When your back goes out more than you do.
You fart in the presence of your SO.
AWB said:
sorry, you get only a C-minus. Here’s the right matchup:
Tinky Winky: purple, w/triangle
Dipsy: green, w/straight rod (boy that sounds dirty)
Laa-Laa: yellow, with twisty rod
Po: red, with circle
Back to the OP: I had a friend who used to say that you’ve settled down when you start going to bed the same day you got up.
Live a Lush Life
Da Chef
One word: minivan.
So far we’ve avoided minivans and artificial christmas trees.
You look around your house and hardly anything came from your parent’s basement/the curb. You also have an actual bed with a frame and headboard, instead of just a mattress on the floor.
You save plastic sandwich bags.
Slowly you start thinking like your parents.
One day, out of the blue, looking for your keys, you dump out your overstuffed purse on the sales counter and it hits you…you’ve just turned into your mother and it was in front of witnesses.
You yell at joggers from your car window as you speed by " If you have that much energy at the end of the day, go paint my garage."
(My girlfriends dad use to do this.)
You walk around the house in your underwear and are not even remotely embarrassed if a neighbor stops in unannounced and he/she is really not, shall we say, impressed with the goods.
Your get up and go just got up and went.
Your choices for a beautiful sunny, kid-free day are: lay out and tan or clean the house. If you lay out and tan you will get wrinkles, skin cancer and leave an ugly corpse. If you clean the house, it will only dirty itself causing you to do it again and againn and again until you die and leave a hollow self of your former self and be a pasty white corpse. Instead you opt for Numero Three: eat chocolate while posting like a madperson on the SDMB.
You come to the realization that your parents are pretty intelligent people.
Shirley, we must have lunch. No, maybe not. I’d splort my food out at every other word you’d say. 
Let’s go shopping and dump our purses on the counter. I cannot believe someone else has done that!
When it takes several days to change the oil in every engine in every gas-burning device in your garage.
When you can’t wait to buy your kid a car so you don’t have to haul his teenage ass around anymore.
When you actually wave at the police when they drive by in front of your house.
“What Ho ! Bring on the dancin’ girls !” Chubby
Your 8 year old niece doesn’t know who the Beatles were.
You look at the strippers in a local strip club ad and think how young they look and wonder if the club is hiring kids – when you suddenly realize they aint kids and you’ve not been in a strip club in nearly 20 years!
You find yourself complaining about the local kids music and suddenly realize your folks did the same about your cool tunes to you.
You try to squeeze your 38 inch waist into those 31 inch bell bottoms that used to fit you so nicely in the 70’s and the chicks thought were hot. (They don’t make it up your thighs and you find it hard to believe that you were once that skinny.)
Your favorite Rock and Roll stars have ANOTHER reunion tour and you start realizing that they might want to consider retiring to assisted living or something because they look kinda ridiculous bouncing stiffly around like they used to at 21.
Black lights are coming ‘back’ and you didn’t realize they had ever been ‘out’.
Going to pick up your niece at school, you realize just how ‘little’ and ‘young’ the grade school kids look, when you recall your grade school years and the kids seemed bigger. (You tend to forget you were smaller.)
You take a nostalgic stroll to a playground and lean on the jungle gym and find that you can comfortably prop your arms on the top. You vaguely recall that climbing it as a kid it had seemed about 20 feet tall.
Mark
“Think of it as Evolution in action.”
You have TWO junk drawers.
You never miss a vote that affects your property taxes.
It’s November 13th and you STILL haven’t made plans for New Year’s Eve.
You start to notice things like landscaping and color schemes.
You can’t stay awake through E.R. anymore.
Back in August of this year, I bought new furniture. Honest-to-goodness new stuff, from Art Van. A couch and a loveseat. I decided that grownups should have a couple of nice things. I was beside myself with joy.
And as I type this, there are two very nice guys hanging brand-new siding on my house. I rent this place, so I’m not paying for it, but I’m excited just the same (the inside of my house is nice, but the outside looked pretty bad).
What’s this got to do with settling down? Furniture and siding excite me. Sigh.
'Furniture and siding excite
me. Sigh. ’
Lets not go there.
And I don’t even have that big of a car! ::sigh:: those will be the days…
Sign’s I’ve settled down?
I try to keep my friends from drinking so much.
I haven’t shoplifted in over a year.
I haven’t had the urge to shoplift in nearly a year.
I get mad at my friends who still steal.
I try not to cuss.
I’m respectful to my elders.
I rationalize other’s idiotic driving instead of tailgating them, blaring the horn, then zooming past and giving the finger to a couple nearing their 90th anniversary.
I’m a whole fuckin’ ball of boredom these days, ain’t I?
–Tim
We are the children of the Eighties. We are not the first “lost generation” nor today’s lost generation; in fact, we think we know just where we stand - or are discovering it as we speak.
Homer:sounds like a good trend for you. You don’t want to be settling down in a cell.
You stop worrying about how your hair looks – what there is left of it.
You are shocked to discover one day that your brown hair had gone gray and learn of the delights of ‘Just For Men’ hair dye.
You find you ‘like’ green beans.
A big bag of chocolate kisses lasts you a week.
You can’t party all night and sail on into work the next day just feeling ‘slightly’ tired.
If you manage to get a hangover, if feels like you’re going to die and you wonder how you survived so many as a younger person.
Someone calls you ‘pops’ – and you let him live.
Mark
“Think of it as Evolution in action.”
Mark, I did that a decade before I settled down. I was at work. Guns and Roses came on the radio and I said “What are these kids listening–OH MY GOD, WHAT AM I SAYING???”
I sodded my yard a couple of weeks ago. You have truly settled down when you get excited about your front lawn.
Don’t call me “sir”.