22 November 2025

My annual pilgrimage

The weekend preceding Thanksgiving is always spent driving Natasha and Tuey down from New York to Atlanta. Then Natasha goes back to NYC and back again to Atlanta before Christmas. Post-Christmas, I take the reverse trip to get them back. This year, Rohan joined us, too. It was a good thing that I did not have to do the nearly 850 miles of driving all by myself.

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15 November 2025

“How many birthday calls do you make?”

Once in a while, I face that question, and I usually respond with “I probably average about 9-10 calls a day.”

This morning, curiosity got the better of me, and I sat down to try to figure that out. Additionally, to identify any interesting patterns in the distribution of calls.

Extracting information from macOS Contacts proved to be more challenging than I anticipated. I had to use Google Contacts, Text files, Numbers, and finally Excel to get to it.

Turns out I have 3,235 birthdays in my calendar. However, 58 of them are no more. So, I make 3,177 wishes every year, averaging just under 9 a day.

Some interesting statistics…

(*) There is no day that I do not have a birthday wish to make. The least is 2 (on Mar 23).

(*) The highest is 19 on three different dates: Jan 22, Sep 9, and Nov 14 (which was yesterday).

(*) Aug and Sep are the months with the highest number of birthdays (over 300 each).

I feel I am well prepared to answer the question next time 🙂

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