Another sign of getting old

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My daughter bought me this mug (pictured on the right) a few years ago. It replaced another mug I lost or broke or something. I have a bad history with mugs. I've cracked them, I've dropped them and, while I don't have a blog post about it, I've lost a few.

As I've mentioned before, we adopted our daughter from China. So, it seemed logical that when she wanted to buy me a mug as a present, she bought one with my Chinese Zodiac Animal on it. Since I was born in 1951, she bought the Rabbit mug and I've used it just about every day since then.

I noticed the other day, though, that my birth year is the oldest one on the mug. Yet another sign of my being an old guy. I know they could only put so many years on the mug but why stop with 1951? There should be a lot of people who were born in 1939 around and I'm sure there are even some people born in 1927 around (my mother was born in 1925 and she is still going!). As you can see in the lower left of the mug, the design was copyrighted in 2006 so why show the future years of 2011 and 2023? Obviously, they didn't want to have to redesign the mug every 12 years and figured these would stay nice until at least 2023 so people could buy them for the babies born that year and in 2011. I hope you 5-year-olds are taking good care of yours.

So, I'll stop feeling sorry for myself and just continue to enjoy this gift. I'm always more careful with something that I have been given as a gift. I always feel that if I'm careless, I could make the gift-giver sad that I didn't think enough of their gift to take better care of it.