Well, Papabam and Lilli took off today for home, and we responded with naps all around (except Bella who disappeared to Jenny's), storing up our energies for a return to normalcy tomorrow: Bella goes back to school, I return to a regular workweek (but no travel until Saturday - this will make a solid 4 weeks with the family), Isaac goes back to ECFE (tues) and Pamela returns to her household machinations - looks like the third floor is next on the list for attack, and unfortunately most of that stuff is mine.
On Friday Papa, Lilli, Bella, Jenny, and I set off to Big Brain Comics in downtown Mpls - a amall independent comic store that I don't mind patronizing. Walked out with two big bags of stuff, including more ScoobyDoos for Bella, as well as some new Donald Duck and Scrooge comics, which we started reading. I picked up bound volumes of "the Astonishing X-Men" which was a 24 issue series written by ubergeek scribe Joss Whedon (pure pleasure, with great art to match). I also got a reprint of a comic I had read obsessively in high school: Howard Chaykin's American Flagg. I'll just say it's a fabulous time capsule of the early 1980s in many many ways, and it brought me right back in time to when I bought them new at Schinders or Comic City... and tried to imagine what my parents thought if they flipped through them (there were some pretty risque things in there!)
On the fitness: Starting tomorrow (Monday the 5th) I'll be teaching 6am 3 days a week when my travel schedule allows. Two BodyAttack, and one BodyPump. In the past 7 days, I've done or taught 7 1 hour classes, and I'm on track to do five more in 5 days. It's crazy. But I'm also impressed that I'm able to teach BodyAttack at all - it's a killer cardio workout, and I have to be up there doing it (with better form than the whole class for good modeling) AND coaching it? But I've done it several times now, and will do it regularly for the forseeable future.
In another front: Paul from Seattle and I have come up with a lot of business ideas, which we kick around and usually find some flaw with and let settle. Often the flaw is "we don't have time or the exact skills to do this". But sometimes we find an actual achilles heel in a plan, and decide we dodged a bullet. Exactly 2 years ago, we started work on a "Social Network Aggregator" - one portal you log into and it has your messages and info from Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendster, and whatnot.
After a week, we figured out a little problem: Facebook and the rest don't charge users: They make their money off of the advertising offered on their sites, hoping that as you're looking at friend pages you'll click on an ad or two along the way. Whether that's a valid business model or not (I have personally never ever clicked on a google ad for anything... sorry google) you understand that a product that offers the INFORMATION on Facebook without any of the rest of the content (including the ads) is probably not going to be looked at very favorably by those companies. We decided that yes, it's possible to make this, but you're just asking for trouble. We let the idea drop.
Sure enough, two years later, some guys actually built this product, got venture capital, got a working beta, and are getting their tushes sued by Facebook. We'll see how it turns out, but it proves two things: 1) we can come up with good ideas, and even if we don't do them, they're viable for others, and 2) we were right to leave that one in the hopper.
In other news: The Mini is gone... turned in to the dealership. Bella had a hard time of it, but seems past it. The ice melt and subsequent skating-rink-ification of the entire world last week made the rear-wheel drive Jaguar a bit of a challenge and for an instant I wondered if I had made the right choice... until the seat warmer kicked in and I decided "I might wind up in a ditch, but I'll be damn comfortable there.".
Finally, Pamela is turning the corner on her sinus infection, but it was a long few days for her: It's very hard when family is here and she's not feeling 100%. I gave her extra "poor dears" for her trouble. Hopefully things will keep getting better for her this week.
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