229115 Resource 101842 21 1 1237778043926 1243740340657 Controlled What a Nice 50th Birthday!

Thanks everyone for helping to celebrate my 50th birthday this week.

Being born on St. Patrick's Day, it's never been hard to find a party on my birthday.  But Carol threw me a a birthday party last night that reached a whole different level of party coolness.  Coolness not measured by the quantity of green beer someone could choke down (before choking it back up), but by the quality of the people I am lucky enough to count as my friends. <a href="http://seidlweb.com/docs/0903220011.jpg" target="_blank"><img title="Virus Sculpture" height="109" alt="Virus Sculpture" src="http://seidlweb.com/docs/0903220011_thumb.jpg" width="164" align="right" border="0" style="border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; border-right-width: 0px" /></a>The question I heard most last night, of course, was "So, how does it feel turning 50?"  At first, my quick reaction was to say, "Not much different," but as I spent time with folks at the party—or on the phone with folks that couldn't be there physically—my answer morphed into, "It feels great!" It felt great to have a house full of very good friends—long-time friends from grade school or college to recent friends, near friends who walked to the party to distant friends that live out of state (even out of continent!), friends decades younger, friends my age, and friends decades older. <a href="http://seidlweb.com/docs/marne-smiley-march-2009_4.jpg" target="_blank"><img title="Marne Smiley" height="138" alt="Marne Smiley" src="http://seidlweb.com/docs/marne-smiley-march-2009_thumb_1.jpg" width="105" align="left" border="0" style="border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; border-right-width: 0px" /></a>The party invite requested no gifts, but I am grateful to many of you that made donations to the <a title="ARPKD/CHF Alliance" href="http://www.arpkd.org/" target="_blank">ARPKD/CHF Alliance</a> to help fund ongoing research into kidney disease. It was also fun to receive a wire sculpture of a virus (above) from Stef Kopka.  (If you're not familiar with Stef's work, <a title="See Ya Around, Shakey Jake | Peaceable Kingdom home to Stef Kopka's life-size wire sculpture" href="http://annarborchronicle.com/2009/02/26/see-ya-around-shakey-jake/" target="_blank">stop by Peaceable Kingdom in Ann Arbor and check out his life size sculpture of Shaky Jake</a>.)  My new virus sculpture will soon be hanging in my office near the Albert Einstein marionette and the "prisoner Bush" figurine my brother carved me for other birthdays. And I'm always pleased when cover-girl-athlete-super-achiever-Irish-cream-connoisseur-and-former-seidl-kid-nanny Marney Smiley (left) brings me a jar (yea, a jar) of her very good (and strong) homemade Irish Cream.  So I was triply pleased when, this time, she brought me three! Thanks again, everyone!  And a special thanks to Carol for making it all happen. 10 application/xml false Andy birthday fifty Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; GTB6; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 $Admin 68.40.167.222 false true false false true 173251 false false true false false false true 101842 blog blogsite/Seidl/web