Monday (yesterday) was the three year anniversary of the day I bought my first house. Okay, you say condo, I say house. It is still mine any way you look at it. Well, mine and the bank's.
It's a good home and I like it here. The very first night I had the keys, I ate Chinese food and slept on the living room floor. The entire place was painted peach except for the 2nd bedroom which was a lovely and very deep and unnatural shade of turquoise. I embraced it's flaws (including the ghetto stove that had a handle held on with electrical tape) because they were my flaws to own and love and fix. (Although, there were a couple of weeks one January where I had to boycott the kitchen altogether because of a nasty garbage disposal incident.)
It has changed a lot since that night and some days I find it dificult to leave here. I live alone again (at last!) except for my two cats - which pretty much puts me about two thirds of the way down the path to becoming that old lady with cats you hear so much about. Sometimes, it is all I can do to force myself out of this nest of solitude.
Today, our national population reached a milestone as well - one much more important and crowded than my little 3 year anniversary. Early this morning (7:46 am by the calculations) the number of people in the United States exceeded the 300 million mark. Though they really can't say exactly who was the 300 millionth customer, calculations also conclude that it was probably a male, probably born somewhere in the Southwest, and believe it or not, probably in Phoenix. Which makes me wonder three things:
1. Did someone think to factor in how many people die every day? Because I had heard that they were basing the time on the fact that a baby is born every 14 minutes or something like that. But if say, someone dies every 7 minutes, wouldn't you need to factor that in? I'm sure they did. Whoever sat around figuring out the exact time obviously had lots of time on their hands and so would have had time to consider all the factors.
2. Roughly how many McDonald's hamburgers does that figure out to per person? Just on average - ignoring the fact that newborns and vegetarians and some really healthy people have never carried their wait in this area. I was just curious.
3. Finally, with the population of the world in general growing to ridiculous proportions, shouldn't we be reworking the phrase "one in a million"? Strictly where it is used as a compliment, you understand. Because now, saying that you are one in a million really just means that there are at least 299 other people exactly like you just in the US alone. It loses a little something doesn't it?
I will leave you with that. Which will probably also leave you wishing that I had left you a little earlier.
p.s. 7:46 am in what time zone do you suppose?
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