WOW! 88 for your Archive Birthday. That's both an impressive age and a very important one. 88 is cause for major celebration in Japan (my second country). I was already there for one of my wife's grandmother's 88th birthday and we made a special trip back to celebrate the other's. A huge celebration ensued for each, complete with congratulatory letters from the Prime Minister.
In Japanese the number 88 is written 八十八 (eight-ten-eight). If the characters are written vertically, in the traditional format, and then squashed together to make a single character, you get
米
This is the character for "RICE," a very auspicious character indeed. You've just celebrated your "rice birthday" when life begins anew.
Happy birthday. I hope you have many more happy ones to follow.
THank you for this. I'm not actually 88, I think that's a holdover from an experiment I was doing to see just how old I could set my age at, and have the system accept it. But still... it's nice to know all of you, and a lot of good friends here.