My birthday was actually quite a while ago, but I have been meaning to write this since…partly by way of acknowledgement but also to show what cool people I have in my family…

Many ,many years ago (so long ago that we need to use two manys, and that’s not too many!), I saw an article in Look and Learn about a revolutionary jetplane-submarine that the Americans were developing. This Look and Learn issue was one of a batch that we had acquired at a St Lukes Church jumble sale and dated back into the mid-late 60s.

It had a couple of drawings of what such a device might look like in action but I never saw anything like them again, until I opened this gift from Carmen…what a score!!!! Who gives a fat rat’s that she bought it in the Op Shop and it probably didn’t even cost a dollar? I like these old annuals anyway but to find one with the ‘sub-plane’ from so long ago…yeah baby!! Coincidentally, I had just finished reading Attack from the Sea, the story of the US Navy’s attempt in the 50s to develop a credible sea-based airborne attack force and so was quite on top of this subject…it’s quite sad that had the sub-plane been scratched on the back of a napkin just a few years earlier, it might have made it at least to the mock-up stage…but I digress…very cool pressie numero uno…

 These two are pretty cool and are responsible for me writing this post …they were staying with us for the first week of the school holidays and hadn’t been here for more than half an hour before charging into my study to announce with some concern that ‘ice had turned to stone and I better come quick‘…OK, busted, yes, I had a teeny-weeny Glenfiddich while watching Shout At The Devil the night before and had left the glass on the coffee table…

These are the ‘stone ice’ in question…my parents gave them to me…I’m not sure if it was just a particularly insightful guess or whether I had mentioned at some point how much I hate the ice in my drink melting and diluting it, especially when it is almost finished but these things rock! They only take a few minutes to chill down in the freezer and hold their cold for quite a while, certainly longer than the life expectancy of the average drink…

This is the way cool birthday card made for me by my nephew, Toby in Dunedin…it is so cool that Aunty Carmen grabbed as soon as she saw it and framed it to share with everyone who visits us…

Toby and his younger brother, Arlo, also sent me these two pressies…the first, the Kermit green thingie is a USB port that plugs into the cigarette light of the truck and it is an absolute lifesaver. As many of you will know, I like to listen to Audible talking books when I am driving any sort of distance on my own, including doing laps on the lawnmower. Unfortunately my current MP3 player, a Creative Stone+, only lasts about 8 hours which isn’t enough for some one way trips and definitely not enough endurance for many of the round trips I make…

The sonic rocks are just cool…you can use them for lots of things ranging from the mundane like holding the grocery list on the fridge door to tossing them around and, yes, they do sizzle as well as snap, crackle and pop…I keep them hidden away most of the time because they are just the sort of uber-cool thing someone might think they have a greater need for than me…

And, finally, because I too am a cool member of my family, I gave myself this, a simple but effective paper model that will upsize quite nicely I think…one of the very first carrier-borne torpedo bombers, not so much cool as very very scary trying to get one of these off and back onto a carrier in the immediate Post-WW1 period…

So thanks to all the cool people who made this the coolest birthday….