主播大秀

Or something similar. I recently had a birthday. I like birthdays; cards and cake and presents, and when it is my birthday I don't have to remember about the cards and cake and presents because that is everybody elses job! Actually this birthday was marked by a distinct absence of cake. Which was a pity because it was a significant birthday, mathematically speaking, being a perfect square, which makes arranging a large number of candles easier. (Next year there will be a zero at the end and I'm going to get some Roman numeral candles (well, just one) as a hint about the cake.)
My Gran's birthday is next weekend and it is very significant, being a perfect square, and having two zeros at the end, so major celebrations are planned. (I have to go away again, so there will be a blog-break I'm afraid) I started to wonder when she would be twice as old as me. Once I would have done this in my head in an instant but I'm slowing down now, and if it doesn't fit in a sudoku grid it takes a while. It slowly dawned on me that she would be twice as old as me not once but twice (fingers crossed and God willing). This is only slowly becoming intuitive, as, armed with a piece of scrap paper and a pen that works, I drew a schematic and worked out the twice-as-young bit happens between my next birthday and hers (all 18 days) and again in 2010 after her birthday and through 2011 until mine. Since then I've been practising on the rest of my family; I was half as old as my mother before and after my wedding, but not actually for it. I was twice as old as my sister on her first birthday and again after my fourth (her birthday is the day before mine, I always thought of it as a practise run, and there was always lots of cake when we were kids). And now I'm going to send my CV to CERN and get a job as a number-cruncher because I'm back up to speed with figures again!