Eight Years of Blipping!

Blipfoto tells me that today I reach 8 years of blipping. The way it calculates this includes a few backblips which I added after starting (7th April 2014) and of course it doesn't know about leap years, but I'm not going to argue!

This is going to be like the Oscars: where do I start with my thanks? To my parents who brought me into the world? (That's going a bit far back although I am grateful to them.) Many thanks indeed to the Blip Central team who keep the show on the road year after year. And to John Gravett for getting me started. To my Editor for her unstinting support - and to all you lovely people who look at my journal and respond to my blips.

I pondered how to celebrate and wanted a see-through 8: my Editor came up trumps with this candle, left over from an 18th birthday (as our youngest offspring is now 29 it must have been a while ago!). It was also her idea to pop it into this cake we had in the pantry waiting to be eaten.

Why did I particularly want a see-through 8? Well, I reckoned that shining a light through it produces a shadow of an infinity sign - and we all want blipfoto to go on for ever, don't we?

The number 8 has some special connotations. These include the fact that it's the luckiest number in Chinese culture because it sounds like the word meaning "to generate wealth." It's the base of the octal system which is especially useful in computers (eg a byte is 8 bits). It's the first cubic number (2 to the power 3). It's the atomic number of oxygen, which is rather important to us. What's more, after 8 o'clock we can eat "After Eight Mints"!


PS I don't currently have a host for April Silly Saturday next weekend or for any subsequent months - do let me know if you'd like to have a go (either in a comment or an email to davidcblipper@gmail.com). I'm happy to do it but it's nice to have a variety of hosts: it's not a big job.