A couple of weekends ago, our friend Tricia came over with her three kids to meet Belén for the first time, introduce us to her son who is about the same age, Cole, and also to get some help with their rafting company’s website.  The site had gone down unexpectedly and Andy has typically been the website IT/creator in exchange for a few really awesome raft trips we have been on in the past both on the Snake River in Hells Canyon and the Lower Main of the Salmon.

Tricia’s asked her oldest daughter, Gracie, who I believe is in second grade, if she remembered me.  Tricia said, “‘you know, she was on the raft trip we all went on last year.”

Gracie’s reply was one of genuine honestly while she sort of ducked her head while she was being shy.  She said, “Ya mom, but she looked younger back then.”

Tricia and I both laughed, but I also thought to myself that Gracie was right.  It is actually something I had been thinking about before she even brought it up.  I am looking older and I don’t particularly like it.  It is not the worse thing in the world, but I would prefer to save my young, vibrant self as long as possible.

Which leads me to my first question, do any of you have any good face/eye cream recommendations that you would swear by?  I have tried the following two creams which I like, but I am still seeing those lines, especially around my eyes.

Both of these products are spendy and while they are very hydrating, I just want to poll you all and see if you have any better tried-and-true recommendations.

And in all honesty, I am okay with aging…it is part of a natural process.  I will try and avoid it with creams if possible though.

Besides, in my mind, age is a state of mind…which brings me to my next topic.

So I feel like someone who is fairly versed in technology and “new school” when it comes to ways of doing business.  My sister and I have had endless conversations about how certain organizations that we are apart of (Rotary, the construction industry, etc.) are way behind the times with many things.  Many things are still very manual, in person, etc.  Luckily a few progressive people are working to change this and it is a breeze of fresh air (larger than a breath).  Change is slow and we understand that as long as progress is being made.

In certain company, I feel like I am bleeding edge.  I can explain the cloud and understand at least some of the possibilities it enables.  I get the majority of my news via twitter on my iPhone and oftentimes by the time I read the email version of the New York Times I get in my Inbox each morning, much of it is old news.  My point is that while I fully admit I am a laggard with certain things (can you spell I-T?), for the most part, I feel more like an Early Adopter realizing fully that I am not am not generally an Innovator.

Today I was presented with two different things that made me wonder if I am not only getting wrinkles around my eyes, but am also becoming old school with my perception of reality.

The first situation was at work.  Apparently our CEO is pushing not only our customers but our company to have more and more mobile employees.  You can see from this sales message that some of the benefits of a mobile workforce include:  increased revenue, decreased costs and improved services.

I can honestly see the validity of this statement in many functions, but I see it less so when an entire organization becomes mobile with little to no face to face time.  I feel skeptical that most Research and Development organizations I have worked in at the company could be successful with such a set up.

Don’t get me wrong, I am definitely a proponent of mobility and valuing a person’s results rather than the hours they are in the office.  I also LOVE to work from home and contend that I get more done while doing so.  My concern would be doing it 100% of the time.  And to be fair, this is not something I see happening in the near feature.  I am just a little concerned about the trend.  I guess it is just strange to me to see a shift from encouraging people to work onsite as much as possible to encouraging mobility.  Am I old school?

Second thing.  I heard the following radio piece on NPR while driving home from work today.  The Readers Digest version is that a boarding school in Massachusetts just renovated its library to have only online content and very few printed books.  Here is an except

Carlisle says the library is trading its 20,000-volume collection for a database of millions of digital books. All students can read any of the books, either through the 68 Amazon Kindles cycling around campus or on the laptop that each of the school’s 450 students is provided.

This article made me sad.  Can you imagine going to the library and rather than having that hushed environment smelling of pages of old books, having something that resembles an Internet café?  While it is sad, I do think that the idea has merit.  The last time I went to the library to check out a book was, well, I honestly couldn’t even tell you.  I have been a couple of times to make copies out of a book that I could not access online and I took Belén once for story time, but even these times have been few and far between.

I have not tried a Kindle yet and do not think I will be trying it any time soon.  I am sure they are cool, but for me, nothing beats sitting down with a real live, true, book, those eight minutes I have had in the last six months to read.  And seriously, how do you take a trashy beach novel to the beach on a Kindle?  That just seems entirely way too lame.

But both my CEO and this school are making these changes because this is wave of the future.  Apparently the young folk (I am beginning to think I no longer fit into this category, scary!) have embraced it and so should the collective we.

My friend just sent me a video that is appropriate for this post..

Back my original question, put in classic GMAT format.

Am I:

a. old?

b. old school?

c. both a and b?

d. neither a nor b?

I will leave that for you to decide since it is probably highly relative to who you compare me to.

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