Moment In Time

Christian and I are set to go on our trip of a lifetime to Southern Africa-including stops in Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique and of course South Africa over the next 3 weeks. It should be absolutely amazing and I hope to be able to make a few postings from the trip, but I'm not sure of what internet access will be like in places like the Okavango Delta and Victoria Falls, so I will do the best I can.

Before C started school, we hoped to do some sort of trip like this, but I started so quickly at Yahoo!, that didn't quite work. So now its our turn, and we're celebrating C's graduation, our recent 5-year anniversary and this special moment in time before C heads back to the workforce. As Brenda told us when we got married, people don't stop enough in life to celebrate special moments, so this is what we are trying to do, and who knows what is ahead of us? Things like safaris, rafting and shark diving are on the to-do list but as past travels have shown, its always the unexpected that proves the most memorable. Will it be a stunning view from an oceanside cafe like in Mexico? Or the cows and cemetary game as we crossed the expanses of Costa Rica? I can't wait to find out.

Stay tuned!

Part of Something Better

One of the things I have always admired about Christian is his commitment to volunteering. Pretty much since I’ve known him, he’s always been involved in some kind of efforts that benefits someone outside of him and his work. This came pretty directly from his mom, who taught him from early on that this type of involvement was important, and Christian has made very good on it, from his involvement with Make a Wish to more recently the Point Foundation.

For some reason, I missed this lesson when I was younger. Its not that my parents aren’t civic-minded (my Mom’s month in New Orleans after the Katrina disaster is a good illustration of that), but for one reason or another, it just never really came up when we were kids. So when I became a grown-up and married Christian, I always admired his conviction with volunteering, but struggled with how to get do something myself.

I’m proud to say I’ve found something pretty cool. I wrote earlier about Yahoo! Pride, an employee group that caters to the LGBT (that’s lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender for the folks at home) audience, and how I helped to program the a new music station called Gay Club Mix. That was neat, but my involvement was pretty minimal. After that launched, Brady, the leader of the group, Brian, a fabulous MBA intern who helped prove the worth of the GLBT audience to Yahoo! during his internship and will be joining Yahoo! this fall, and I wondered how we could really get Yahoo! to get behind the community in a much more visible way. We ended up with the idea of a promotional page for Gay Pride, and I’m proud to say that it launched today. I provided the conceptual design and wireframes, basically figuring out what was going to go on the page and where. From there, I handed my design off to Brian and Ernie, a set of 2 amazingly talented guys who provided the visual design (the color, fonts, and images) and the web development (actually building the whole thing), and I continued to act as the art director. I’m immensely proud of the result, and you can see it at http://events.yahoo.com/pride06/.

Brian, Brady and I agreed from the start that we would try and leverage as many of the community elements as possible from across Yahoo! and to design it in a way that would be relatively easy to implement. After all, this was a volunteer effort for the 3 of us and anone else who would get involved, above and beyond our normal daily responsibilities! Highlights include exposing community pictures of Pride from Flickr, the wildly popular photo sharing site Yahoo! acquired last summer and Pride events from upcoming.org, where users can share events with the community. Brian’s visual design, with the avatars in the header and the use of playful color throughout the page is really fantastic, and it’s all built in the latest coding technology, meaning its very light and flexible. When we found out that Travelocity was going to be a sponsor, it was icing on the cake.

So it launched early this morning and we're getting a lot of positive feedback internally, from people as high as the Chief Marketing Officer. It's a great feeling to combine two thing I love-- design and the gay community-- with something I've been wanting to do-- volunteering. We hope this is just the start of marketing to the LGBT community at Y! and I can't wait to find something like this again.

Love is in the Air

There's just something fantastic about love. In the past two days, I've been able to experience or witness some different stages of it, make me appreciate it even more.

Friday night, Christian and I celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary. We were treated to an extra special early present last weekend when we attended the wedding of our good friends from DC, Curtis and Ryan. These guys are one of those couples who just make you happy to be around, and the wedding was a pure reflection of that. The outpouring of love and support each of their families provided, including such wonders as each of their moms walking them down the aisle together and Curtis' sister giving one of the toasts, was remarkable. Additionally, getting to celebrate this occasion with all of our best friends from DC was great as well, feeling the love from a circle of people who, despite some of us who have moved away, will probably always be the best group of friends we will ever have. And lastly, as and icing on the cake surprise for us, Brenda Grisham, the woman who conducted our ceremony 5 years back, was the person they had selected to do their wedding. We had not seen her since our own special night and it was a real treat to catch up with her and marvel in all the amazing things that have happened since we got married. (that's us with her)

Friday night was the actual day of our engagement and we went out to dinner at a place called Palamino, in downtown SF. The night before our wedding, we treated our families and best ladies to a dinner at the Palamino in DC, so the restaurant has special meaning to us. We told the waitress when we sat down that we were celebrating our 5th anniversary, and she told us that she had already had 2 other anniversaries and an engagement that night! We don't usually go out to dinner with just us, so it was a nice time to reflect on our 5 years and talk about what we hope will happen over the next 5. It was a warm night in the city, so after that, we strolled along the Emarcadero along the SF Bay and took in the all of the lights of the bridge and the buildings in the city. But by far, the highlight of the night was what we spent most of the dinner talking about-- naming the two kids we hope to have by the next big anniversary. I look forward to telling them lovingly someday how and when we figured out what their names will be.

And lastly, we spent a deliriously tender evening on Saturday night with our gang here in San Francisco. The setting was Supper Club, which puts cocktails, a 5-course fancy dinner, beds, and performance art into a blender, mixes up, and serves for utter enjoyment. There were 12 of us, set up over 3 beds where you could literally lay, and the best thing about it was how you could move around and talk to each person in the group. With us were two of our best SF friends, Maria (in the white) and Titus (in the black) both who had relatively new boyfriends visiting from out of town, and both in the mad theros of newfound love. What a fantastic thing to observe, and over the course of the 3 or so hours we were there, feel a part of. The hanging on every word said, the passionate gazes, and the hoping of the best for the future were all there, and I couldn't be happier for both of them. As I told Maria, although the intensity of that time doesn't always stay, the underlying passion can and should, and I feel fortunate enough to be in a relationship where it does. Moreover, getting to spend time with all of my favorite people here in our new home for a night was just what the doctor ordered to cure me of any home sickness after last weekend.

So although its not quite springtime anymore and I'm still trying to get used to these cold SF summers, I really feel like love is in the air. And what a beautiful thing it is.