Trigentennial

Thirty. Three-zero. Yes, today is the trigentennial anniversary of my birth, which means I'm now 30 years old.  Three whole decades.  It's yet another big number to wrap my head around, though in this case, I've had a few years' worth of mental preparation.

After years of considering myself to be in my "mid"-twenties, I realized shortly after turning 28 that that wasn't really going to work anymore.  That one came as a bit of a shock, but made me determined not to let 30 sneak up on me.  Like I said earlier in the week about this year itself, it's something about those eights that strikes me as inherently anticipatory.  Must be why, despite having been born in 1988, I'm more of a "nineties" kid.  ;)

Anyway, I celebrated midnight quietly at home before bed, then — because my job is in IT — woke up reading about the recently-disclosed Meltdown and Spectre side-channel attack vulnerabilities with wide-reaching implications for nearly every machine in production that contains an Intel chip, before getting ready to head into work and coming to an unfortunate realization that one of Ed and Erin's cats had probably urinated on both my coat and my scarf when I'd visited last night.  So I switched to an old coat with a broken zipper, and braced for the frigid 10 °F (–12 °C) weather.

Despite the apparent panic in the broader industry, I had a calm but productive day at work, one of just eight between the holidays and the start of spring classes at Carnegie Mellon, so I've got to make them all count.  Looped back home afterwards, picked up the soiled coat, and brought it back to my friends' place where they graciously made quick work of "going through the process" to properly clean everything because this happens frequently enough that they thankfully have a process down solid.  Then a mellow dinner with them at Fuel and Fuddle.

Nothing wild and crazy today, nor last night, either, since it's been so cold.  It's 6 °F (–14 °C) now and getting down to 0 °F (–18 °C) by morning, and even a bit colder tomorrow night.  The Post-Gazette says it's the coldest stretch of weather in Pittsburgh since 1989.  I don't know by what metric, because I definitely remember colder days, but certainly it's been cold for a long while.

But I guess I've officially earned my tricenarian card.  And I can take out my now-expired vicenarian card which was issued ten years ago and put it next to my old denarian card which I'm sure I was given at some point.

Random tangent: I definitely taught myself all those words just after midnight today. And apparently rarely-used words like those have quite a few spelling variants.