Celebrating my birthday -- with an equation

Inevitably, each year on my birthday, the students (and my kids) want to know how old I am.
Although I am not adverse to sharing my age, I never tell them directly. Instead I make some sort of math problem which has an answer that is equal to my age.  Sometimes I even try to throw in a pattern or some number series, if possible.
Here is this year's birthday equation:
(3 x 4) + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8


Then, whenever a student has figured it out, I will tell him or her not tell until tomorrow, so everyone has a chance to figure it out. Who knows if they do, but they do have meaningful discussions about the numbers.  My birthday equation 2 years ago looked like this:

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8

but I added this equation:

(1 x 2 x 3) + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8

I heard one group of kids make the observation that "Of course they equal the same, because no matter what you take times 1, it is the same number!" Referring to the part of the problem in parentheses.  Another student pointed out that this equation also worked with out the one:

(2 x 3) + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8

One year, I had the students take a few minutes and see how many problems they could write with my age as the correct answer. This was a meaningful task for all as the students would work at their own level, and each could have a correct answer. We posted them on the board and a number of students added new ones throughout the day.

How do you celebrate your birthday?

How could I have missed the Initial Teaching Alpabet (I.T.A.)?

I had been doing some reading and browsing and stumbled upon the "Initial Teaching Alphabet"  or I.T.A. shown in these photographs:

I.T.A.

The Penguin Who Couldn't Paddle

How John Caught the Sea Horse

Luck Dip

I was intrigued because I had never heard of this before? Did I miss something in our STAP or education methods class? 

Upon further research, I learned that it was never widely used. By coincidence, just a few weeks later I was reading some activities in this book: Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons by Siegfried Engelmann.

and I realized, it uses I.T.A. or at least a version of it, called Distar. Some of the reading passages use the same phonographs used in the ITA charts. 

INITIAL TEACHING ALPHABET (i.t.a.)
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ita.htm

The Pitman Initial Teaching Alphabet (i.t.a.) was invented by Sir James Pitman, grandson of the inventor of Pitman shorthand. It was first used in a number of British schools in 1961 and soon spread to the USA and Australia.

It is designed to make it easier for English-speaking children to learn to read English. The idea is that children first learn to read using the i.t.a. then are introduced to standard English orthography at the age of seven. Opinions vary on the efficacy of the i.t.a. and it never became a mainstream teaching tool.

Each symbol predominantly represented a single English sound (including affricates and diphthongs), but there were complications due to the desire to avoid making I.T.A. needlessly different from standard English spelling (which would make the transition from I.T.A. to standard spelling more difficult), and in order to neutrally represent several English pronunciations or dialects. 

The main problems of using the i.t.a. include the fact that it is based on Received Pronunciation, so people with other accents find it difficult to decipher; the lack of written materials, and the transition to the traditional orthography, which some children found difficult.

Notable features

The i.t.a. consists of 42 letters, 24 standard lowercase Latin letters plus a number of special letters, most of which are modified Latin letters.
Each letter represents to a single phoneme.
Some of the phonemes represented by digraphs in the traditional orthography are represented by ligatures in the i.t.a.

Has anyone else ever used I.T.A. or similar programs?  Let me know.