Yes this is the second time...

Yes this is the second time I have posted about cleaning our garage so cars could be parked in it. However, the first time was more of a "stack everything on top of everything else until you can see the floor." Well as you can imagine as soon as the holidays came the stacks came down and never went back up. We needed a solution so Adam took charge.

He found these industrial racks, rented a van, picked them & and a work bench up, then assembled it all. Now that's a great husband.

We needed a work bench because next month he and my dad are going to start the crown moulding in our house, I have a million magazine pictures cut out ready to go. I am SO excited!!!!!! My dad did most of that kind of work in our house in Fresno and it will be awesome for him to teach Adam.

First things first, you all care more about Annie than the garage so here were her day's highlights.  She wore her cousin Ainsleighs boots for the first time and kept them on!

Daddy and his van, the pieces were too long for our car.

Annie and Mommy watched Daddy work.  Annie is wondering where her Daddy got the spiffy new Van, and if it has a DVD player in the back seat for her.

She made funny faces while she had her treat, and we did more crafts.

 The beginning.  Well, the parts that weren't so messy we could show them.

Todd, this is for you.  This is the wedding ketubah you almost tossed last summer.  As you can see it's a good thing you didn't as we have put it to good use ;-).

Adam putting it together.  Each of these shelves holds two thousand lbs.  Think I can buy that many holiday decorations?  Answer.  NO.

The new work bench!  8ft of pure maple and steel manliness!  We will eventually get one of those rolling tool chests to go under it.  (Father's Day maybe?) and one of those hooks board thingies (that's the technical term of course) to go above it.

I told Adam the wood looked too nice to work on and he laughed at me.  Bring on the crown moulding!

 

This is Mommy's potting and work bench.  It does not have hammers and saws but rather wrapping papers and ribbon.

 Another reason these are great is you can go two containers deep, which if you have the depth/room is really awesome.  Costco baby!

 As Annie would say... Ta Da!

We did manage to throw a lot out but we came across this Rawlings brief case that Eric gave Adam and want to give it away, it's too nice to toss.  They are not cheap to purchase so if no one wants it we will donate it.  If you would like it, let us know, it is really nice leather:

Dancing Queen

Mommy likes to listen to music while she works. This morning Annie decided to do some interpretive dancing. This kid CRACKS me up! Sorry for the low quality. The only camera I had nearby was my phone. *Shocking I know.

Once upon a time...

Annie has become quite the little reader. Clearly she can't actually read but she is fantastic at telling great stories of her own based on the pictures.

I love her little imagination. She makes me laugh so much every day now!

Telling us an Annie original!

Mirror mirror on the wall...

Dare to dream?

So we all know I love cold rainy days, and if I don't have to drive in it, I adore snow.  Now clearly we aren't going to be sledding down our driveway, but could I dare to dream it might snow?

My hopes aren't high, but they are there.  For the first time ever I see a snowflake on my weather.com forecast.  I will keep you posted!  If it doesn't snow at least my tulips will be happy.  I keep flashing back to that scene from Father of the Bride where they are in the yard after it snowed defrosting tulips with a hair dryer. 

Parent find of the Year

I had posted before about these craft kits I bought on Amazon.com for Ainsleigh and Annie. And now that we have made a few of them I cant say enough about how fun they are. Annie is not advanced enough to do more than color, paint, and glue. So having these premade pieces to use (in addition to her own creative time) is a blast b/c she LOVES the end product.

The kids get to do glue sticks, place stickers, and place items together. There is little to no cutting and Annie loves them. For a rainy day they are perfect. Two thumbs up.

http://www.amazon.com/Alex-Toys-Giant-Busy-Box/dp/B001AQDA50/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=toys-and-games&qid=1298325516&sr=8-1

Each craft comes in its own little bag so there is no confusion about parts and the pieces are contained.  We got three kits.

The Social Network

Okay so I watched The Social Network with Adam last night.  We made it almost all the way through it with Annie in the room playing with her own toys.  That's a parental milestone. But that's not the point of my post.

I loved loved loved this movie.  But not really because it was that great of a movie.  I loved it because it reminded me so much of life here in the Valley in 1998-2001.  The VC's were crazy for smart  kids to work on business ideas for this new thing called the "Internet".

The best line of the movie which I firmly believe was "If the Winklevoss twins had invented Facebook, they would have invented Facebook."  Too true.  And for me that's the end of the debate.  Zuckerberg seems jerky, in the movie and in real life.  But he executed on it.  We all have had our "Could have, Would haves, Should haves."

In 1997 Mark Woodward, his brother, and I started a company that would allow Real Estate agents to get real time listings on the Internet.  Accessrealestate.com.  Mark's brother worked at a Real Estate firm where they would exchange MLS listings by fax.  This is no lie, we started working on "Zillow", online MLS, etc.  But we gave up, because well, we were 20.  Such a great idea, but we weren't the ones.  Damn.

Then about 2 years later we had a number of friends start again.  Money was being thrown out windows in the Valley and kids our age were getting it.  My top 3 favorite start ups my friends started are below. 

We had Utellretail.com, a supply chain management startup that my roommate Zaw, and his friends Aswan and Ameen started.  Zaw and I shared an apartment in Palo Alto and it was great.  We always were having business meetings in the family room over beers, trading ideas and talking strategy.  Just like The Social Network minus the naked girls and drugs. It did not succeed but Zaw is now the CEO of a hugely successful mobile advertising company.  (http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/10/a-look-at-4info-the-king-of-sms/  http://alerts.4info.com/ )

The next is Steamtunnels.com.   Three friends of mine all started Steamtunnels.com.  This one kills me because one of its founders was a fairly good friend and still is someone I keep in touch with, ironically (you will see why) over Facebook.

Aaron, Tuyen, and Lawrence started Steamtunnels which WAS Facebook but the school (Stanford) shut it down.  This was before Zuckerberg. They weren't like the twins because they actually got it live.  Don't believe me?  Check out this recent NYT article and radio interview: http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/01/11/a-social-network-way-ahead-of-its-time/, and  http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_021011_full_show.mp3/view   and this one http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1999/09/23/MN55114.DTL&type=printable.  I remember them working on this so vividly.  It should have been them because all three of them are so much nicer than Zuckerberg seems.  Aaron now is CEO of a company that works in my space, Adroll, and Tuyen and Lawrence both run their own firms.

Lastly was my start-up.  Nightscene.com.  I had bought Thenightscene.com domain as a start up idea the summer of 1999.  Kerstin and I worked on it a bit and sort of lost track of it.  She then went to work for a start up in the disc storage space started by another one of our friends. 

A few months later an angel investor reached out and wanted to invest to start up the domain as Nightscene.com.  Apparently he and Sean Parker thought the same about the "The."  I ran it with a few friends for about a year before we ran out of money.  I can say I had two official meetings at Garage.  Garage Ventures was a VC famous for funding seed money to start ups.  Our last meeting was scheduled for the day the market crashed.  Needles to say, it didn't happen.  When it crashed I saw grown men crying in bars in downtown Palo Alto.  What a mess. 

Our ambition sort of makes me laugh now.   But as my dad said, and it stuck with me, "sometimes ignorance of obstacles is exactly what you need to succeed."  I had tons of optimism and PLENTY of business ignorance.  But I think my dad was very right.  You need that to really believe your idea can make it and not focus on how reality can stop you.

Nightscene.com was a combination of Yelp, mobile geographical advertising (which didn't exist then), and Citysearch.  But the bottom line is if I had invented any of those things, I would have invented them.  There is nothing left of the site but one indexed page of our placeholder on the web archives.  http://web.archive.org/web/20001026124328/http://www.nightscene.com/.

I took some pictures of my pictures and put them up.  This is Kerstin and I blowing out our idea for the first time at Sand Dollar beach.  The first version of our Nightscene logo cracks me up.  

I did finally join one successful start up, QuinStreet, which I have been with for nearly 11 years.  I joined when we were very very small and now we are a large publicly traded company that I am very proud of.  Was it my idea?  Nope.  But maybe the next one will be....

Snow, fits, four girls & brunch.

Today was great, I got to do all of my favorite things, spend time with family, brunching with my girls, and shopping.  Add in one fabulous bloody mary (Lori's was bacon flavored?!?) and I was happy as a clam.

Are these not the saddest eyes you have ever seen?  This was taken after Annie threw a one hour fit b/c she didnt want to wear this sweater.  No one ever said everything here was fantastically perfect.  What a morning!

A walk with Grammy calmed her down.

The weather here has been NUTS.  The mountain behind my house had snow on it!  (Granted its only at the very tops of the hills but still, it's really not that high!)  I wonder if it snowed here in the middle of the night.  Bummer if it did and I missed it.  My mom says I should move to the boonies because the mountains, cows, and snow get me excited beyond belief.  I think I am in the perfect place because I get the mountains, snow, cows AND Neiman Marcus.  Ideal don't you think?

My parents and I.  You know before I had Annie a picture with just me would have been exciting to them ;-), now, it was just bait to get Annie to come over.

This was as close as we got to a good picture of them.  Oh Annie.

My girlsbrunch, brunch is a highly under celebrated meal time.  Although I am not sure this qualified as we ate it at 1, and other than a pancake we all at lunch food.  Except we had some great bloody marys.  (Rupal we missed you!)

Tonight is movie night.  The Social Network.  Can't wait!

Tomorrow we plan to work on the garage and next weekend we have some fun dinner parties to go to.  Enjoy the long weekend.

Grammy, Gramps and Annie

My parents came by this weekend for a visit. We have not stopped since they've been here! My mom brought amazing homemade chicken enchiladas, and, as a separate meal, braised short ribs.  It's been pouring here so much that there was snow on the foothills around the house!  The food was perfect for the cold weather.

Today we went to the mall,  Mommy and Grammy, and got mani-pedis at my salon.  Such a treat!  The boys stayed home and painted with Annie.  You will note the blue hair later on.

For dinner we went out to our favorite Chinese joint and Annie was well-behaved.  Afterwards, we took Annie to her very first 31 Flavors and got her an ice cream clown for dessert.  She loved it!  Pics are below as well.

A wonderful, family-filled weekend.  Feeling very content!

Annie, Adam and Gramps happily playing trains Friday night.

 

The boys adoring Annie.

Our girls! All so happy.

Mommy happy to have such a great family activity to do all together.  Everyone helped.

Annie was amazing with the frosting tubes.  I am so proud of her.

Completed sugar cookies!  So cute they deserved a silver platter!

Oh boy, my first ice cream cone from 31 Flavors! Score! Mint chip and looks like a clown to boot - did I just win the lottery?

Thanks Grammy! My first ice cream cone was yummy!