A few years ago I worked on the MSN Explorer 8.0 team; the project was code-named Texas. I made a few really good friends on that project. This weekend two of them had serious medical surprises.

Craig, movie critic - really, he was the FOX13 movie dude - and former speech writer for Bill Gates, had surgery to get his appendix out; his blog post just said, "They say it has to come out tonight."

Perhaps even more severe, Chris, golf and ski buddy now at DeepRockDrive (guess they couldn't afford spaces for their name), went into the hospital with a sharp pain, thinking it was as kidney stone. Unfortunately, it turned out to be cancer. Chris goes into surgery tomorrow. He and his lovely wife, Leslie, have started a blog to document the experience.

Other than the fact that these two good friends of mine (both of whom are about my age) had these problems on the same weekend, the weird thing about these was that I found out about both on Facebook. Sign of our times, I guess.

I admit I'm a little freaked out by my friends having these kinds of health problems. I know these are strictly age related, but it's playing on my impending feeling of doom around getting older. Of course, my feelings here are nothing compared to what Craig and Chris are going through. My prayers and best wishes go out to them and their families.