Tuesday, July 15, 2008

MidLife Crises-- But what age?

I mentioned earlier that I am doing a triathlon in August as a sort of midlife crisis. It comes the week after a milestone birthday. (Yeah I'm not telling you which one :-)

I took a look at my genealogy file today to see if I was really due for a midlife crisis. Thanks to the statistical reports, I can see that in 7 generations of direct ancestors I have lifespan data on 102 individuals. (Thanks Grandma--who was a great genealogist.) Of that 50 are men and 52 are women. The minimum age of death was 25.08 and the maximum age was 103.66 (My Patriarchal Great-Grandfather Joseph Hatten Carpenter). And the average age at death was --drum roll please--68.25. Aaaahhhh!!! I should have had a midlife crisis a while ago!!!

I asked my Mom the other day if she remembered anybody doing anything stupid for a midlife crisis. She said she didn't. Apparently I'm blazing new ground there. This morning, while biking (after swimming) I was looking down at my gears trying figure out why they were squeaking and I ran right into the back of a parked car. Laurie, Kristy and I started laughing so hysterically that we couldn't pedal for a while. So now I have a midlife crisis bruise. I am still laughing about it while I write.

I think I'll shoot for another midlife crisis at where Joseph Hatten Carpenter should have had one. 51.88. I think I'll go for the red convertible sports car that time. Much less painful. Isn't genealogy useful?

1 comment:

Liesl said...

Good luck on the triathalon! We took the kids to the pool the other night and I couldn't even swim from the shallow end to the deep end. I loved the post about your Nama. What a great story!