Since I'm 42 now, I can now officially say it is not the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Basically it was a lovely day where I got to eat a wonderful crab cake lunch outside with my family and had a cake I did not bake myself for a change. 

I stayed up last night until 3:30am doing the coding homework for the second week of class and I can definitively say that I learn better in a physical setting where I would have a TA check my code than in a virtual one where you plug it into a system that will give errors but no suggestions. BASIC came more naturally to me than Python since at least you could include goto loops. Perhaps there's an equivalent in Python but it really seems to be a linear code and we've covered while and for loops but it doesn't have the same flexibility.

Or it could just be that I'm really new at this and I may figure it out in the coming lectures. It's been so long since I learned anything truly from scratch that it's hard to remember just how long it takes to put the pieces together. I trained a lot of bankers and colleagues at my last job but it was much easier being the teacher, the student definitely has the harder role.

More than anything though, this birthday has brought home how much I miss my time at Cornell, and how much I miss living in NYC. But I think I'm making progress at accepting those things and times are gone. I still have no idea what life is going forward so I'm continuing to wait and watch.