Today is my birthday. :)
It's a good day for lots of reasons. The entire weekend has been pretty good, if fact. My grown daughters Manda and Penny, son-in-law Tim, and future son-in-law Tony came to visit yesterday after church. Manda and Penny had fun playing with Christy's and my younger children, Stevie Ray and Emma Grace. Christy made an awesome meal - as usual - and good times were had by all. Everyone gave me M & M's for my birthday - the perfect birthday gift! :)
I'm 43.
Born in 1963, I was a couple years older than Stevie Ray is now (he's 3) when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the lunar surface and Collins orbited above. I wrote my first programming instructions (it would be a gross exageration to call it a "line of code") in 1975 on a Southwest Technical Products Motorola 6800-based system. As I recall, it was a trainer. I set the individual bits of the byte using toggle switches, then hit another switch to load the contents of this buffer into the accumulator. Another toggle switch incremented the address pointer. And so it began.
I remember the oddest things from my childhood. The things themselves aren't odd - it's odd that I remember them and not other stuff. I remember when the price of a small bag of M & M's went up from $0.10 to $0.15 at John A. Love's Exxon service station in Green Bay, Virginia - and thus became taxable, raising the price another penny to $0.16. I've been against taxation ever since.
I remember my oldest younger brother Mark (who just called to wish me a happy birthday) and I walking up the road a few houses to Granny's house - where Mom lives now. I remember putting on a tie to go to the old wooden church in Green Bay. It burned down 20 years ago and a new brick church was bult to replace it.
In the last year, I returned to this community where I spent so much of my childhood - the latter part wishing to escape and never return. It's a full-circle experience. Watching Stevie Ray put on his "little man suit" and tie to go to the Green Bay church is another.
So I took the day off, worked with Christy on building furniture for the kid's playroom, got a haircut, played with the kids, scheduled the Richmond User Groups social, watched some CMT, and kicked around some technical ideas. All in all, a great day thus far. :)
Happy birthday to me!
:{> Andy
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