In summary, these are the basic problems that we face (in no particular order):

1. Who’s your target audience? Do you know who to send an email to or do you just send to lists, or keep adding CC’s until someone replies? 
2. Do you include people who don’t have anything further to add or do you just keep them on for the fun of the ride? 
3. Is what your writing about something that’s better suited by: A) walking up and talking to them, B) through an instant message, C) a telephone call (yes it’s that box on your desk with a handle that has a numbered keypad and voices come out of a little speaker)?
4. Do you fork your emails to allow for narrow paths of communication to specific audience members? 
5. Does your email signature give you the need to feel important? 
6. Cover your ass (CYA), do you do this often through email?
7. Do you expect your emails to be read and responded to promptly? When did email become instant messaging?
8. Do you misuse the IMPORTANT flag on your emails? Are your emails more important than others? And do you realize that the email that you sent and the Outlook notification that pops up has now interrupted my thought process that will in fact take 15 minutes for me to refocus back on the task I was working on? 
9. Emails are changing from an asynchronous form of communication to a synchronous form.

Phew, that’s quite a list. But let’s give it a go and see where it takes us. The first point is fairly straight forward. When we send emails, we often either do or are subject to pure laziness or sheer ineptitude when it comes to who does this email NEED to go to. I put need in caps as this is a fairly important fact as many times, dare I say mostly all the time, the people on an email do not need to be copied in on that particular email. For example, if you are going to send a question out to a wide audience, yes there may be times when this is valid, but wouldn’t it be better to IM or call or talk with someone on that team to get their perspective on who the right person would be? This would obviously require a bit of leg work, but the end result is clear–you get your email to the right person the first time and without the insane process of interrupting everyone’s thought process on a particular team.

Point 1: Do your homework and ensure that everyone on the email thread HAS to be included. If they don’t, don’t include them in the original email, or forward them the sent email as an FYI.

The second point comes from the fact that many times an email becomes a conversation. This in itself isn’t a bad thing, but it means that during the course of that conversation it will probably be the case that you need input from other people in order to progress that conversation. This point will also include points 4 and 6 from the list. For example if you have an email between 2 people (we’ll call them Person A and Person B), and you need input from Person C, today you’d expect to see that Person C is just CC’ed onto the email thread and then from that point forward, forever will they continue to receive replies on the email even when they have no further action or a real interest in the conversation. All that continues to do is to provide additional distraction to Person C who just wants to get back to what they were doing and for the conversation to move on. I’ll use the analogy of an office. Person A and Person B walk to the office of Person C to ask a question. Person C answers the question, but instead of moving on Person A and Person B have the rest of that conversation in the doorway of Person C’s office. Obviously this makes for a very distracting situation for Person C as they are trying to get back to what they were doing and all they here is the jabbering of Person A and Person B. So what do you do? The correct situation would be when the email conversation goes to the point where you need input from Person C, fork the conversation. FORWARD that thread to Person C, get the reply, and then FORWARD that reply back to Person B and continue your conversation. This way Person C provides their input in writing, you have CYA’ed because it’s in an email, and now the conversation can continue with the input from Person C.

Point 2: Fork emails when appropriate to ensure a focused conversation with a narrow list of recipients. Recipients who need to provide input should never be included on the main thread.

Point 3 is one that hits close to home. I can’t explain the lengths of perturbedness (yes I made up a word) that I feel with this particular point. Email should be an asynchronous form of communication–meaning that when you send an email it is meant to pass a chunk of information and once digested on the other end a meaningful response sent back. What we find is that emails are used as a fire and forget method that is used for CYA and to pass the buck in terms of the work. Many people find nowadays that tweet conversations are happening via emails. We all know what that is, the situation where emails are flying back and forth and it’s more like a 130 character tweet than a substantive email chunk. In these situations a person should opt for a couple of different things.

For example, in a situation where emails are flying back and forth amongst a large group of people, a conference call should be quickly organized, people jump onto the bridge, have a discussion, create action items and move forward. This could also be done if everyone is on an instant message platform like Skype, to create an ad-hoc Skype group and have the discussion there.

Or in the example of going back and forth between 2 people, those two people should instant message or have a direct conversation in person or over the phone, and then once they have resolved their issues come back to email with a summary and a plan to move forward.

Or in the example of a quick question, pick up the phone, instant message, or walk up to that person and ask your question.

Point 3: Email should be used as the last resort method of communication when all other methods, i.e. instant message, phone call, and in-person have been exhausted. For visual learners, I have provided a flow chart to follow:

Email signatures were previously used to provide brief details about the sender, such as a telephone number, company name and position. But nowadays I see that email signatures have become more and more elaborate. People are including QR codes, logo’s, HTML coding, warnings about privacy, legal comments, think before you print, etc etc. But also signatures are becoming more and more elaborate as people append more data to their position. For example, it was previously acceptable to put your general position, say a Manager, or Technical Support or even just the department that your with. But now you see people who have these long elaborate titles including irrelevant professional abbreviations.

Point 4: Keep your signature short and simple. In most cases you can DELETE your signature from your reply and just put your name. If people don’t need to see the extra information, save them the bytes and don’t send it.

The last point I’ll cover as I’ve touched on a few other points in the above is the importance of emails. As you can see from the flow above, email should be used in the case when someone isn’t available or when a large chunk of information needs to be sent over. The assumption and expectation should be that the person will need to read and digest the information and form a proper response. In cases when dealing with important situations or time sensitive situations, I’ve noticed that people will throw the important flag on an email and expect this to mean “see my email first!” as if it where the kid in class that’s jumping up and down yelling “pick me!”.

Point 5: Important should still have the expectation of non-immediate, and used in rare situations when the content of the email requires a critical review.

Because these devices are getting to be as powerful as the computer I’m typing this blog out on, more and more people are opting for consolidation when it comes to their devices. For example, not long ago it was very common for a business to provide you with a Blackberry so you could get your emails on the go. Most people would then carry a Blackberry and a purpose built phone that was their personal telephone. This seemed very reasonable as the two devices had two separate functions. Nowadays we want everything and the kitchen sink with us at all times. Our smartphones replace the camera, computer, regular mobile phone, gps device, and watch. Most of us are now in situations where we want one device to rule them all, meaning we don’t want to carry around more than what we absolutely need. Because of how fast the market has adapted to smartphones, it is truly easy to get Exchange to sync on my Android or iPad as well as my Google Apps for my personal email.

But wait. As more and more people do this in business, I am finding a growing trend of…. lazy people. Yes that’s right. People who think that setting up their work email on their smartphone is a super cool and smart thing to do (it is, I’m not criticizing that per say) but then choose not to change their signatures. I can’t tell you how many emails I get now that say “Sent from my iPhone” or “Sent from my HTC <Device Name>”, honestly this is something that should be done right after adding your work mailbox.

So please do everyone a favor and change your email signatures. I did it as the first thing I did on both my HTC Sensation and my iPad, so there’s no excuse!

In todays day and age, its more and more difficult to find people that you can look up to. The days of honorable people like Jack Welch and Warren Buffet are few and far between. Corporate America is far more concerned about aggressive behavior that fuels young naive individuals to climb over each other in the pursuit of climbing the corporate ladder. Corporate America is more concerned with the bottom line–especially in this economy with the health and wellbeing of the workers coming secondary. Learning and growing as a professional is now up to the individual through self determination and self awareness to their own progress or lack there of. All of this leads to a situation where finding people in the work place that act and behave as mentors is dwindling faster than the housing market.

In reality this is quite sad. It use to be the mentors in business that saw the young raw potential and blew that spark into life that in turn helped the business but also drove that person to be more successful. Taking a page from “paying it forward” that person would in turn do the same later in life when they get the opportunity to do something similar for another.

Looking back in my professional career I can think of someone who was a mentor to me. Someone who when I first met him made me think, “thats who I want to be like”. The way he treated people, treated customers, his business acumen, and the way he carried himself. All of these qualities I saw and wanted to be more like. In fact I can say with certainty that the majority of my early career was working towards emulating those talents and trying to build myself more like that. The saying goes, “imitation is the highest form of flattery” and part of being a mentor is having others look up to you and to in many cases, trying to be like you.

But on the other hand, what happens when your mentor falls from grace? Someone that you look up to having a serious of decisions that results in them hitting rock bottom? Whats it like to see that person again after several years expecting to see one thing and then you finding something else.

Its disheartening to say the least. Its like getting told that there is no Santa Clause or Easter Bunny. Not only is this a tell that says the economy is still not in an upswing when someone as talented as he is can’t get back on his feet, but with the already lack of mentors in the workplace its one less person to care and look out for the next generation.

I’ll be sad to see them leave, to find a better opportunity and to spend more time with their family. But in the end we all need to do what’s best for each of our own situations. The saying goes that whenever we have reached the bottom there is only one way to go but up. I’m a firm believer in this and believe that one’s own character will in the end out shine any adversities that they may have faced.

For me, it was curious why a delay was necessary, but more over what the impact it has on the CFPB to delay his appointment. The reality of the situation is that without Cordray at the helm of the CFPB they are in effect and agency that cannot carry out their mission. When it came to bailing out wall street there was little hesitation by Washington to move quickly to help address a problem. Why is it then when regular consumers need help to provide some fences and safe guards to prevent companies from taking advantage of Americans, do politicians do everything in their power to make this appointment a faint priority?

With the appointment Richard can start the process of taking control of the CFPB and move forward initiatives that were held up as most of the actions that the CFPB can take require a director to be named and functioning in the role of the job.

But moreover I would like to see further action taken by Washington to stabilize the housing market–the very thing that was at the heart of the worse financial crisis since the great depression (as was voiced by Obama in his speak earlier today). We see a runaway train here that is eating at the very foundation of the American dream. More and more Americans are either forced to or making the conscious decision to short sale or foreclose on their property. But in doing so, dramatically reduce the prices of all the homes around them. In fact in our housing market your home is only worth what similar types of homes have sold in your area. Pretty soon we will be in a situation where good law abiding Americans who’s dream to own a home and who did the right thing by standing by their financial commitments will be in situations where their homes are worth half or less than the value of purchase. How is this right? We need stricter laws and enforcement to make it so the rules apply to all or more people. Or make it so those who did the right thing can have some benefit and be able to get out from under their homes if they need to move or relocate.

I plan on starting a discussion with my representatives to urge them to consider legislation that would provide regular Americans a way to relocate and be able to help drive the housing market by stimulating more sales. For instance, if your home was purchased within the last 10 years and the purchase price was $300,000 and now is worth $175,000 because of foreclosures and short sales and a complete lack of regular home sales, you should be able to apply and qualify for a program where you can take advantage of short sale prices and the difference between the sale price and the remainder of the mortgage would be subsidized by the government. Then over time if the price of the home goes up, the government would be entitled to the difference up to the value of the original loan. This means if that same home over the next 10 years returns to a value greater than the original loan value, say it was $250,000, and sells for $320,000 then the government would get the difference between the original short sale and the loan value, and the person who sold it would get the difference of $250,000 and $320,000. Its not a perfect system, but at least it takes the current behavior that is already happening and put some fences around it so more people can take advantage of it. Think of it as rebooting the housing market. Additional stipulations could be put into place that in order to quality you have to then in turn purchase another home, and/or be financially responsible in other areas to minimize fraud. Nonetheless we need more options to allow hard working Americans to have options that are quickly being taken away at the hands of less than honest or responsible people.

But what’s entirely more comical is to hear that just recently the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and it’s various divisions: FEMA, TSA and US Customs and Border Patrol, that these agencies all received a substantial increase to their 2012 budget. Now how is it that we hear the media go on and on about the politicking that occurs on other spending issues, and yet we don’t hear a peep when it comes to a silent passing of this increase? How is it that in a day and age where we need to look at ways to shrink the size of our government, to cut the fat as it where, we are spending more money on things that honestly we don’t need.

I’ve posted about this topic before, but there needs to be some honest discussions in Washington as to whether or not we need the TSA. Clearly there are news outlets and political officials who also must have asked this question. But can we say that we are or can be safer by spending money’s that by all rights we don’t necessarily have, to provide the TSA with:

• 250 additional advanced imaging technology (AIT) devices,
• 140 new behavior detection officers,
• 12 additional multi-modal Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) teams,
• 20 additional explosives detection canine teams,
• 53 air cargo security staffers

All for an additional $153 million dollars more to tax paying Americans. Wait, am I the only one that see’s a problem here? First off, as pointed out in the HSToday article, many airports already have AIT devices but are not used because they don’t have the staff to man them. Clearly the TSA needs to have an organization shakedown as time and time again I go through the lines and see TSA agents just standing about. Perhaps the issue isn’t sheer manpower but a lack of specialized skill sets to take on the really important tasks.

For example, I can see a reduction in headcount, that is followed by an increase in training and hiring of specialized people and focus more energies on stuff that is going to prevent terrorist attacks, than to have TSA agents wheeling around bins from one end of the security line to the other. Or someone standing there to direct people when to walk through. Clearly these are not people that we need to be spending $40k/yearly on. Look at how in Chicago you can go through the security check points to get onto the L-train. You put your ticket in, a turnstyle let’s one person through. This isn’t rocket science here. If the issue is to turn us people into cattle and herd us through the lines, there are ways that this can be done without the intervention of people and will allow the TSA to focus their efforts on the manpower that is required to carry out their duties.

In this case, I would have liked to see the House and Senate both call on Janet Napolitano, head of the DHS, to find ways to cut $153 million before spending more. Isn’t this what the Speaker of the House John Boehner keeps calling for? He’s not opposed to tax increases, but he wants to see similar cuts in spending. I want to see this same philosophy be used for all money considerations in Washington. If the DHS wants more money, they have to find ways to fund it, reduce other programs, more their processes more efficient, etc etc. In other words, be more creative than just throwing money at a problem.

TL:DR, spending it out of control in Washington. There’s no question about it. This Administration, Congress, and Senate are all responsible. As much as one political party will say and do just about anything to say it’s the other party’s fault, clearly there is ample blame to say it’s everyone’s fault and now everyone’s got to find a way to come together, compromise and make some serious reforms. All federal departments should undergo cross-departmental scrutiny to understand how they are using their money and justify it. For example, in the Peace Corp, they aren’t allowed to spend any of their budget on food items for themselves. This sounds like a great idea. They wanted to have bottled water delivered to their office, what did they do, they put a water pool together and people contributed $X dollars of their own money and they get bottled water delivered. These types of common sense practices should be universal across all agencies and departments of the government. How much would we save if people had to ask themselves, do I really need this, or is it just a convenience?

We need to urge our political representatives to stop the business as usual practices when it comes to agency and department spending. Treat those spendings as you have treated all the American facing ones. The tag line that’s commonly used is that politicians are looking to “Cut and Grow”, cut spending, and grow the economy. How is it that this Act cuts spending or grows the economy? If  we use that as a litmus test as we have for other things, i.e. the deficit ceiling or the payroll tax extension, this act fails on both fronts. It doesn’t cut the agency’s spending, it actually grows it, and it doesn’t necessarily create more jobs it creates more Government jobs. I’ve always been a firm believer and this is where I will side more on the Republican views than Democrat–jobs should never be created by Government and should instead always be grown through the private sector. Governments responsibility is to guide the ship. Steer this country with sound policy and legislation that allows businesses to get back on track. Will businesses be hiring in 2012 if there is an outstanding question on whether or not they will have a payroll tax increase from the previous year? Probably not? And I don’t buy into the rhetoric that it should have been 12 months instead of 2. The question on the table is should these cuts be permanent or not? Period. Give people the certainty of knowing that ou rGovernment is passing legislation and policy that makes sense and allows them to forecast months down the road to know what they can or should or will be doing. But Government should not be creating jobs–specially when an outside look in says that this department, the TSA in particular, needs to trim the fat. Find new ways of making it better, or paraphrasing the late Steve Jobs, make it so that people will love it.

Take for instance the Federal Air Marshal Service. Part of this service is to provide trained personnel on aircraft in a way that people don’t know if they are there or not. This service is at the cost of $966 million dollars. WTF. The idea behind this service is clear, had a trained Marshal been on one of the planes on 9/11, maybe, the outcome would have been different. But more so aren’t we just saying that we want a pair of eyes and ears on the planes? Wouldn’t it be far more cost effective to outfit planes with video surveillance and have a centralized surveillance monitoring center that had eyes on each and every plane in the sky? Planes are soon going to be wifi enabled, doesn’t that make for this type of surveillance a more cost effective solution?

Cut and Grow Washington, you need to start listening to your own words and playing by the rules that you have set forth. You have time and time again this year shown us that you will put the country in jeopardy, to effect changes that cut and grow. But when it comes to your own backyard, I don’t see you playing the same game here. Is it the unwritten rule that we only scrutinize the public policy’s and internal policy’s go unchallenged? Is there a hands-off approach when it comes to certain agency’s? Is there a sense of entitlement that prevents these types of changes from occurring because of political clout and/or backing? Who runs Washington and are they working by the people for the people? These questions we all need to ask, but more so we need answers from Washington on how they plan on Cutting and Growing when it comes to their own houses.

It’s very easy in this day and age to talk about how economy is bad and how things are looking bleak in Washington and throughout America, but it’s important to remember too that we are also quite fortunate and even during these times of need, should be looking for ways to help others and to share good fortunate throughout the world.

Obviously bird watching doesn’t count:

Because at the end of the day, he’s just a lazy bum!

It’s been since August that I last logged into WoW and looking back I think that the challenges that other players are currently facing with the content and each other, lends me to believe that the right choice was made to take a step back and reflect.

When I log onto Google Reader this morning and see posts like the one from Beru @ Falling Leaves and Wings talking about the challenges that she is personally facing, it reinforces the belief that I have that Blizzard has made some really difficult choices with this expansion and the net result of those choices may be a larger percentage of player burn-out than in any other expansion.

Now contrasting this view, I have recently started playing Runes of Magic. I had played this on and off again, but only recently did I find that an old friend has also been playing this game and runs his own guild. So in natural order, I dusted off my name and created a healer on the Osha realm and I have to admit, Runes of Magic is a very nice refreshment from WoW.To compare and contrast the games, I provide the following list of things I believe RoM does that is an advantage over WoW:

1. Sense of community. It was previously told to me that WoW did have a sense of community up to the point that they introduced the Looking for Dungeon tool. This tool allowed a person to queue up and within their battlegroup (collection of various realms) they could enter as either a tank, healer, or DPS and with random players go through an instance. Before this tool, people had to find others on their same realm to form a group and queue for that instance or travel to that instance. In many ways the LFD tool was a benefit, as it allowed more people to see the content, especially if they weren’t part of larger friend or in-game social networks or guilds. But on the other hand, it breed a sense of isolation as it meant that people were no longer interacting the same way with others on the same realm. You didn’t have the same bonds of friendship and reliance. For instance, if there was a really good tank on the realm, they weren’t acknowledged as such and asked to join particular parties because of their status on the realm. Mainly you find this within the guild itself that various classes are acknowledged, but outside of the guild, it wasn’t as apparent. In RoM, there is no LFD. Groups to get into an instance are required to be put together all on the same realm and you have to travel or portal yourself to that instance. Generally I find that there is more of a sense of realm on Osha as you know who the good players are, the people who are at the top of their game, the people who are just trolls, or generally who you can count on for pushing new content. Also and I’ll make a bigger reference later on, but because of the economy and the way that is setup, you must make friends, especially if you are a diamond trader as you can royally get screwed if you get a diamond troller. This sense of community is much stronger in RoM and reminds me of what others have told me who had played WoW before the LFD tool how things were.
2. Diamonds and Rubies. No this isn’t being materialistic, but in RoM since the game is free to play, it uses micro-transactions in-game to make money. Now I’m usually on the fence about these types of games, but there are two schools of thought on this that I’ve noticed. First, yes you can absolutely play the game without buying anything from the in-game store. But the game isn’t as rewarding and you can’t enjoy any end-game content without the items from the in-game store. Now initially this seems like some players would be left out, but bring in the diamond traders. You will have people who spend real money to purchase items for other players for in-game gold. Now this is sort of an underworld in MMO’s that most know about and developers mostly choose to ignore, but for players like me who don’t want to farm and earn millions of gold on their own, the options in WoW were either to be broke, be lucky, or pay a gold farmer. In RoM, if you are someone who just earns a lot of gold, you can pay diamond traders to buy things with diamonds and send them in-game. This I will admit is one of the better things I like about RoM. For a person like me, on day 1, can I purchase a lot of diamonds, and then sell them to others on the game to make a quick bit of coin–legitimately. Everybody wins.
3. Quests are enjoyable. You actually have to figure out the quests. And each quest while it has the inherent “go here, get this, bring it back, win” feel, doesn’t feel like grinding. And each zone builds on the next zone so it’s actually in your interest to finish out ALL the quests in a zone. This was unheard of in WoW as each zone you’d have quests that were just impossible, several tens of levels higher than you, or took you to another part of the world all together.
4. Consistent gear. Gear stats between Chapters (expansions) of RoM are generally consistent with the early levels of gear. Instead of massive class rebalances such as stam packing healers who then need different gear going from Vanilla to Burning Crusade to Lich King, the gear is fairly evenly stated and as you get into higher levels you add stats instead of have to changing the ones you were using before.
5. Modifying gear. This is by far one of the best advantages of the game. You have tiers of gear as well as stats. WoW has tried to do this with reforging where you can take one of your major stats and reforge into part of the major stat and part of another stat. But in RoM, this goes to the next level. You can tier your gear from a lower tier to a higher tier and push ALL the stats up in level as well as finding all kinds of different combinations of runes and make the runes more powerful in level and then adding them as stats (up to 6!) to each piece of gear. On top of that you can add individual runes to gear either through existing rune slots or through drilling more rune slots with items from the in-game store. What this does and you’ll see this theme across many different aspects of the game, it creates a sort of uniqueness where a player may want more of a particular stat and choose to go one way whereas another may have a different spec or play style and choose to go a completely different direction with their stats.
6. Classes. This is another really interesting benefit of RoM to WoW–you get multiple classes. First you get a Primary and Secondary, but unlike WoW, you play them both at the same time. Whichever is your primary has all of the primary skills and a subset of the secondary skills along with specialized elite skills. If you switch them, the reverse is applied, i.e. if your a Priest/Scout, then you get major heals and ranged weapons for offensive abilities. For a Scout/Priest, you get all your offensive ability with buffs and heals. Additionally when you hit level 30 you get a third class, so in the previous example if you are a Priest/Scout and you choose a Knight, you can either have: Priest/Scout, Priest/Knight, Scout/Priest, Scout/Knight, Knight/Scout, Knight/Priest. WTF! Seriously this is hugely beneficial as one toon can be MANY different things. It’s the thing I hated the most about WoW in that you had to level up alts in order to play different classes. Not necessarily the case here. If you want a heals, dps, and tank in one toon, you could do that very easily.
7. Professions. For some that I knew in WoW, professions were like crack. You were limited to 2 gather and 2 professions, and you had alt toons just so you could have each profession and gathering ability. Not the case in RoM. You get all of them on your toon. ALL of them. You can gather all the materials, and you can spec into all the professions. WIN. Also there is a crafting queue, so you can queue up multiple things, such as gathering and crafting and tell it to do the max for each and you can walk away and let the queue process.
8. Houses. You get houses to store things in, buy furniture and housemaids that can alt for additional gear storage. Furniture is a big one for me. There are times when I need a forge or a fire, and I have to go search for that. In RoM, you can buy all the crafting furniture and put it in your house so you can reduce the gathered material and craft it all standing in the same place. Guilds also can get guild castles that have beneficial abilities for guildies such as buffs, or fixing debuffs (like your death debt).
9. Transport Runes. You can mark places to transport back to and as long as you have a transport rune or transport portal you can either go yourself or bring a party back to that same spot. Do you know how beneficial this would be to mark say the start of an instance, and then tell everyone who is going, meet here in town and I’ll open a portal to that place? That would have saved a TON OF TIME! And honestly it doesn’t make sense not to have something like this.
10. Mounts. Day 1 you can buy a 1 or 2 person permanent mount. No more searching for mounts or waiting till your a certain level. Why punish your players? Traveling around the zone makes it more fun for them, so give them mounts!
11. Ability overload. In WoW there were SOOO many different abilities. A lot of time you thought to yourself some of these are just nonsense.  In RoM, there aren’t as many abilities and I’m perfectly fine with that! A healer needs their quick heals, group heals, heals over time, bubbles, etc. That’s about it!

Overall, I have to say I’m very pleased with RoM. It’s a nice break from WoW and as I mentioned above, a lot of really good reasons that make it different and actually more fun in various areas. I haven’t yet seen the end-game raiding content, so I can’t comment from that perspective, but as I level up (level 40 out of 70 so far), I’ll certainly continue to blog about those experiences.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

2010 has been an interesting and exciting year. For PaDeu that has meant starting a new career and all the challenges that comes with.

Momo has been busy working hard with his trainer John at BarkBusters to learn how to be more social and how to be a good Shiba. How’s he doing–the jury is still out on that! (I kid!) He’s doing quite well, and we are hoping for more social play dates in 2012.

George started Hapkido and couldn’t be happier! He recently completed his Yellow Belt Green Strip rank and is looking forward to continuing his journey in 2012.

2010 also marked the first time that PaDeu has gone skiing! Park City, Utah was amazing and we got a chance to see the Galicia’s, long time friends of the family. Turns out I fell more than PaDeu did so we are looking forward to go back!

We love all of you and hope your 2010 was one for the books! Merry Christmas and have a Happy New Year!

]]> http://wp.evolutioncreations.com/2011/12/merry-christmas-2011/feed/ 0 http://wp.evolutioncreations.com/2011/11/etl-fiber-bomb-in-the-mornings/ http://wp.evolutioncreations.com/2011/11/etl-fiber-bomb-in-the-mornings/#comments Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:36:18 +0000 george http://wp.evolutioncreations.com/?p=1047 It’s been awhile since I’ve posted up anything regarding Eat to Live, but we’re back on the horse after a period of being–well off of it!

Here’s a great tasting juicing recipe that I came across and modified slightly. It’s orange as the Hulk is green, but man is it tasty!