A New Year

Happy New Year everyone! Things are going well here in the Bay area. We've just had some amazing rainfall this past week. Flooding, chaos, mayhem. Other than the torrential rain, it was quite nice. We stayed inside during the week. We had some friends over from my work to talk and introduce Lisa to the people I hang out with down here! Quite fun.

Christmas was nice this year as well. Lisa and I had a budget of 100 dollars this year, just like last year. It's nice to have limits. ;) Lynn, Lisa's sister, came down on Friday of last week, when it was raining hard. Her flight was delayed coming out of Vancouver and landing at SFO by a couple of hours. It was quite a drive, but the MINI handled the rain well. No slipping and sliding. The only pain was the fog! She'll be here for another week, before flying back to Vancouver. The two of them are spending the time visiting San Francisco and the surround locales, and this weekend we'll probably take a drive up the coast or down the coast. The weather is quite sunny now, but the rain isn't supposed to be over yet!

It's a new year, and with that, come new resolutions. 2006, I think, it's going to be a time of innovation and progress for this west coast Inversin household. Lisa and I are discussing a pet, but we'll see. Once a dog or cat or bird or kid come around, it'll be tough to go overseas to work for a while! In addition to the pets or kids discussion, business plans still bloom to my mind. I've been reading up a bit more on the types of businesses, and I'm hoping we settle on one this month or next. I have some brilliant plans on paper, so we'll see what this year brings on that front.

We just finished applying for Lisa's green card this week, and all that remains is for our lawyer to prepare the paperwork and for us to sign it. I'm hoping it will be sent off by mid month. Roughly 4-6 months later, Lisa should have permanent residence! Won't that be nice.

I talked to a bunch of coworkers about possible manufacturing possibilities for this product I'm developing. For this particular one, I hope to have a prototype by the next time we play paintball! That would be nice. I came up with yet another idea this morning, and hopefully will have a working prototype this evening, or if I put it off, this weekend! I've been looking at a provisional patent (which allows patent pending) for it. It only costs $500 for the filing (199 for application, 299 for patent search), and I have a year to file the actual, proper, patent application. If I can get this prototype working by this weekend, I'll be filing by mid-month, and then the rest of the year will be testing and customer feedback and manufacturing. Yay! By this time next year I hope to have the actual patent filed and have a number! Provided that no one else has thought of this. :) I haven't found anything like it on the net, so we'll see.