The gorgeous artistry of this cake makes me want to get married again. And the description of the flavor (orange zest filled with dulce de leche with guava) is making me starry eyed.

PaperSource makes the best papers, stationary and Japanese Papers. Our COO at Bramble Berry got me the most luscious thank you cards for a wedding present.

PaperSource Thank you cards were the perfect gift because a. great design, beautiful paper and gorgeous envlopes make life a little more cheery and b. I have a bazillion thank you cards to write for thoughtful wedding gestures from friends and family.

We had a rule in our house growing up, “Never use the gift unless the thank you card is written.” This little common sense rule, thought up by my beautiful Mother Wenche (pronounced Ven-KA), is brilliant in its simplicity. Now that I am growing up, many things that my Mother had us do are proving themselves to be practical, smart and well thought-out. It’s so cliche how this is happening as I hit my 30’s.

Apparently, writing thank you notes and hand written cards is getting all en vogue now that there are more and more emails written with less personal “touches” in our daily lives. There are appropriate ways to write thank you cards and less appropriate ways (hint: mentioning any personal news, like your new job or new hair cut or car, does not go in a thank you card).

Herb Bridge, from Ben Bridge Jewlers, gave my husband some great advice. After an amazing talk, sponsored by the Entrepreneur’s Organization, he asked Herb what business advice he left out of his talk. Herb thought for a moment and said: “Whenever I read the newspaper, if I see a friend or acquaintance listed, I cut out the article and send it to them with a handwritten note. This is the best business advice I could give you.”

One of the Greats, giving practical business advice … get clippin’.

I just came across this interesting idea in sustainability – live on only the food that is grown in your immediate, 100 mile vicinity. These two Canadians are trying it and it sounds difficult (though they are losing weight). The article draws attention to the things that we don’t think about in terms of our daily eating habits, like the fact that most of the sugar production in the world comes primarily from outside the US and so our sugar travels thousands of miles to reach us.

This whole school of thought goes hand in hand with the idea of reducing our ecological footprint on the earth. Here at work, we have employees who walk to work, carpool (me, me, me!), ride motorcycles and enjoy riding the bus. We recycle. We try to use recycled paper when we can. There are other things we do, but ultimately, it all boils down to trying to do our part for the environment.

But we normally don’t consider our food, where it comes from, who it supports and how far it needs to travel to reach our dinner tables.

Definite um, food for thought.

On my amazing, beautiful, breathtaking run along Bellingham Bay on the official “South Bay Trail” (thank you citizens of Bellingham for passing the levy that paid for this trail), I came across a fascinating sight.

I was almost done with the run and working up to a “You’re almost done! Push! It!” sprint when out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of a seagull terrorizing … a starfish? “Huh,” I thought to myself, “Do seagulls even eat starfish!?” And thanking the universe for a legitimate excuse to stop my death march sprint to the finish, I came to a full stop and watched.

The seagull kept trying to pick up the starfish. Given that the starfish was 4 or 5 times larger than the seagull’s entire head, I put the possibility of the seagull making any headway with the starfish at about nill.

To my surprise and amazement, after about five minutes of toying with the starfish, the seagull managed to get the starfish just at the right angle to gulp 2 arms and the bulk of the body into its mouth and down its throat.

And then … it just sat there.

The starfish’s body was larger than the seagull’s head. Adding the arms into the equation, there was no way that the seagull was going to manage to gulp the starfish down (bringing us back to the original question: Do seagulls even eat starfish?)

I watched for about ten more minutes. The seagull sat there, with a stupefied expression on its face. I imagined it was thinking things like:

“Great, now what, Dummy?”

“Ewwww, the little tentacles are moving! I would spit this thing out, but I don’t want to look stupid since I have an audience.”

“Hey, wait a minute! Do I even eat Starfish!?!”

While I waited for the Seagull to do something, (anything!) I began to notice the detailed beauty of my surroundings. I saw many many more starfish. I saw beautiful fluffy purple starfish working their way up among the rocks. I saw the contrasting colors of the orange starfish set off beautifully by the surrounding kelp grass. I actually turned off my iPod and heard the waves and the wind. For once, I really noticed the beauty of the trail I run down every few days.

It was a calming, focusing 15 minutes before the chaos of the day started.

There are lessons to learn from the fifteen minute interlude with the gull and starfish. Some that come to mind are:

1. Stop and smell the roses! Don’t miss the scenery in pursuit of the goal.
2. It’s good to challenge yourself.
3. But sometimes, if you challenge yourself, you may end up stuck with a massive lump in your throat, unable to breathe.

Until I went away for two weeks, I had not realized how out of control my insatiable need for copious amounts of information was. When I got back, much of my 6 foot tall mail stack was filled with magazines. I’ve now spent the better part of the weekend trying to read and digest all the magazines. The only clutter and mess in the house is the four magazine piles (read now, read soon, read later, probably just throw away).

I subscribe to about 35 magazines and of those, 7 are weekly (The Week, US Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, Wine Spectator, Business Week, Puget Sound Business Journal, National Conservative Weekly). You might think that with all these magazines that I spend almost all my time reading. But, that’s not the case at all. I probably log about 2 hours a day reading, and that includes the books too.

I like to start my morning reading a business magazine for 20 to 30 minutes – almost like a morning meditation. I have many to choose from (Inc., Fast Company, Business 2.0, FSB, Fortune, Seattle Business, 3 regional/local business newspapers, and the new Conde Nast Portfolio). I usually manage to make it through a magazine per morning, reading two or three feature articles word for word and then skimming the rest.

In the evenings, after chores have been done and dinner has been cleared, I don’t watch t.v. I read magazines and books. And, if there’s a movie on, unless it’s subtitled, I have one eye on the movie screen and the other on a magazine. In the evening though, I read my lighter fare (Blueprint, Shape, Herb Companion, Natural Home, Scuba Diver, Elle, Lucky, National Geographic, Fitness, Shape, gossip rags, etc..) and catch up on all the fashion and gossip news. This kind of reading relaxes my brain. I usually keep a notebook beside me to take notes about ideas that pop into mind or web sites that I want to visit. I also get almost all my book suggestions and movie watching ideas from the reviews in the magazines. The last step to my reading in the evening is to turn on the computer and log into Netflix and add whatever new movies came out this week (that also reviewed well) and then head over to the library site and put the latest releases on hold in the library.

I’m sure that this well-organized life will come to a screeching halt once I have children but for now, I’m an information junkie and I love it. Of course, all of this reading apparently does not stick, because our Team Bramble Berry team did terribly (not quite last place but close!) at the local Whatcom County Trivia Literacy Bee!

My best friend’s son, Kyle, was recently diagnosed for an intrinsic brain stem glinoma. For the blissfully uninitiated, that means that he has an inoperable brain tumor. For once, I have something to obsess about that’s not soap or business related. So, I’ve spent copious amounts of time in the last five weeks searching, searching, and searching the ‘net for information, would-be cures, pediatric oncologists, pediatric neurosurgeons and the holy grail of a doctor that will try to operate on Kyle. I’m about 0 for 45 on that count. But, I keep searching and trying.

When I don’t find what I want, I switch terms, try the ” ” in different places or just plain skip to page 10 on the search engine and hope that it’s a better fit than the first 5 pages of non-hits. I never switch search engines. It turns out that I’m not alone in this. According to Convera, 93% of search engine users don’t switch to a new engine if they’re not getting the answer they want out of the first engine.

Why not? They’re different companies, with different algorithms. You would think that we’d all switch. But instead, we just bang our head against the same wall, but in a slightly different spot by trying to refine the search engine terms.

Only 10% of searchers find what they want on the first attempt. And only 21% of online searchers feel like their search engines understand the queries.

Well, duh. They’re computers, not humans. Of course they don’t “understand” your search engine query! But aside from that, artificial intelligence is supposed to be farther along than only getting 10% of our search engine queries right.