Happy Birthday to Me...
Actually it was last Monday, when people were celebrating Memorial Day and everyone was buzzing about Branjolina's offspring. I happened to be in California, celebrating a graduation and seeing a nephew off to the army and various family activities. I also got to reconnect to some old friends and acquaintances. It was a good trip but I came back to discover that my car had been towed away and impounded. They pick the one week I'm gone to do some dubious work on the parking lot. I retrieved it at my expense, thank you very much.

If you bothered to count the candles you see here, you would find that there are 48 of them representing the years of my life. Dwight D. Eisenhower was president on candle #1, followed by JFK, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush1, Clinton, and Bush2. You can associate various historical events with those names, and conclude that I saw much of it happen on a TV screen. So much for almost half a century of living.

I suppose the good news is that I don't mind getting older. I didn't like it when I turned 25 -- that sounded old to me, which is of course laughable in retrospect. As it is, the time seems to pass more slowly than it used to. There's plenty of time for towing my car away, for example.