Or, as I like to call it, The Day After My Birthday.

I had a good 21st… drank a few beers, opened a few presents, sent in my absentee ballot, and got 72 unique hits on my website, including the 1,000th hit this month. Seventy-two hits in a day isn’t a record — after all the “Rally Monkey” and “duck in a noose” traffic during the preceding week, it’s only the sixth-highest daily total in “My world” history — but 1,000 hits in a month is definitely unprecedented.

Of yesterday’s 72 hits, seven came from Google searches, three from Yahoo searches and three from MSN searches. Most of the rest were my friends and family, visiting my website in response to the mass e-mail that I sent out early Wednesday morning. Hit #25, which was the 1,000th hit of the month, came at 8:40 AM Pacific time from someone with a PacBell.net IP address who looked at a bunch of my photo galleries, including my old pictures of the World Trade Center, my trip home last October, and the USC protest against sweatshop labor last spring.

Speaking of which, there a bunch of newly uploaded photo galleries from Spring, Summer, and Fall 2002 on my photo page. So check ‘em out!

Anyway, thanks for the hits, and thanks for the birthday wishes, everyone!

Here’s what my mom wrote to some of her friends at Eastern Connecticut State University (where she works) on the occasion of my 21st birthday:

Twenty-one years ago Tuesday (the 29th was a Thursday that year), I drove out to Eastern, gave a morning lecture on medieval art at the Media Center, gave another lecture on medieval art for another Art History class I was teaching at Eastern. I went home that evening to bake cookies for what I thought would be my last day doing library work (some things never change!). That night, 2 weeks ahead of schedule, my water broke and I went into labor, and so 21 years ago yesterday, my son Brendan was born.

My son is legal! Some of you saw him at Boy’s State here at ECSU in1998, or saw him at ages 9 and above sledding down the hill beside the old library on school snow days. So I thought I would share it with you.

Indeed I am legal. Hooray!