This past week, I turned 31. A young 31. A hip 31. 31 is the new 21. Anyway, for those who don't know the drill, here are 5 brief stories from the past week. Four are true, one is not. In fact, that one is so not true, that I'll almost be offended if you think that it is, and your name will promptly be stricken from my holiday card list. But hey, no pressure, it's all in the name of fun! Your job is to guess which story is a lie, then leave your answer in a comment. Ready? Go!

1) For my birthday, the wife got me a waffle maker. Since then, I have made (or suggested making) waffles for every single meal - morning, noon, or night. In fact, the writing of this post was delayed because I was making apple spice waffles. They were delicious, btw.

2) Several people told me that turning 31 was harder than turning 30 for them. Generally, I don't think that was true for me. I felt "older" last year, when I was leaving my twenties. In fact, the only time I really did feel old this year was when I was watching the Masters golf tournament. South African Trevor Immelman won, I'm pretty indifferent about that. And though I was miffed that Tiger didn't make a charge on the weekend, I was more upset by the fact that this is the first time that the current Masters champion is younger than me.

3) We were lucky to get excellent weather for the entire week. It was sunny and with highs ranging from the low 60's to the upper 70's all week long (we were still wearing our winter coats the week before, so this is a pretty drastic change - average highs for this time of year are in the mid 50's, and we never get sunshine). Anyway, as a result of the weather (and the fertilizer I put down the week before), the grass needed mowing. This was fine with me, as I've only been waiting since October to do it. I waited for the morning dew to burn off and got all ready to mow Saturday morning, but then I realized that it was still a few minutes before 9:30 a.m. It felt later to me, I had been up for a while. So I sat inside waiting until 10, which I thought seemed like a time that's late enough to not disturb the neighbors.

4) I was awake for a few minutes in bed on my birthday before the wife came in our room with the boy. He jumped on my bed and hollered, "Happy birthday, daddy!!" Though we're only talking about a few minutes, this was the first time that I didn't remember that it was my birthday until someone else reminded me.

5) I work at a university, and consequently spend most of my day around a bunch of college kids. I get a kick out of making them guess how old I am when they find out it's my birthday. (My informal polling has showed that college kids generally don't care about specific numbers, they refer to age using these categories: young, under 21, 21, and old.) Last year, people who didn't know my age always guessed high. The typical guesses were in the 34-35 age range. This year, most of the guesses were either 28 or 29. I'm not really sure what the difference is, but I do know that I sure do like the kids we have now way more than the ones we had last year.