Thanks all for your good wishes!

Micca: with a lot of guessing I think I understand your attempt at German!

Katlaughing: that was understandable immediately. The umlauts developed as abbreviations for ae, oe, ue when printing involved a lot of carving and other manual work, and when paper was expensive - the e was placed above the a, o or u to save space in the line. As letters got smaller and smaller, the thin lines of the e disappeared, and only two dots remained of the e - here we are at ä, ö and ü ... In many cases (especially in names) the original ae, oe or ue survived, e.g. in my surname Waechter which means guardian which means Wächter in German - as translation for guardian, the umlaut is used, but about 30% of the families with surname Waechter/Wächter kept the original ae ...

Les: of course it is a big one - before today, my age was also the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything (see Douglas Adams), now it is only 43 ;-)

Erik: I wish I would meet you more often, but you moved off to a far away island ...

Ernest: Danke!

gnu: as I said to Terry in the chat: as this is supposed to be a happy day, I won't tell the sad story of my Scotland trip today ...

Leadbelly: I didn't know there is a Mudcatter living as close as Landshut ...