Some travel catch-up and a birthday abroad

It's been a while since my last post, so there is some catching up to do.  Yesterday evening, my travels brought me back to Boulder for the first time in about two months, so it feels like a good time to put fingers to keyboard and crank out a new blog entry.

In October, I had my birthday in Edinburgh.  I'm sure some readers will be looking forward to tales of debauchery too scandalous to be uttered (or typed) in polite company.  It turns out, the reality was rather mundane as far as epic adventures go.

In 1776, Adam Smith invented economics.  In 2011, his statue was pooped on by birds.  Only one of the previous statements is true.

I walked around Edinburgh, saw Adam Smith's statue, and eventually wound up going to a pub with some other tourists.

Despite the text on the sign behind me, it turns out the real threat is not terrorists.  It is drinking with Australians.

I met some Australians who bought me one or more shots and promised that since it was my birthday, they would arrange for me to "hit the floor".  Evidently, their plans did not come to fruition, because they left the pub, I hung out with some German friends, and then I returned to the hostel and went to bed.  In the morning, the Aussies were in rough shape.  Perhaps they were planning to give me a terrific hangover for my birthday, but forgot it at the hostel and took it for themselves instead?

A few weeks later, after returning to the USA, I was out on a bike ride in the coastal hills on the San Francisco peninsula.  I saw a scene that reminded me of the cone-on-head art installation in Glasgow.

It's not Glasgow, but I appreciate it.

I noticed this afternoon that at some point in the past few weeks, while fiddling around with my privacy settings on Facebook, I entered a setting that caused a number of status updates to be visible only to me.  Talk about preaching to the choir...  If the above reference to the cone-on-head art installation in Glasgow does not sound familiar, it's probably because the links I shared on Facebook for the last two blog posts were visible only to me.  Feel free to check out the other November blog entries to see what else I've been up to.

At any rate, I think I have the Facebook-link-posting fixed, and will wrap up this post by sharing a couple quotes from a pair of books I read recently.

From The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain:
To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.

From Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck:
You can look back and say, "I could have been...," polishing your unused endowments like trophies. Or you can look back and say, "I gave my all for the things I valued." Think about what you want to look back and say. Then choose your mindset.