This year almost past was not a year of writing for me, which is definitely something I'm planning to do differently in 2015!  We moved into our new house at the beginning of January.  The photo below was taken on our first day.  Remodeling the kitchen, furnishing the entire empty place, installing geothermal HVAC for the carriage house, and looking at 14,483 fabric and tile samples and light fixtures with my amazing interior designer took up all of my creative energy, plus some. 

 

 

I didn't realize how tired I was until we arrived in Bora Bora for a month and I slept 10+ hours a night and took afternoon naps for about 10 days.  I slept more than Brad, who is a championship level sleeper.  I had read a startlingly small amount in the previous ten months of the year, which was also a sign that my brain was a little too busy making house project decisions.  I think I read less up to November than I had since I learned how to read before kindergarten.  

Then I made up for lost time, reading about 30 books in the month we were away.  I'll do a post tomorrow (New Year!  New writing focus and energy!) with a list of the books I read, and at least a comment or two on them.

Here's a view of Bora Bora / Paradise, which is nice to see when it was 18 degrees below zero at our house in Colorado last night.  I'll post some more photos, too.

Happy New Year to my readers, family, and friends, and a toast to more writing in 2015!

 

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One of Brad and my tips for happy relationships is gift giving.  We have a date the first of each month, which we manage to do about 90 percent of the time, and we exchange gifts, which we manage to do about 50 percent of the time.  Sometimes we do significant gifts (Range Rover to Brad, killer earrings to Amy), but often we just do something small and thoughtful.

I've been looking for socks that are as exuberant and unusual as my husband is, and recently discovered that Robert Graham makes these wonderfully colorful dress socks.

So these are my August 1st gift to Brad –

Today is the first day of spring, which is a bit hard to believe when this is what we have outside the house:

The dogs are much happier about the snow than I am:

 

 

For more fun photos of spring snow, go to:

Spring Equinox 2010

Every so often, venture capitalist Larry Cheng puts out a list of the top VC blogs. Previously, he ranked the blogs by how many subscribers they have on Google Reader. But now he’s changed his methodology and is ranking them by average monthly unique visitors, based on Compete data. He just came out with his new global ranking for the fourth quarter of 2009. Below are the top ten blogs from that list.

via www.techcrunch.com

I love reading the Sunday New York Times as ink printed on paper rather than my daily online reading, but the article about venture capital and new technologies that includes quotes from and a fun photo of Brad doesn't appear in the paper version of the paper until tomorrow. 

You can read it online here, and then go pick up your paper copy tomorrow like I will.

I just spent 2 hours sorting my email inbox down from 1066 emails so that I can start the working year off on Monday morning with some idea of what I have to do.  Inbox Zero doesn't mean that I don't have any email to deal with; it means that I have put each email in an appropriate sub-folder that I can schedule time on my calendar to work on.  I have 225 items in my To Do folder and 345 in my Correspondence folder, which is a lot more manageable than over a thousand unsorted items.  I'm going to try to be more responsive and organized about email in 2010.  Wish me luck!

I love Colorado weather, even the big snow storms.  Here's a photo of Brooks frolicking yesterday morning before the storm really even got going.  I'm guessing that's a foot of snow.

And then over the weekend, all the snow will go away:

This is what I like to see —   a potential president who reads books.  Now that’s a change I’m really ready for.

Thanks for Fred for posting the image.

On June 14, 1777, the Second Continental Congress adopted the flag of the United States.

And it's also 3 months until my next birthday.