I got my birthday wish! The Red Sox won the world series, after 86 years of not-winning! Toward the end of the game, the announcers trotted out some stats to assist us in visualizing how long ago that was - women couldn't vote; baseball games weren't even broadcast on the radio. There was no TV.
I started to think - my parents weren't even born. Which is something since they're both in their 80s. Amazing that you have to live to be that old before your team wins.
Also today I mailed off a paper to a journal, after frantically editing it for the last 10 days. Lesson learned: you can't really resuscitate old work. Your ideas are old; your thinking is less sophisticated; your writing style has much improved in the interval. You've learned new stuff you want to add, but it's not a very good match for what you have.
That possibly means that Western Front trenches, Thoreau/Abbey comparisons, and the Eye's I are all headed for the dustbin of history. Lesson's corollary: write up the stuff while it is fresh. It may suck, and you may do better with it in a couple of years, but then again - Dubya may win the election and we may all be annihilated by terrorists. So carpe diem; seize the glory.