, balsamic vinegar, and some sort of starch -- usually French fries. When I eat at a restaurant, I order this same meal about 95% of the time. Routine - I really like routines. Most of my readers know of my commitment to running, but few know of my obsession to run 5 days a week, every week, regardless of schedule, fatigue, and plain ol' common sense. Beds without humans in them need to be made; an unmade bed haunts me and disrupts my other activities until I attend to it. I never leave my office for the day, without attending to any loose papers on my desk. They ...