alas, another year...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

Interesting...  Although I try as hard as I can to follow the BigFuzzyDad parabola of life:

• Life lived at the idealistic peak.  40 years teaching 3rd graders, big family, tons of friends, trips, fun kids, hot beer, making a positive difference for so many people, and always laughing.
• Never a focus of imminent doom.  Not even on Iwo Jima.  Even after major heart attack #1  "Hey nurses!  Turn off my heart monitors!  My wife is here, I'm going to close these curtains, and you don't need to hear the alarms when my heart rate goes through the roof!"  5 weeks after major heart attack, while heli-hiking the Columbia glaciers near Banff, Canada - stripping nekkid and sliding down an ice slide into a natural hot spring.
• After a last kiss to his wife, "see you in the room", one last final massive heart attack and BANG, a split second of immenent doom.

Yeah.  I want to live like that (without the heart attacks).

Happy Birthday! I hope you have the opportunity to do something entertaining that doesn't lead to people laughing about the resulting news article.

Separate note: I prefer BFD's chart. Other people keep reminding me that I'm hitting "The Big Four Oh" this year, but I don't feel any different. I can't speak for anyone else's experiences, but my own is pretty good. I've not reached the "ideal", but I also keep moving it higher and higher so that I always have something to strive for. I don't worry about death, that's too much anxiety for me. Overall I'm doing fairly well. Nowhere near perfect, but I have very few legitimate complaints and most of those involve the long-term effects of injuries I got while enjoying life.

That's an odd parabola...I've never seen a parabola like that in all my math studies (and I was a math major).

Fuzzydoug's may not be a perfect "academic" parabola but it is good enough for COJ.

You know, there are drugs for that. "When the moment is right, will you be ready?"

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