I've had a pretty big year. And now, as everyone does their 2010 retrospectives, I'll throw my own into the mix.
2010 started out with a lot of promise for me. I had just completed the Executive Program in Sustainable Management at Presidio Graduate School and had a pretty good idea for a sustainability-focused social networking website that I was gearing up to launch. More importantly, I was also anxiously waiting for China to give me and my wife the green light to go pick up the son we were adopting. It had been almost a year since we started the process and we had been hopeful to have him home before Christmas 2009.
Oh, and in January, I fried the alternator in the 1970 Jaguar E-Type I had been working on. Little did I realize that the time I drove the car right before doing in the alternator would be the last time I would drive the car for a very long while. I still have the car, but it has sat idle in my garage for the entire year now--which means it produced less CO2 than my wife's Prius. So there. I just need some parts and spare time to get it running again. Sadly, finding the spare time is proving more difficult than finding the parts for a 40-year-old British sports car.
Early in the Spring, we took our daughter skiing a fair amount, I started coaching her T-Ball team, I re-discovered my love of fly fishing and I kept plugging away both at getting my web idea going and getting my son home from China.
Later in the Spring, our family was struck by the deaths of my oldest, and favorite, uncle and, less than five weeks later, my youngest, and favorite, aunt. She died suddenly on Earth Day. The bright moment from those losses is that I got to re-connect with some extended family members. Also in the Spring, I ended up scuttling my social network idea, finally yielding when a friend bluntly told me, "The world doesn't need another social network." And he's right. But that didn't stop me from coming up with another idea in sustainability, but the new idea needed quite a bit of incubating. What didn't need further incubation was the paperwork to adopt our son. We received news that we could travel to China to get him!
Summer kicked off with us getting ready to go to China at the end of June. We took our then-6-year-old daughter with us. I blogged daily during our trip, so won't go into the details here. Suffice it to say that since we got home, our lives have been in a constantly evolving state of transition. Now that we're six months together, our son has adjusted amazingly well. As for the rest of us, I think we're just getting our legs back under us. Note that I've been somewhat neglectful in updating this blog...
In the Fall, and after taking 3 months of Adoption Leave, I left the investment bank where I had worked for more than 11 years and joined a friend at a small institutional equity research sales & trading firm. Mine is not the most glamorous work around, but it does afford me certain liberties such as having time to spend bonding with our new son who turned 3 in September. And by "bonding" I mean "taking him fishing a lot."
And so we roll into Winter. Christmas came about three weeks too soon. I ended up scuttling my second sustainability idea--but am working on idea number three now. I also launched my personal website tied to this blog. BluePlanetDad.com went live on Christmas Eve.
In sum, 2010 was a year of fits and starts. Or maybe fits and almost-start-ups. Or perhaps fits and fresh starts. Regardless, with a new child in the family mix, there have been plenty of fits. Hopefully, 2011 brings more starts than fits. I'm confident it will.
May you have a healthy and prosperous new year.
BluePlanet Dad
