Technolandy

Day 72 (of 2025/26) on birthdays…

Ironic (or serendipitous) that day 72 marks a share on birthdays… you can do the math yourself on that one… 

I don’t usually mention my birthday at work. It’s a thing where I feel much better celebrating others than myself – although at home, I have always made a big deal about my birthday… probably because it is so close to another ‘birthday’ with lots of presents. I’ll admit that my parents did a very good job keeping the two events separate and making each feel special… the only ‘joint’ presents I recall were things like ski boots for my birthday and skis for christmas. This year, I kinda let it slip and now I have to own it as a couple of people are poking me a bit more…  

For instance, I was asked if I had a preference for a cake as our staff celebrate communal birthdays monthly… Our resident baker is amazing, so I am more than happy to defer to whatever strikes her fancy. I also shared how I was lucky enough to grow up in a community with an amazing german bakery – the smell of the bread tuesday mornings on the walk to school was amazing (they closed mondays) and they have ‘ruined’ a few things for me – their meat pies, their longjohns, and some sort of cake with a crunchy top and a sorta pudding middle. But annually, I got their black forest cake. It was so good, that I still occasionally try others just to try to recapture that memory. 

Birthdays are good times for remembrance… what has happened, and what might be next! This year I teased the well-wishers with: ‘unpacking new aches and pains’ for a bit of fun – the nice part for me is celebrating a third post-cardiac-event birthday.

Birthdays, I’m realizing, aren’t really about cake or candles anyway. They’re pause points — moments where memory and momentum briefly meet. I can still smell that bakery on a Tuesday morning, still taste a cake that no modern version quite lives up to, and still feel the weight of how lucky I am to be here, marking another year at all. If Day 72 is about anything, it’s about noticing those small, human markers in the middle of busy systems and loud timelines. So I’ll happily eat whatever cake shows up, accept the good-natured teasing, and quietly hold the gratitude that comes with a third post-cardiac-event birthday. Not a bad way to keep counting days.