Tomorrow is my thirtieth birthday. Funny, I don't feel any different.

Well, that's not really true. Changes just come upon you so gradually that you don't really notice them until you hit a milestone and look back and go, "hey, what the crap just happened?"

Turning 20 was a much bigger deal to me than this. I don't know why. I was almost halfway through college then, had no prospect of ever having a girlfriend, much less a wife and children. I still lived at home with my parents, when I wasn't off at school, and my life really wasn't all that different from when I turned 18, which really was a much bigger occasion. You know, old enough to vote, about to graduate from high school, etc.

My life has changed much, much more dramatically in my third decade on this planet than it did during my first or second. I completed my college degree, landed my first real job, got married, had two children, got laid off of work twice and nearly a third time, and finally pulled up stakes and moved my family over 500 miles away from the town I was born in and always called home.

So tomorrow I'll turn thirty, and I'm thinking, "what's the big deal?" All the big important stuff already happened.

And I'm also wondering what my world will look like in another ten years.