birthday

Birthday blogging

by

Today is my 41st birthday. After turning 40 last year, it’ll be a long time before I have another big birthday to celebrate.

I’m once again lucky that my birthday has fallen over a bank holiday weekend. We’re off to Beamish again; as we went there last July, we have annual passes with a couple of months left to run. It also gives us an opportunity to visit the areas that we missed last time – namely the 1940s and 1950s farms, and the funfair. Our visit also coincides with the Festival of Transport, so we’ll be able to travel on the short steam railway which wasn’t open last year.

We’ll be staying overnight nearby, as it’s a two hour drive each way.

Oh blimey I’m 40 now

by
An AI-generated image of a three-tier 40th birthday cake

Today I turn 40 years old. Yes, I’m surprised as you are, but I suppose that’s how the passage of time works.

I suppose as I enter what is unavoidably middle age, I should dispense some words of wisdom. So, here are a few bullet points:

  • As you get older, it gets easier to just be yourself. I don’t feel like I need to pretend to like things, or act differently, just to seek the approval of others any more. It can be hard to be your authentic self when you’re younger, and you need to build your friend group. But it’s quite liberating when you eventually realise that your true friends like you for who you are, and you can just be you.
  • Being jealous of the achievements of others is just a waste of energy. Be happy with what you have. There will always be younger people who are better than you or are more successful, and that’s okay.
  • True love is unconditional love.
  • Don’t assume everyone else has it together just because of their social media persona. We all have our struggles, and not all of us make them public.

Right, that’s the sanctimonious stuff out of the way.

As for how I’m celebrating my 40 years on this earth: I’m currently in the West Midlands with my household. Quite what I’m doing will depend on the weather (I’m writing this a week ago) but it’ll also include a long drive home in the evening. Tomorrow is a meal out with friends, and there’s a family meal on Bank Holiday Monday. Whilst this isn’t as fancy as when we went to Dublin for my 30th, it’ll (hopefully) be a nice family weekend.

It’s nice that my birthday often falls on a long weekend. Although I did have a GCSE exam on my 16th birthday in 2000, which wasn’t so nice. Indeed, up until 2006 I often had exams around my birthday and so celebrations were rather muted.

If you want to see what I wrote on my birthday in previous years, I did a nice summary when I turned 32.

Thirty-two

by

So today’s my birthday. I’m 32, which isn’t a particularly notable age, other than the realisation that my GCSE exams were half a lifetime ago. So rather than ramble on about how I’m feeling old, I thought I’d look back at what I’ve written on my birthday in previous years:

I’m actually surprised that several years went by where I didn’t think to write anything on my birthday. That may have something to do with not having the ability to schedule blog posts in advance back in ye olden days. 2005 was a particular surprise, as back then I often posted new entries multiple times a day – this was in the days before Twitter and the like.

As for 2017? Well, I have a whole year to think of something to write, I suppose.

We’re not doing much for my birthday – I’m at work as normal today (and have a two hour afternoon meeting!) but we’ll probably go out for dinner tonight.

May 25th

by
Hornbill

One thing Wikipedia is good for is finding out what happens on a particular day in history. For example, on May 25th:

It’s also International Missing Children’s Day, Africa Day, Geek Pride Day, National Tap Dance Day and Towel Day.

And famous birthdays include Jonny Wilkinson, Cillian Murphy, Demetri Martin, Princess Laurentien of the Netherlands, Mike Myers, Anthea Turner, Julian Clary, Paul Weller, Alastair Campbell, Eve Ensler, Catherine G. Wolf and Ian McKellen.

Plus, a not-so-famous birthday: mine.

The big Three Oh

by
30 today

Today’s the day that I leave my twenties and become a thirty-something. One of a few ‘big’ birthdays that I’ll have in my lifetime.

Christine’s present to me was the trip to Dublin, and my parents bought me an iPad Mini to replace my ailing iPad. Plus a few little somethings from other friends and family.

I’ve had a couple of meals out to celebrate already but today will be mostly spent at home with Christine. Partly so that I can play with my new iPad (my precious…) but also because we need a bit of a rest. And the weather’s pretty awful, but then it is a bank holiday weekend so this is to be expected I suppose.

Thank you to everyone who has sent me a card or wished me happy birthday on Facebook.

The life of a 29-year-old

by

Saturday was my birthday. Not a big milestone this year, but I now have only 12 months of my twenties left. Having just got married, I didn’t expect to get many presents, but my main gift from my parents were …

The rest of this blog post may have been lost permanently.

Twenty Five

by

Today is my 25th birthday. Hard to think I’ve been alive a quarter of a century, but there you go.
Presents included a new walking rucksack, which is being put to use straight-away as I’m off on a walking holiday in North Wales this afternoon. I’ll therefore be beyond the reach of the internet but may be using good old SMS to update Facebook and Twitter.

See you on Friday.

Things

by

Thanks for all of the birthday wishes over the past couple of days – I had quite a good birthday but most of my presents aren’t coming until tomorrow. Not entirely sure what I’m getting but I think they will mostly be vouchers for driving lessons.

I’m having a brief experiment with Trackback. A while ago I removed the block of code that allows other weblogs to discover the trackback URL and post to it, in an effort to reduce trackback spam. This turned out to be very successful, making the trackback problem almost non-existent, however since then I’ve been getting almost no trackbacks at all which makes the feature almost useless. So I’ve re-added it, but now I’ll only be opening trackback on a handful of entries (with it off by default). I’ll see if I start getting more pings this way, or if the spam problem becomes intolerable again.

I’m looking at alternatives to trackback, such as getting data from Technorati and displaying a list of blogs that link to that entry, but I’d like to give trackback another chance before I give up on it.