🛠 Still Holding Together with Sarcasm and Orthopedic Inserts

It's my birthday and I'll limp if I want to

Happy 45th birthday to me. I painted myself a frog to celebrate.

I’m not saying I’m aging poorly, but yesterday I sprained my ankle trying to beat a 13-year-old to a soccer ball, and today I can hear my tendons and ligaments composing a strongly worded letter to the manager of Time.

Yesterday, I was 44. It was a beautiful October day. The sun was shining. The air smelled like pumpkin spice and unpaid medical bills (there’s always one). I was out on the field, chasing down a misplaced pass during practice with my son’s soccer team, which, for the record, is made up of teenagers who bounce when they fall and metabolize Takis as a recovery snack.

Meanwhile, I run like a heroic war horse in slow motion: majestic, full of determination, and destined to pull something that attaches to a hamstring.

I didn’t get the ball. I got a sprained ankle, a bruised ego, and a deeply philosophical reminder from my left psoas that it “didn’t sign up for this.”

Look at how I once looked when I played soccer in my 30s. Sigh.

🎯 The skillset nobody understands

Today, I am 45.

I spent part of my special day hunched over a keyboard, publishing a tutorial on how to force a VPN client to disconnect when it’s idling. It’s basically the IT equivalent of yelling at all the moms in the carpool line: “Hey! No idling! You’re polluting the internet!”

Nothing says birthday joy like aggressively kicking out lazy packets.

When I’m not humiliating myself in front of middle schoolers on Monday nights, I spend my daylight hours creating structured documentation components and publishing using a component content management system with custom CSS overrides and semantic tagging. This is a fancy way of saying I write instructions for complex software in a way that makes grown adults cry slightly less.

If that isn’t a titillating job description, then I’ve got nothing for ya.

And no, my family doesn’t understand what that means.

Let me try putting it another way. I translate engineer into human and pretend that screenshots are a form of empathy. I turn chaos into bullet points, existential dread into numbered lists, and the occasional, “it works on my machine,” into something resembling documentation. I’m basically a diplomat between developers and reality, and I’m armed with a style guide, a VPN, and the creeping awareness that no one will read what I write until they break something.

If I were to say instead that I make spreadsheets (I do dabble in those), people would nod politely. If I say I write step-by-step instructions for installing a product on your Linux operating system, people change the subject and ask if I’ve seen The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.

I have.

🧍The bionic toe and other personal milestones

Listen, friends. Nobody throws you a surprise party for building out over 100 tutorials with partially shared content components. Nobody writes a hit Netflix called The Style Guide Strikes Again.

But this is my calling. This is my craft. And baby, I can throw together a new quick start guide for our image on Microsoft Azure like a caffeinated wizard in a bathrobe.

So, since it’s my birthday, I’m going to celebrate the many blessings that come with another orbit around the sun. Cheers to me, and these additional gifts I have:

• I can type faster than 98% of the population. (Source: me. Also, that one time I beat someone at Mavis Beacon in 1996.)

• I have the driest eyes in Davis County. So dry they make toast look dewy.

• I’m the proud owner of a titanium toe. I’m bionic. If you’ve ever stubbed your toe and thought, “This could be improved with surgery and metal,” I am living your dream.

• I’ve trained my cat to do four tricks: spin, sit, shake, and jump through a hoop. (Five, if you count “pretend not to know me unless I’m holding a Churu.”)

🧘 What I’m actually grateful for

Now, before you think this is just a birthday rant wrapped in sarcasm and orthopedic tape, let me say this:

I’m grateful I sprained my ankle.

It meant I was out on the field.

I got to play the game I love with my son and his teammates, even if they do fog up the window in the back seat of my car with sunscreen and smell like unwashed shin guards.

I got to laugh, run, and be part of something.

Even in my old age, I got to show up, stay human, and limp away from a group of teenagers with just enough dignity to call myself young at heart.

So here’s to another year of fast typing (honestly, I average 120 WPM), cat tricks, titanium-enhanced wisdom, and orthopedic inserts.

Happy birthday to me.
And to my ankle. Icing on the cake.