It is a little before seven in the morning on July 9th, 2009. I awake with the woman I love in my arms. I close my eyes again to savor the moment. Today, I am turning fifty years old; half a century. In most ways, it really isn’t much different than being forty-nine yesterday. Yet I am sure there will be plenty of new adventures, not only for me, but for all of us. As an example, this weekend, we will leave to spend a week camping on Cape Cod. I suspect that Kim has never rented a trailer on Cape Cod with a man in his fifties before, but I suspect it won’t be all that different from when we pitched our tent on Cape Cod last year.

Already I’ve celebrated this milestone. Last weekend, we had the public celebration at Kim’s parents’ house. It was great to see many friends there. I’ve received various messages wishing me the best on this day and letting me know that being fifty isn’t really all that bad, including some very humorous cards. I have plenty of thank notes and messages on various social networks to write today. It’s good. It provides a great opportunity to connect with people that I haven’t spoken enough with recently. I wouldn’t have made it this far without the kindness of so many friends and a few strangers and I especially look forward to seeing new friendships and old flourish in my second half century.

An hour later, I am sitting in my office. I’ve drank my first cup of coffee and written several of my thank you messages to friends. Fiona ran downstairs to wish me a happy birthday. She has been eager for me to open my birthday present from the family.

It is a SodaStream home soda maker. When I was a kid we used to make Root Beer. We would pour pounds of sugar in a giant pan, add Hire’s Root Beer Extract and yeast. We would stir it all together and then siphon it into bottles where the yeast would convert a little of the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. It would be a sweet sticky mess and we would wait patiently for the Root Beer to be fizzy. I’ve wanted to make some soda this and we had a failed attempt some years back when we tried to short circuit the process by using a carboy and a carbon dioxide canister.

The SodaStream home soda maker is different. It is more like a twenty-first century version of the old seltzer makers. You spritz carbon dioxide into a liter of water at a time. There are all kinds of syrups you can use to make it one sort of soda or another. Kim got ginger ale, root beer, and tonic for our first experiments. The company threw in a free sampler of many of their other sodas and some fruit essence that seems like a nice way to make soda. We will experiment with this a bit to find what works best for us, and perhaps work on making our own syrups for local sodas.