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Friends,
Greetings and Happy Holidays as a busy 2004 comes to a close. For the Hennenhoefers, this year was especially busy due to the birth of our first son, Ethan Todd Hennenhoefer, on February 21st. Having survived pregnancy, sleepless nights, crying babies, and all the other babies that come out of the woodwork once you have one, I’m looking forward to a calmer 2005.
Alisa left Dell this year to be a stay-at-home mom for a while. She has threatened to quit several times, but overall she is enjoying the change. It’s a very rewarding job, but certainly has its bad hours. She requested a promotion in her last quarterly status update, but Ethan is a pretty tough boss.
I’m still spending a good portion of my life traveling. The upside is that I've given up on trying to do real work on planes and now it’s a great time to catch up on reading. Some of my favorites this year (for the science geek in all of us) were On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins and Genome by Matt Ridley. Thanks to ABC for messing up my Tivo with strange start times for Lost, for I now have the power of BitTorrent. HDTV on my laptop with no commercials is a great thing even when I’m not traveling. Now if they could just find a way to make it legal.
Currently, we are busy preparing for the “some assembly required” holiday season. These days it’s impossible to make a children’s toy that doesn’t take batteries, have flashing lights, and make noise. As much fun as Ethan has with the wrapped presents, I wonder how necessary all these fancy toys really are. Pushing boxes around keeps him pretty busy.
On the work front, everything is going great at Obsidian. Our little startup company is eight years old now and is listed on the INC 500. The only things that remain constant are my partners, Becky and Rob, my email address, and the Obsidian kittens, Tcl and Perl, which have been spending more time at my house than the office lately. Becky got married to Randy Siebod this year, in a “small” wedding that somehow got scheduled at my house. It was fun, but for the record, there is no such thing as a “small wedding.” I performed the ceremony, which was actually my second. So far I’m 2-0, so I might quit while I’m ahead on this one. Rob and Sara also joined the ranks of new parents this year with their daughter Dayana. It seems there are babies everywhere.
Welcome to 2005 everyone. I hope you’re all keeping warm and I look forward to catching up with you soon.
Eric
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Ethan's First Plane Ride
Infant
First Halloween
Alisa and Eric go party hopping
8 Months
Easter
Bath Time
6 weeks
