You know you're getting old when....

On Sunday, as T and I were cleaning our house, I was hit with a huge sense of "Oh shit."  It was somewhere around the point where we were almost done cleaning the bathrooms, and I got this huge feeling of accomplishment and, dare I say, excitement about having a clean house.  "What happened to me?" I asked T.  I used to be that girl who would be able to out-drink her male companions and dance on bars.  I used to go weeks on end without cleaning and not really care.  Hell, I used to never be at my apartment.  Here I am, enjoying cleaning?  On a weekend?  Really? 


You know you're getting old when you purchase a Swiffer Wet Jet at Sam's Club and say to your husband "this is totally going to revolutionize the way I clean our floors!"  And get giddy when you finally get to try out the product and use any excuse possible to use it nightly. 


You are old when purchasing items in bulk excites you. 


You are getting old when all you want to do on a weekend evening is going to bed at nine because the idea of sleep is what excites you.  (Actually, this could mean you're old OR you're a parent.  Or both.)


Or you get excited about using a food processor for the first time to make your own baby food.


You're old when, in doing my grant reporting, looking at dates of birth for children in these cases, it always amazes me at the year where a "child" is no longer a child legally.  And I think about how old I was at that point in time and what I was doing. 


You're old when you can't drink anything caffeinated past noon because you'll never fall asleep that night. 


Or when you're talking to someone about the Olympics when you were a kid, and you find yourself saying something like "oh, I loved that skater from East Germany."  And remember a time when there was an East and West Germany. 


Or when you only listen to the 80s and 90s station on XM because, to you, all of the new pop music sounds exactly the same. Or it's some cookie-cutter teen from Disney.


Or when you're walking with your husband at a tour of the Budweiser brewery, and the tour guide points out a building that was constructed in 1982 and some punk next to you points at it and tells his friend, "wow, 1982?  That's like 30 years old.  That's old."  (And yes, I wanted to punch him.  Hard, too.)


Or when your nephew, who was born when you were 15 years old, is learning to drive.  And you remember him "driving" around his toy train when he was just two years old. 


Or when you're writing a post about how old you are....


Either way, these days, I'm feel a little bit older.   Is it 4:00 p.m. yet?  Time for the early bird special?