It happens every year, our birthdays, one after another receding into the past. Until she died in 1992, my mother telephoned on every birthday to tell me what she had been doing 30, 40, 45, 50 years earlier. That part of the call always annoyed me then and of course, now I miss it.

If not for the blogosphere, I might have missed this birthday altogether. Recovery from surgery, little more than a week ago, has naturally taken up a large portion of my attention. So it was almost a surprise and certainly a delight with my morning coffee to find so many greetings waiting for me.

Birthday wishes in the comments section on yesterday's post from Sage at Musings, Karen at Namaste, Mick Brady at Dancing in Tongues, Kristi at The Winchester Mantoni's, The Old, Old Lady of the Hills, Old Horsetail Snake himself, Kay Dennison at Kay's Thinking Cap, Cop Car and Inanna at Anything Goes.

Some others posted greeting on their blogs: Millie Garfield at My Mom's Blog, joared at Along the Way, kenju at Imagine What I'm Leaving Out, Claude at Blogging in Paris, Elaine at Kalilily Time, Cowtown Pattie at Texas Trifles and Harold at The View From Where I Sit.

Tamar of Mining Nuggets sent a musical, animated, interactive ecard you can see here, as did Elaine of Kalilily Time which is here. Take a look; both are fun to play with.

What can I say? It is a great, good thing to have a blogosphere birthday and I thank you all. (If I have left out anyone, I am most chagrined and you should let me know. I'll update.)

Thanks to a magnificent sendoff from Norm Jenson at One Good Move yesterday, the new blog, The Elder Storytelling Place, got an amazing amount of traffic on its first day. Norm's story, Curiosity, is the inaugural post and is not to be missed. Colleen Shannon of Santiago Dreaming has already submitted a story which will be published next week.

Remember, the new blog is yours. Its success depends on your contributions. Stories may be original for the new site, or they may have been previously published elsewhere and you may submit as many as you wish over time. The instructions for doing so are here.

A couple of people have commented that they will do their storytelling on their own blog, thank you very much. That is a good thing - there cannot be too much storytelling in the world. But part of the reason for The Elder Storytelling Place is to encourage non-bloggers to share their stories and some bloggers may want to re-post stories in another place so new readers can enjoy them while discovering blogs they didn't know about before.

Another great birthday gift will be forthcoming before long from Mick Brady at Dancing in Tongues. As it turns out, he was a web designer for a long time and has offered to create a unique banner for The Elder Storytelling Place. I am most definitely not a designer and after weeks of fussing around trying to come up with something I could actually accomplish in Photoshop, I gave up and just cloned the TGB banner.

That's not the best idea I ever had and I'm grateful to Mick for stepping in to help with my design deficiencies. Watch for it soon.

Thank you, everyone, for starting off my 66th birthday with such a bang.