Birthday Cake

 

Today – just like every other day – there are at least 15 million people celebrating their birthdays.

More people have birthdays in August than in any other month.

"Happy Birthday to You" is the most popular song in the English language (followed by Auld Lang Syne and For He's a Jolly Good Fellow).

Once upon a time, only royalty had birthday parties. No one else was considered important enough to be celebrated.

Germans invented the birthday cake about 200 years ago. Originally, these cakes were sweetened bread dough topped with sugar.

The biggest birthday cake in the world was created in 1989 for the 100th birthday of Fort Payne Alabama. It weighed 128,238 pounds, 8 ounces and carried 16,000 pounds of frosting.

The world's most expensive birthday party cost more than 27 million dollars. It was on July 13, 1996 for the 50th birthday of the Sultan of Brunei.

Nine Butterflies

 

When one door closes and another opens, you’re probably in prison.

Sixty might be the new forty, but 9:00 pm is the new midnight.

When I say, "The other day," I could mean anytime between yesterday and fifteen years ago.

I had my patience tested. I'm negative.

When you ask what I’m doing today and I say "nothing," it doesn’t mean I am free. It means I’m doing nothing.

I finally got eight hours of sleep. It took me three days, but whatever.

I hate when a couple argues in public, and I missed the beginning and don't know whose side I'm on.

When someone asks what I did over the weekend, I squint and ask, "Why, what did you hear?"

When you do squats, are your knees supposed to sound like a goat chewing on an aluminum can stuffed with celery?

I don't mean to interrupt people. I just randomly remember things and get really excited.

Milky Way

“President Spencer W. Kimball, speaking of the literal gathering of Israel, stated: ‘The gathering of Israel consists of joining the true church and coming to a knowledge of the true God. Any person, therefore, who has accepted the restored gospel, and who now seeks to worship the Lord has complied with the law of the gathering of Israel and is heir to all of the blessings promised the Saints in these last days.’ Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have the great privilege of loving, sharing, inviting, and helping gather Israel to receive the fulness of the Lord’s covenant blessings. This includes Africans and Europeans, South and North Americans, Asians, Australians, and those upon the isles of the sea. ‘For verily the voice of the Lord is unto all men.’ This gathering shall continue until the righteous are assembled in the congregations of the Saints in the nations of the world.” – Elder Quentin L. Cook

Four Pinwheels

 

Compliment three people daily.

Watch the sunrise at least once a year.

Be the first to say, “hello.”

Live beneath your means.

Treat everyone as you’d like to be treated.

Never give up on anybody.

Forget the Joneses.

Don’t deprive someone of hope. It may be all he has.

Pray for wisdom and courage.

Be tough-minded but tenderhearted.

Be kinder than necessary.

Remember a person’s greatest emotional need is to feel appreciated.

Keep your promises.

Show cheerfulness, even when you don’t feel it.

Keep in mind: “overnight” success usually takes about 15 years.

Leave everything better than you found it.

Notice that winners do what losers won’t.

When you show up at work, let the first thing you say brighten everyone’s day.

Don’t rain on other people’s parades.

Never waste an opportunity to tell someone you love them.

Four Butterflies

 

Spain was still a fascist dictatorship the year Microsoft was founded.

There were no calculus classes in Harvard’s curriculum in 1636, because calculus hadn’t been discovered yet.

Two empires – the Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire – span the entire gap from Jesus to Babe Ruth.

Prisoners began to arrive at Auschwitz a few days after McDonald's was founded.

When the Egyptian pyramids were being built, wooly mammoths still walked the earth.

The last use of the guillotine was in France the same year Star Wars came out.

Oxford University was over 300 years old when the Aztec Empire was founded.

Nintendo was founded the same year that the Eiffel tower was finished.

At least a dozen of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories were written after World War I.

When Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, you could already visit what is now Santa Fe, New Mexico, eat in a restaurant there, and stay at a hotel.

Pinwheel

 

It started innocently enough: three generations watching BattleBots together. When the show was over, the older two noticed the younger one had spent the whole hour peeling bits of pleather off the office chair. No real harm done; the chair was easily replaced. We added the old office chair to our yard sale, but no one wanted it. We took the chair to good will, but they wouldn’t take it, either. Next week our HOA rented dumpsters so residents could dispose of things too large for our bins. John wheeled the chair into one and walked back home. Then he walked upstairs, down the hall and to the sewing room before he realized he’d stepped through a puddle of ink in the dumpster. Blue ink. Vivid, permanent blue ink. The good news is we now have new carpeting on the stairs and the entire top floor. The better news is we’re finally rid of the cursed chair.

Four Jacob's Ladders

 

I’ve been a music student since I was eight years old. I was assigned my first simplified arrangement of Mozart’s work by age ten. Even then, I could tell you several things about the most famous composer of the classical period: He was a child prodigy who died very young. He was horribly underappreciated during his lifetime. He was extremely poor, and buried in a pauper’s grave. Nearly all of this is wrong. Mozart WAS a child prodigy. He was 35 when he died; very young by today’s standards, but 35 was actually the life expectancy for a male European in the 1700’s. Mozart was famous – like rock star famous – his entire life. His income as a music teacher, performing artist and imperial musician left him comfortably well-off. He was buried in a communal grave in the Cimetière Saint Marc, Vienna, not because he was poor, but because it was the fashion at the time.