Two days ago, on November 5, 2025, I turned 77. That seems as good a reason as any to start a blog.
I’ve had several previous blogs, all either defunct (like the blog I kept for our parakeets) or frozen in time (like the Dragonfly Ranch blog, which is still online but closed). Over the last few weeks, I’ve had thoughts I wanted to capture and reflect on, and this seems like a good way to do that. If anyone else is interested, I’d be surprised — but the world is full of surprises. My therapist says she thinks I’m an interesting person, so who knows?
I’m intentionally starting the blog today (November 7) rather than on my birthday for what you might call numerological reasons — or, more respectably, number-theory reasons. Though I don’t think I’m really a math nerd, I *am* a nerd, and I couldn’t help noticing that my age on this birthday is the product of two primes, 7 and 11, so I wanted the blog to start on 11/7/2025 (or 7/11/2025 European style).
I figured that the integer 77 probably had more interesting properties than that, but I had to look them up. When I did, I found out, among other things, that:
* The product of two primes is called a subprime.
* 77 is the sum of three consecutive squares (4*4 + 5*5 + 6*6).
* The word for 77 in Swedish (sjutiosju) was used as a shibboleth in World War II to distinguish native Swedish speakers from Russians and Germans.
Digression: Grammy (our maternal grandmother, who spoke Swedish as a girl) used to amuse us by saying the Swedish for “seventy-seven seasick seamen”: “sjuttiosju sjösjuka sjömän”, which is actually just part of a much longer Swedish tongue-twister, apparently. (You can look it up.) The sound represented by “sj” appears to be unique to Swedish. As an alveolar fricative (you can look that up too), it’s related to the German “ch” in “ich” and to the Welsh “ll”, but different from both of them.
Another digression: I thought about celebrating my birthday at the 7-Eleven, but Missoula doesn’t have a 7-Eleven. And here I thought they were ubiquitous.
Digresson about digressions: You’ll have to get used to these.
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