Thank you so much, everyone.

Honestly, I'm amazed by how many of you wished me a happy birthday. I feel like it's more than I deserve, considering how sparse my activity has been and how long it's been taking me to respond to everything.

The 40th part of a millenium achieved
Congratulations for your 25th birthday Pangaea
I hope you are having a great celebration and that your last year was and next year will be of health, success, happiness, friendship, luck, peace, love and occupation 
Wow, I've never thought of it in those terms before.

I normally don't post in these topics, but I'm willing to make an exception for a good friend of mine.
I'm touched, Chronicler. Thank you.

Dang, I missed another one!
Oh well, hope you had a supercalifragalisticexpialidocious day 
No worries.

You were one day late in wishing me a happy star day. I'm three days late in responding to my own star day thread!

And now, my birthday story:
After a somewhat rushed (but very tasty) breakfast of blueberry pancakes, we went to the movie theater to watch Monsters University (I had actually seen it already, but my mom wanted to see it and my siblings and I were happy for an excuse to watch it a second time

). Afterwards we went out for "sunch" (combination supper and lunch) at a local restaurant, where I had what I daresay was the best turkey burger I'd ever eaten. Incredibly, our waitress turned out to be a previously unknown cousin of ours (my dad's aunt's great-granddaughter, which I think makes her my second cousin once removed); none of us knew until she saw our name on the bill, which prompted her to ask if we were the same relatives her family used to tell her about. So that was an interesting surprise (It also wouldn't have happened if the restaurant that had been my first choice for sunch on my birthday hadn't been closed on Sunday).
Shortly after returning home, I was presented with a modest stack of birthday gifts (We all considered my bat workshop and trip to Bracken Cave to be essentially early birthday gifts in themselves, so our budget was lower than usual, which I was perfectly okay with

). Among them were a $25 Barnes & Noble gift card ("It will take much less time to spend it than it did to accrue those 25 years," my mom joked); two DVDs:
David Attenborough's Life Stories and
The Best of Whose Line Is It Anyway?; a hummingbird feeder (which came as a complete surprise; I had never even asked about getting one); the new book
Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy by Mark Witton, arguably the best reference guide to pterosaurs ever written; and three brilliant cards from my artistically talented younger siblings. (My youngest brother had so many ideas for character pictures that he made me
two cards, both of which were absolutely hilarious and adorable

). Finally, late that evening we had a delicious homemade Denver chocolate sheet cake with triple chocolate fudge chip frosting, which my brother had decorated with gel icing bats. So yes, it was a wonderful birthday. :^.^: