Good morning! Thanks for the birthday greetings!

Hey, all, I took a blog break yesterday — it’s been a long semester so far and I just decided to cut off one thing for a bit. It was…different (that’s Minnesota slang, I’ll let others translate). I’ll ease back in today.

First on the agenda: my birthday was on Friday, and I got inundated with greetings on Twitter and Facebook and all those social media places, and I did not reply to them. Not because I’m a bitter, hateful old man now, but simply because there were so dang many of them that if I tried I would have been sitting there all day typing the same short phrases over and over again. So I will now simply broadcast one mass “THANK YOU VERY MUCH. I HAD A LOVELY TIME. I’D HAVE INVITED YOU TO THE PARTY BUT THE WEATHER WAS TERRIBLE AND I DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH CAKE. SINCERELY, PZ.” Although actually I had tacos, but if I’d told you that you would have been even more annoyed that I didn’t invite you. Sorry. But really, thanks!

For those of you hoping for news from the future, I have to tell you that so far being 61 is awesome. It’s a prime number, you know, and you get all kinds of superpowers on prime birthdays; now I have to wait 6 more years before I get another base power boost. It’s also the sum of two squares, so you get to feel as good as you did when you were 5, 6, 25, and 36, which is nice.

All in all, I highly recommend living until you are at least 61. I encourage all of you young’uns to do so.