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I turned 70 today and, yes, I’m still counting down. It won’t be a habit unless I continue to do it.

Birthdays are great and, thankfully, I still feel young enough to believe that. I’m not concerned about any rapidly approaching expiration dates (beyond that of the milk I drank this morning) and I’m far from ready to spend too much time pondering the past or considering the future. The present is pretty grand in itself. It features all the things I really need – a great wife and kid, several lasting friends, a generous family, a paying job, and my health. I’m happy to hang out in it.

As birthday wishes rain down (I just received a personal rendition of Happy Birthday from my father. I believe he’s a baritone.), I’ll put all that getting old stuff aside in favor of playing with my toys. Oh yes, toys. What would a birthday be without them?

Wow, I’ve been busy the last couple of weeks. It’s not hard to notice the lack of activity around here. Life got in the way of my time here and it shows, or doesn’t show depending on your perspective.

The real culprit is work. I’d love to be able to plan out the fits and starts in my schedule but that never seems to be. Work has robbed me of nearly all my free time over the last couple of weeks, leaving me with a bunch of half written blogs now aching to be revised with a eye toward the past tense.

It’s a bummer.

I like to keep the content around here fresh, both because it keeps me actively writing (and — imagine the horror — even thinking) and because I fear I’ll lose what little audience I have if there just isn’t anything interesting around to read (which, by the way, isn’t guaranteed even if I am actively updating).

In the near future, at least, it looks like I’ll be able to keep life at bay, allowing me some time to whittle away at the keyboard. Maybe I’ll even get off my butt and write a blog or two. Stranger things have happened, you know, like this.