Maya and Jeanine arrived in Mumbai safely. I received a message with this photo and was informed that Maya was falling asleep during tea. They are now ten and a half hours ahead of us and I am sure it will take a few days before they recover from the jet lag. I cannot remember spending a Valentine’s Day apart from Jeanine and I am already missing her but am very happy that she will have a chance to enjoy with Maya what I had a chance to enjoy with the boys during their Coming of Age adventures. On the home front, all is well. Nicolai prepared omelets for breakfast and they were quite delicious. Jeanine has raised boys who know how to cook well.

I took my girls to the airport early this morning as Maya began her Coming of Age adventure with Jeanine. Starting with Kyle, we decided that our family would celebrate, at age 13, the transition from childhood to adulthood with an exotic adventure. Kyle choose to explore the caves and underground rivers of Belize and to camp on a sliver of land 35 miles off the coast. Nicolai elected to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania followed by recuperation on the island of Zanzibar. Maya will spend a month in India with 3 weeks spent volunteering at a school in the province of Maharashtra and the balance sightseeing in Mumbai, Delhi and Agra. Jeanine will be posting updates to her Facebook page and I will re-post pictures here as well.

Nala has discovered a high perch from which to survey her domain. Although warm temperatures are causing the snow to melt they are also causing it to slide off the roof and onto the deck helping to keep her observatory platform intact.

Ice generally starts forming from the shores of a flowing river eventually closing at the center. In this case, it appears that local eddies caused by the bridge from which this photo was taken have prevented ice from forming across its entire width. This gives the unusual impression that the ice is advancing like a glacier.

Jeanine and Maya are members of the National Charity League, a philanthropic organization for mothers-daughters committed to community service, leadership development, and cultural experiences. This afternoon they attended a “Tea” to honor graduating seniors and the rest of the day packing for Maya’s Coming of Age adventure to India where the majority of their stay will be spent volunteering at the Residential School for Tribal Girls located 2 hours outside of Mumbai.

My Honda snow blower clears a path 28″ wide and 20″ high. Winter storm Nemo, a blizzard with hurricane-force winds, has left much of New England under several feet of snow. The average show depth on our driveway was 20″ with some drifts rising above 3 feet. At one point, I found myself chewing through a snow bank, and the top of the snow blower chute (42″) went below the surface of the snow. With the driveway cleared, I am very tempted to head out in search of snowscapes to photograph. Unfortunately, a state of emergency is still in effect, and anyone caught driving is subject to imprisonment for one year.

Everyone in New England was hunkering down as winter storm Nemo descended on the eastern seaboard. iRobot asked all employees to leave for home at noon and by 4 PM the governor closed all roads in the state to all but emergency vehicles (anyone driving after that would be ticketed). Nicolai’s friend Taylor was visiting as the storm began and was stranded here until her father was able to pick her up just as the curfew was going into effect. A beautiful girl and natural model, Taylor enjoyed posing for portraits to pass some of the time. Maya provided several different scarves for us to work with and served as my lighting assistant.

Today’s Globe featured an article about new guidelines from the federal Department of Education requiring public elementary and secondary schools to make reasonable accommodations so that disabled athletes may participate in sports. Nicolai is arguably the poster child for such participation having blazed this path before it was mandated. Many believe these guidelines will do for the disabled community what Title 9 did for women.

It has been more than 25 years since I co-founded a company called Truevision. That entrepreneurial endeavor remains the highlight of my professional career both because I was part of creating a truly great company and for the financial success that followed. This evening I was thrilled to see my former colleague and good friend Cathleen Asch. Together with Joseph Haaf, now deceased, we orchestrated a management buy out to form the company and ran it for several years using what we called the “three-legged stool” leadership model. Cathleen was responsible for finance and operations, Joseph for sales and marketing, and I was in charge of product development. I have not since seen this co-CEO model in any other company and I feel it contributed to the success of what was a genuinely unique and special company, one still fondly remembered by all who were involved. I have not seen Cathleen since our 20 year company reunion in Indianapolis more than 5 years ago and it has been more than a decade since the whole family visited with her at her home in Barrington Hills just outside of Chicago. She is in town on business and we were delighted to host her for dinner this evening. It was great reminiscing about Truevision and catching up on all that has transpired since. With any luck, Cathleen will be travelling to Boston with greater regularity and we will have many more opportunities to reconnect.

One of the most important things I do at work is to make sure people get paid fairly. It never ceases to amaze me how out of whack compensation can get when managers take the easy way out and simply “peanut butter” (spread out uniformly) their merit increase pools. I am invariably the hero to some and villain to others who ensures that we operate as a meritocracy, rewarding our top people with the highest compensation. This week I am in the thick of the process and one of my favorite tools are sticky notes. In a meeting with my direct reports that went well past normal business hours, we stack ranked a group of employees from across the Engineering organization as a quality control check. Having integrated two divisions into a single organization this year has amplified the magnitude of the challenge considerably. This is some of the hardest work we do as a team but it is also extremely satisfying when we arrive at a fair outcome. For all the grousing I hear before, during, and after the process, I think folks appreciate the level of rigor and effort we apply to something as important as salary administration.

I generally do not feature images by other photographers but felt compelled to share this one by Erik Johansson. He is a photographer and retouching artist from Sweden whose imagination and the ability to translate his ideas into pixels is quite amazing. More of his work can be found on his website.

With outdoor air temperature in the teens, I thought the better of venturing out to play soccer this morning. Instead, I spent some time cleaning up my photo archive. In the process, I discovered that this photo and its associated blog post have been sitting in my draft folder since July 21st of last year. I went ahead and posted the original in color and then decided it would look good as a black and white image as well.

Maya would like to attend a summer ballet intensive program in Philadelphia this year. When distance precludes an in-person appearance, prospective students must submit audition photos and videos of their dancing. This afternoon I spent several hours with Maya, her friend Maddie, and their ballet teacher shooting the mandatory still photograph poses. I got a great workout moving the necessary lighting equipment and background, which filled every cubic inch of my SUV, from my basement photo studio to the second-floor dance studio on the other side of town and back. As their teacher suggested ways to improve each pose I gained a new appreciation for the difficulty of ballet. Both girls did a great job and we will follow up with a video of the required dance combinations later next week.

A sports facility close to my work has just completed the construction of a domed soccer arena which can be configured as one full-size 11v11 field or four 8v8 fields. For $8 they are offering a 90-minute, Friday noon pick-up soccer game. I decided to play instead of eating lunch today. Although I was the oldest player by a long shot, I held my own (at least for the first 60 minutes) and got a great workout. I plan to make this a regular part of my training regime in preparation for the outdoor season.