Happy Birthday to Me

Enough negativity; yesterday was my birthday!

I turned 35, and this actually seemed like the first big milestone I've hit that actually kinda made me feel old. I'm in a new demographic category now. I talked to my mom on the phone and she said 35 kinda made her feel the same way.

Anyway, I must not be that old, because to celebrate, I drove over the mountains to Malibu (that's one nice thing about living in Woodland Hills) to go to the beach. Just like going to the beach with my mom when I was a little kid, my wife sat on a blanket on the sand to keep an eye on me while I played in the waves. Some pretty strong waves, too... bodysurfing is like wrestling the ocean.

So one thing I'll need to do now that I'm 35 is start using a new color to indicate the new counties I visit. I've got things set up right now to use a different color every five years of age, so anything I first visited between birth and the age of 4 is red, anything first visited between 5 and 9 is magenta, etc.
The problem is that getting new counties is getting harder and harder. Since I finished collecting all the California counties last year, the nearest county I haven't been to is Lander County, Nevada, 460 miles away. It's a lot tougher to rack up counties here in the West, since the counties are so large. To put things in perspective, if I were living in New York City and had visited everything within 460 miles, it would have meant I'd been everywhere as far north as Bangor, Maine, as far west as Cleveland, and as far south as the North Carolina state line. There are about 400 counties within 460 miles of New York vs. about 65 counties within the same radius of Los Angeles.