Adoption!

Wow! It's amazing how your world unfolds when you open yourself to new possibilities. This is the most exciting adventure to begin - our family has decided to adopt 2 children into our family. We're wide-open as to where they come from, but we believe that our families member are already identified...we just have to find them! Possibilities are beginning as we look into India and Japan!

Tropical travel...

Costa Rica is a nice break from the cold of my home in Colorado, where it snowed on Easter! The palms and warm sunshine do wonders for the soul. Alas, the cage of my hotel still precludes full restorative emersion, but I'll take what I can get.

On my way from the airport with my friend Juan and I caught up and discussed the demands of work and home. He reminded me of the Stephen Covey observation that we sometimes trade the important for the urgent. This is an ever present challenge in my own life, where I have to fight to keep the priority straight, carving the time for the important!! How about you?

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Early flight consolation

I was never a fisherman. If I had been, then rousing my body, as my friend Ange says, ''before Jesus wakes up'' wouldn't be that rough. That being said, when I do need to catch the dark-o'clock flight, there's usually a nice consolation prize...ah Starbucks :) YVR, or Vancouver Int'l Airport provides the ambient babbling brook and native bird-squawk (with a nod of the head to the indigenous tribes that preceded them), which also helps to ease the startling morning effect!

POP QUIZ: From where does the coffee megalith's company name derive? BONUS: Name the native tribe of the Vancouver region?

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Dinner for one

Part of this blog is to dispel the myth about the glamour of business travel. Aside from the familiar airport, hotel, and office, the evening meal is the one slight variable...what I eat. Could be seafood, could be steak, could be pasta, could be pizza.

But one thing remains the same, at the end of the meal...only ONE dinner mint: dinner for one :(

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Pass it on...

I'm beginning to enjoy the solitude of mornings, coffee cup in hand, reading my favorite blogs. It's like chatting with friends, hearing what's going through their minds. One of my favorite morning stops (and the top of my blog 'faves') is Cathy Walters. A week or so back she wrote a blog called jumpin and jivin' that inspired my heart and ever since I've been trying to "pass it on"! These comments are a public thank you to her and hopefully an encouragement to others to inspire others!

I get to lead teams of leaders in what I do to earn a living. Part of those teamwork sessions involves an opening "defreeze" - it's like an icebreaker with the express purpose of getting their minds to move in a distinctly different direction from their usual work-a-day world activity. I chose to use Cathy's blog question of "If you could live your perfect life, what would you include? and what can you start doing TODAY?". I passed this question on to about 16 top leaders of a U.S. organization and then yesterday I posed it to about the same number of top leaders in a Canadian company. Two observations, 1) It causes just the pause for a 'deep think' that makes a defreeze question effective, and 2) people then have an idea floating around in their heads that they can act on to improve their lives! I love this!

Maybe you can kick this question around yourself, or with friends and loved ones and see where it goes! Let me know what you come up with and any of the responses you hear in a comment!

Dirty laundry

I thought I'd spice up my blog with a bit of edgy commentary!! For real though...I do recognize in myself a sometime unhealthy gravitation toward the salacious...details about incidents or individuals that I just don't need to know. Why is that? Don Henley wrote, ''It's interesting when people die, give us dirty laundy.'' Not sure the propensity bears nourishing though. Your thoughts...why do we care about Britney, Brangelina, or Hurricane death tolls?

Visions of Italy...

Last year my buddy took his wife to Italy for their wedding anniversay and sent me this postcard. I've never been to Italy...but it looks really nice. So, I keep this travel destination ever before me as I type away at my desk. Some day.

Spam soup?

Sunday lunch at a Hawaiian restaurant with the family and I'm all for authentic...but Spam soup!! I can't believe that a restaurant would actually offer that! I was later informed that the state of Hawaii boasts the highest consumption of Spam per capita versus any other state in the union. That said, there's no way I'm consuming it - wouldn't want to jeapordize the bragging rights of Hawaii.

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Guitar Lessons

For Christmas I gave my son (under my wife's inspiration) a book of coupons for guitar lessons. Today was lesson #1. Though his intro to music class allowed him to try out a little (nylon string) guitar along with piano and recorder...today he started on steel stringed acoustic.

It was cool to pull out my old axe that I bought upon graduation from college 20 years ago and start passing on the musical heritage - note the ''Rock for Life'' motto along the little guys sleeve. Will he become a guitar legend - another Stevie Ray Vaughn...Phil Keaggy...or Jimmy Hendrix? I don't know. What matters is that my son and I have a whole coupon book and beyond to explore the possibilities together!

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Hold on Loosely...

I was chatting with a friend over lunch the other day and we agreed that sometimes we (or anybody) can wrap our head around and idea, argument, position, or expectation and literally stop thinking! We cease taking further data in about a subject or conception and thereby risk missing the discovery of a better or improved understanding. The presumption is dangerous because our understanding of reality is continually being refined. Think this is too philosophical...think "parenting!" Just when I've got one phase figured our...bam, my kids age on me!

While it is critical to "keep an open mind", I also believe that we do so in order to then close our minds upon better ideas and deeper truths. It is a process. If we fix our minds too rigidly, we stop allowing ourselves to be refined. [Old Guy Alert!] There's this 80's band called 38 Special that summed up well what I'm trying to say:

Just Hold On Loosely,
but don't let go
If you cling to tightly,
you're gonna lose control

[PS - The Daffy Duck image above is from a 1956 Looney Tune entitled Ali Baba Bunny and NO, I'm not that old, but I do like cartoons.]

You blog???

I had a 20-something co-worker ask me this question the other day - with the clear emphasis on the latter word, as in, "aren't you a little old for that?" Well, technically, I DO have a blog site...but I think there is a frequency requirement to actually declare that "yes, I blog."

I like to read blogs. In fact, a few of my faves are listed to the right. But, "do I blog?" probably not. I like to think of it more as a really inconsistent online journal of an otherwise occupied old guy. Facebook, LinkedIn, Club Penguin...social networking is a big commitment that I'm not sure I'm really up to.

Nevertheless, to maintain some semblance of understanding of the world around me and "the buzz" I do have token place markers in each of these worlds - okay, the Club Penguin is vicariously through my children, as I peak over their shoulders.