Happy Holidays 2010

We are enjoying the holiday pictures and greetings that arrive every day in the mail and are offering this blog as our update on a great 2010.

Many of our adventures this year took place on road trips. Chris had some meetings in the San Diego area earlier this year so we hopped in the car and made a little tour of the Southwest. We spent a couple days in Madrid, New Mexico with a buddy Jameson met on the beach in Mexico a couple years ago. Jameson and Maya had a blast climbing boulder-covered hills and high-stepping through cactus clusters. We then spent a week in Tucson and loved it (more on that later). After business concluded in San Diego we made a stop at LegoLand and then took in Joshua Tree National Park before making our way back home.

Montrose Pools, Tucson AZ

Jameson loves the road and also enjoys getting back to his friends in the neighborhood. Highlights of their shenanigans this year include a bungee jumping experience the kids invented using life vests and bungee cords and launching themselves from tree branches in the front yard. The kids also became very fond of our spare garbage container. One day they decided they wanted to "swim" in it and later it became a stage for an up and coming rock band. Most of August was spent with this swimming pool / concert activity.


Jameson remains an avid outdoor kid and has logged several long bike rides with the family. Speaking of bikes, Jameson and Chris took apart an old 3-speed and a kids bike this summer and changed things up during reconstruction. Turning is a little tricky but by all accounts it's a cool ride.
Jameson still adores Legos. In addition to our trip to LegoLand, Jameson had a Lego Engineer at his birthday party. The guy showed up with boxes of Legos and Power Functions. For hours the kids designed and built battery-powered track machines and battled each other.

Melinda had a great year too. When we decide to hit the road and transform a business trip into fun for the whole family, she's our cruise director. We love that Melinda is an expert on the "Journey". For example, Chris had some work in Pennsylvania and along the way we spent a couple of days on the beach near Michigan City, raced a train on our bikes in Ohio (and won!), and experienced snowless tubing at a ski resort in Virginia. Another trip to meetings in North Carolina included mountain biking in Kansas (it's true...Kansas!), Frisbee golf in Tupelo Mississippi, and a Renaissance Festival in Kansas City, Missouri. That last trip included Disney World and Universal Studios in Orlando. We are all fans of Harry Potter so visiting Harry Potter World was a thrill. The Pumpkin Juice is actually pretty good!

This Frisbee golf course on a ridge outside of Tupelo was ablaze with Fall colors.
This bike path in Little Rock is the longest pedestrian bridge in the US. It's built atop a dam and spans the Arkansas River. It's called the Big Dam Bridge. :)

With Hogwarts Castle in the background, Jameson casts

a spell on himself with his new Harry Potter wand.

Riding in a big Dr. Seuss fish is serious business.

Melinda continues to run all aspects of finance and administration for our business. She's also a weaver from way back and was thrilled to receive a loom hand-crafted by her father this year. We always knew Melinda was creative and the loom is drawing out even more of our artist.

The family business had a spectacular 2010. Chris's book, "Managing the Core" launched multiple consulting projects for our business and the book is now required reading for many in the industry. Chris is a regular guest-lecturer at the University of Colorado and, if we ever decide to come off the road for a year, he's been offered the chance to teach business part-time. Chris continues to run and ride bike on whatever trail he can find.

We're all looking forward to wintering in Arizona this year. We mentioned the brief stay in Tucson as part of an early-year road trip and we liked it so much we decided to hang out down there and experience a warmer winter.

We wish you the best this holiday season. Celebrate and then have a wonderful 2011!

Chris, Melinda and Jameson (I'll drop a few more photos below just for fun)

We met Jameson's buddy Evan at Disney World.

This is how we look on the road.

This is how we look after a long roady!

Happy Holidays!

We always enjoy hearing what our friends and family have been up to over the past year and thought we’d send this note on our 2009.

Here are a few highlights:

Jameson is a Lego enthusiast. His fondness for all things Star Wars has influenced his Lego collection and he also loves building vehicles of all sorts and spends hours acting out action scenes. This year he took an actual Lego Engineering course taught by a real engineer (a guy who may have the greatest job in the world). Jameson loved the course and learned about the physics of construction while building some cool bridges and catapults.

On Halloween Jameson gave us a real surprise. A nearby town puts on a road race for runners of all ages. There was a 10K, 5K and a 1K Goblin Run for costumed kids. Long story short, Jameson ran the entire 5K distance and finished in 38 minutes! He followed that with the Goblin run in his Luke Skywalker costume.

Melinda had a great year too. We’re a homeschooling family and she enjoyed feeding Jameson’s endless curiosity with fieldtrips, tours, play dates, library visits and adventures of every sort. We started a family business this year and Melinda runs all aspects of finance and administration. In addition, she continues to spearhead the family’s volunteering and charitable giving. Melinda particularly enjoys lending a hand at a local organic farm and throughout the summer and fall nearly everything on our plates was food we picked ourselves.

In May, Chris parted ways with the consulting company he’d been working for and we launched the Driscoll Consulting Group, a biotechnology management consulting firm. We started the business in conjunction with the publication of Chris’s first book, “Managing the Core.” Business is good and Chris has had fun with newspaper and radio interviews and with conference presentations as far away as Beijing, China.

We’re all adventurers and this year we tried out road-trips. We did one trip from Colorado to Minneapolis so Chris could join Brother Bill in the Lifetime Fitness Triathlon. Other road trips took us to Boise, Portland, Salt Lake City, Black Hills, and Mt. Rushmore. Last but not least, we made our way to Albuquerque for the Hot Air Balloon Fiesta which was an awesome experience for us all.

We hope 2009 was your best year ever and that it is knocked from the top spot by 2010.

Chris, Melinda & Jameson