I have been realizing how much my computer skills have slipped out of step with the ongoing march of technology and I decided to do something about it. I signed up at the local college for a course in Web Development. I have no designs on going back into the workforce and building a new career, but I don’t like feeling lost when I used to be confident in my ability to keep up.
Sharing a class with 19-year-olds is quite an eye-opening experience. It dawned on me that I am three times their age and the ancient history of web computing in the first chapter of the textbook sounds like yesterday to me. Wow. I do have an advantage over most of them in that, to me, it is not all a crazy alphabet soup of acronyms and the actual programming assignments, such as coding HTML, come to me quite naturally. I see things as interesting new ways to solve problems that I have run into before so I have a context onto which I can pin my brain.
That said, I am gaining some respect for the depth of knowledge required to put together a web site from scratch. WordPress does so much for you that you have to know almost nothing. I got started on this in order to be able to provide technical support for my church’s new website but I am discovering that the complex tasks of programming in the background are beyond the scope of the class I am taking. At least I will have conquered the first step by Christmas, so I can try to learn the rest on my own as my new year’s resolution.
The down side of this all is that much of my free time is now tied up with studying, homework, and rushing off to classes. I caught up on reading the blogs I follow today and discovered I was almost two weeks behind. I kind of liked my relaxed retirement schedule and this intrusion is making it look all the more precious.
Bluestem Pond 
I’m impressed that you’re joining those 19 year-olds and hope that you learn quickly so you can return to your retirement schedule. But only if you want to. Who knows. After you’re venture into the land of young’uns, you may sign up for another course. Enjoy.
Thanks. Freedom is quite a draw, though.
I’m impressed with your industriousness. Good for you. Did you code back in the day? (“Back in the day” sounds like it was 100 years ago, but nowadays, it could be last year.)
Yep, I started out as a programmer, and evolved in the IT world from there. I always thought writing and debugging code was the most fun of all.