V/Speak

Yesterday was my birthday.  For the safety of others, I will keep my exact age a secret.  Really, I just want to maintain my youthful facade and revealing my age might pigeon hole me with me Internet peers.  🙂  I am usually not one to spend a lot of time talking about birthdays, but yesterday was a pretty cool one.  Not just because it was the one day that is all mine, but because I also got a gift that allows me to look forward to completing one thing on my Life List.

My wife, Danielle, is an amazing gift giver. Every year she spoils me with surprises that I have not anticipated but are always the perfect present.  This year was no exception. Danielle is also very supportive of my career and is always pushing me to be the best that I can be in my field of expertise.  It’s no surprise that as part of that support she keeps tabs on this blog and my Twitter stream. That paid off for her this year when she was coming up with gifts for my birthday. Having read my life list she went through items that were ripe for a great birthday gift.  Slightly too late for France and Le Tour, taking my father to Poland proved a bit pricey right now, and she can’t exactly do the training that is necessary to complete an Iron Man for me.  That left a great opportunity to send both of us to Montana for a fly-fishing expedition next summer.

I mentioned above that she is a great gift giver.  She is also a woman of exquisite taste in holidays.  This gift was no exception.  Drum roll please… Her coup de grace gift for me yesterday was to book us into The Resort at Paws Up in Greenough, Montana for 3 days of adventure next summer.  If you’re not familiar with this place, take a look at their accommodations page to get a flavor of how we’ll be living during this time away.  She has booked us into the newly developed ‘River Camp‘ area for our stay.  That river?  The Big Black Foot, or ‘Big Blackie’, of A River Runs Through It fame.  I’ll be fishing the same waters as Norman Maclean and can’t wait to hook into one of the many species of trout (brown, brook, and cutthroat) native to the Bitterroot Valley.  A fly fisherman’s dream vacation and one item scratched off the ol’ Life List – it doesn’t get much better than that!

David Veneski Personal Fly Fishing, Life List

Last month, I blogged about a program that we were doing with Maggie Mason of Mighty Girl.  As you may recall Intel is helping Maggie cross a few items off her Life List of things she’d like to do before, as she says, ‘die – peacefully, in my sleep, of extreme old age’.  I think Maggie is safe from that fate anytime soon and it’s been fun to watch her make progress on whittling that list down.  So far, with our help, she has redesigned MightyGirl.com, taken tap-dancing lessons, and swam with bio-luminescent plankton in Puerto Rico.  Soon, I am going to be taking a quick trip to San Francisco to teach her how to roll in a kayak – which I am very much looking forward to.  My kayaking buddies might be cringing right now because there are times on the river where my roll is not the greatest.  Don’t worry Maggie – I have a bomber roll in the pool!

Maggie’s list has inspired an exercise where many of my co-workers, our agency, and our friends at Federated Media have taken on the task of writing down their ‘mini’ life lists.  We had an amazing response when we polled the list above and we thought it would be fun to share those lists with our friends and families.  I’m not shy, so I’ll be the first to roll mine out for all the world to see….. here goes nothin’!

• Successful and loving marriage with my wonderful wife
• Have and raise @ least one healthy child and be blessed to watch them grow up and have a family of their own
• Ride 3 of the hardest mountain stages of the Tour de France – Mont Ventoux, Alpe d’Huez, and Luz Ardiden
• Complete an Ironman triathlon (why just run a marathon when you can suffer through 3 disciplines?)
• Renovate one final house – maybe our ‘life house’ with my wife
• Fly Fish in Montana
• Finally learn to play the guitar, and play it well
• Write a book about something I am passionate about
• Take my father to Poland before he can’t make the trip
• Go to at least one Summer Olympics

David Veneski Blogging, Social Media Life List, Mighty Girl