Birthday presents

My birthday is tomorrow, but I’ve already been surprised with a few very nice presents.

First I got to see a no-hitter for the New York Mets.

Then I got to see the 2012 Transit of Venus (online, anyway, it was cloudy here).

I feel privileged to have witnessed both of those, because neither is expected to be seen again during my lifetime.

Then I learn via TBogg that tomorrow will also be a very special day in the blogosphere, with some of the louder bloggers on the far right calling for a day-long blogging strike. Tbogg says, “Seriously, I don’t know what the hell they think they’re doing but it’s hard to see any downside to this, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.” I’ll second that.

Apart from my birthday, this month marks a couple of other big milestones or anniversaries for me.

I started this blog in late June of 2002 (on Blogger, where most of the archives have fallen prey to link-rot). My first post, if I recall correctly, praised the “sentergistic” energy supplements sold by Pat Robertson — the miraculous formula that enables the televangelist to leg-press 2000 pounds.

Ten years later and Robertson is still hawking that stuff — now in a tasty protein shake. And, oddly, I’m still here writing about it.

This month also marks the one-year anniversary of my getting laid off from the newspaper biz. Like far too many others “celebrating” such anniversaries, I really, really didn’t think that a year later I’d still be trying to find my next job.

I started this blog almost 10 years ago because I worked in a cubicle at a job where I had 30 hours of work to cram into a 40-hour week. I wouldn’t have suspected then that something I’d started because I was bored in between assignments at work would become the thing that helped me get by in between jobs.

So, anyway, I’ll probably end up spending a good bit of this month muttering those three numbers under my breath in disbelief — 44 years, 10 years, a whole year …

As far as that first one goes, well, as the pictures here illustrate, 44 is a pretty good number. I’m older than I’ve ever been before, but that beats the alternatives.

By the time Kierkegaard was my age, he’d been dead for two years.

(Yes, I tell some version of that same joke every year. That’s what middle-aged people do — we repeat jokes. And I intend to keep repeating this one until I can tell it about Irving Berlin. I hope you’re all here to read it.)