We lost Kathy on April 19, the day before her birthday. It was a long battle after her cancer returned in early 2007 but Kathy’s determination was unwavering and she never complained about the pain, the fatigue and the side effects from years of chemotherapy. We had the good fortune of being able to let her pass at home with the help of an excellent hospice team, a wonderful group of caregivers and the loving care of her cousin Mary in her last days. For all that, I am thankful.

Kathy was my wife, best friend and lover for almost 42 years of marriage. I miss her deeply but the positive memories are beginning to prevail over the challenges of the last few years. The image that is most present with me now is her wild, curly hair blowing in the breeze as we did our marathon training runs in San Francisco in the 1990′s. The determination she exhibited then was present right up to the end.

I’m entering a new landscape without Kathy. It feels odd without her but, as Mary said, the dogs and I must simply get up each morning and put one paw in front of the other. We are soldiering on. Each day is a little easier than last but the void remains.

We are quickly approaching the five year anniversary of our arrival in Santa Fe (March 16, 2006). It appears we have adapted to the cold but sunny winters and fallen victim to the ‘Land of Entrapment’. I’m not terribly surprised that we are still here, just amazed at how quickly five years can disappear. I think we’ll stay awhile longer…;-).

2010 was a challenging year on the personal front. Kathy terminated treatment for her metastatic breast cancer since the chemotherapy was no longer working. The disease continues to progress with her treatment now focused on pain management and optimizing her quality of life. We have some travel planned over the next few months including a couple weeks in San Francisco in February and a week on an island in French Polynesia in March. A friend and neighbor here in Santa Fe recently took on the role of General Manager of the lovely Te Tiare beach resort and offered us a really great rate that makes if almost affordable.

I continue bootstrapping my latest startup, veloGraf Systems, as the chief (and only) developer of the front-end application while my young partner develops the more difficult back-end API service. I never expected to become a Ruby on Rails coder at my age but the development is moving along albeit more slowly than I had hoped. I find the complexity of modern application frameworks harder to absorb than I expected. Probably an age thing but I’m pretending it’s the software. If all goes well, early February should see the launch of the first phase of our social graph management service. It’s a consumer-focused service rather than the enterprise software product outlined in our rather dated web site.

I started thinking about posting an update to our web site before the holidays. It has been over three years since I posted anything (just after construction started on our new house) and over four years since I started this “journal” to chronicle our travels to find a new home. Rather surprising to realize we are in the middle of our fourth Santa Fe winter, we built a house (I was the general contractor on our EcoNest) and I have already launched two high-tech startups. I’m winding down the first one (Knowledge Reef Systems) and my partner and I are ramping up veloGraf Systems as we speak.

Before posting, I decided that I really should take a couple of hours to “refactor” the web site to a blog form. Much easier to update and gets me out of coding HTML. Unfortunately, a few hours became most of Sunday evening and the better part of today. I am so bad at estimating projects, especially when it includes coming up to speed on new technology. But it’s done. Now all I need to do is backtrack over the last two years to fill in some of the gaps. Soon. At least it will be quick and easy to make posts. No excuse now…