I have to hand it to the constellation of social sites to which I belong. All combined to give me a very happy birthday today! I turned 38 today, and I didn’t get the iPhone I was seriously hinting for because of local shortages, and my husband has a summer cold, so has been prone on the couch for two days, barely audible on the cell phone. I was thinking I might just have a lonesome birthday, but no!
Good wishes streamed in from across the globe, from close and from not-so-close friends via email, twitter, Plaxo, and Facebook. The email friends already knew my birthday, or maybe saw my shame-free birthday-promoting gchat status line. And, at least some of the twitter wishes came in response to my own birthday oriented tweets, but not all. Some came before my own tweets. The other birthday wishers are either uncanny calendar-keepers or may have been reminded of the event by the various methods those sites use to keep friends aware of each other. Facebook and Plaxo did all the hard work for me. I’ve been kind of withdrawing from Facebook, but I got re-engaged with it today, catching up with well-wishers, surfing their profiles. Previous to today, I would have said I wasn’t completely sold on Plaxo. I mean, who needs another place to update your status and befriend the same 30-60-90-howevermany people I’m already friends with elsewhere. But Plaxo seems to really emphasize the birthday thing, and that was amazingly touching to me on this day. Nice to get several well-wishing messages and feel friendship coming through my email all day today.
I also benefitted greatly from the ArborWiki birthday deals page, which helped me score some great (and free!) Zingerman’s bagels and a yummy free Birthday cupcake from Cake Nouveau (key lime, mmmm). Thanks to the larger ArborWiki community for maintaining the list!