Hello, Merry Christmas, and hello from Texas wine country! Yes, Texas does have a wine country, and yes, as you’re expecting the wine is not spectacular. We’re not here for the wine, we’re here to get away from the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives to enjoy the holidays, cook, walk, listen to music and just spend some time together where we don’t talk about work.
Okay, we still talk about work, but less, and since it’s our company none of it is really work, it’s exactly what we want to be doing and have dreamed of doing for years. We rented a great little spot here in Fredericksburg (Texas wine country) on HomeAway, which for those who didn’t know is an Austin startup actually just a couple of blocks from our house. You might think of HomeAway as a website, but dig a bit deeper and you’ll find a 1,500 person company. Here’s where we’ve been spending most of our time:
We’ve been keeping the fires going and have watched just about every Christmas movie on our list, including Christmas Story at least twice in the last 24-hours. Is it just me or does watching that movie make you feel really old?
Last night we made Kucios (pronounced Coochos) which is a Lithuanian tradition involving 12 seafood dishes made on Christmas eve. While Daina and I aren’t big into cooking we do cook up a storm during the holidays and last night was only the beginning. Today we’re making our Christmas ham which has become a yearly tradition for us. Daina also makes bread from scratch which means the whole house smells amazing all afternoon.
One other thing we do on Christmas that makes it significantly more relaxing is staying in. That’s right, we don’t drive at all, we just stay in, cook, watch basketball and enjoy some awesome XMas music blasting through our Sonos Play:5 (shameless plug).
This has been such and incredible year for us, from getting into Techstars, to moving to Austin, to hiring our first three full-time employees (Fashion Metric is a team of 5 now!) and some more exciting things that we can’t share quite yet but you will definitely hear about in January.
Of course it’s times like these that I feel infinitely thankful for everything we have in life. I still can’t believe I’ve been writing this blog for over seven years and I am so thankful to all of my amazing sponsors, many of whom have renewed for four years or more…so I guess I must be doing something right!
Last but not least, I am thankful to you, my reader. If you’ve read all the way through this post and you’re reading this now, that means you. I started this blog as a journal for myself, now my posts reach people all over the world, from startup founders to venture capitalists, domain name investors to coding geeks like myself.
Run Run Rudolph is playing in the kitchen right now, which always reminds me of this scene from Home Alone…if you haven’t re-watched this over the holidays, today is your last day. I hope you are all having a wonderful Christmas and thanks to every single person reading this, if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be writing this. Merry Christmas and for those going to NamesCon – I’ll see you in Vegas very soon!
