12/30/2009

It’s nearly the end of the year. Elsa and I are at the kitchen table finishing off our holiday cards while a light snow falls outside the cabin windows. The trees are flocked and a fire burns in the woodstove. Leia, our beagle, is snoring gently in her bed while Siena, our rat terrier is curled up in my lap. It’s a perfect pastoral moment.

As I look back on this past year it was filled with activ
ity. Nothing monumental, just the everyday life moments that fill our days and make them pleasant. We had our challenges this year like everyone else. At the end of last year, Elsa had a severe medical emergency

(a blood clot in her brain that caused a series of seizures) that wasn’t resolved until June. Her body healed and now she is back to feeling herself. The economy created some anxiety as Oregon’s legislature cut education budgets in order to maintain basic services. Had Elsa not been a Special Education teacher, she would have been laid off along with 15% of her fellow teachers. In a time when so many of our colleagues have been downsized we were grateful for her specialty. The kids Elsa teaches are also grateful for her speciality as they continue to make gains that in some cases take them beyond their regular ed peers. She is shaping young lives and giving them hope and opportunity for a better future.

This has been an extraordinary year for me and for my work. I’ve had a chance to put all my business philosophy to work at the Sitka Center and I’ve seen amazing results. It really is true th

at if you put the time into hiring great people and then set a clear vision, an organization can transform itself. We set new records in workshop attendance and we have been receiving amazing press including three articles in the Oregonian, one on the front page. All while continuing to honor artists, writers, musicians, ecologists, and their work.

This year I finished my work on the board of the

Association of Women Business Centers, but increased my commitment to a project to create web-accessible data for economic development agencies. To all but the biggest data geeks, it’s a bit dry, but imagine taking 37 million bits of data covering every business in the United States and condensing them into a single graph that is useful to policy makers and regional economic developers. We’ve received Kudos from the Census Bureau and the international economic development council.

Aside from our work, Elsa and I have found living at the coast to be a mixed pleasure. We love the walks on the beach, but the Pacific Ocean does moderate our

temperatures so we don’t get distinct seasons. In fact, sometimes the daily high temperatures in January can exceed those in August. I’m loving the coast, but Elsa misses the seasons. Having snow here at the cabin is a good thing.

We are looking forward to traveling more in 2010. The world is a big place, filled with opportunity. We think the year ahead is going to be amazing.


Happy 2010!

Love Eric and Elsa

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