Happy Friday! What a week it’s been with this nasty cold!

I fly out this evening to San Francisco to do a photoshoot for Sophia’s Smile! I’m so excited! In fact, if you are in the Bay area you can look at the website link and join us!

And even better, I get to have a beautiful brunch with my Next Octave girlfriends on Sunday. I am in need of some great “girl time”! We haven’t gathered as a group since early May, and I can’t wait to catch up on how all our businesses, loves, and leadership roles are doing. Brian is going to brave the kids, Rosie and Prince Phillip by himself. I’m sure you’ll find them poolside at the Tennis Club if you need him. Make sure he doesn’t have more than one Margarita! 🙂

On to Housekeeping! First things first!

The Chicago Workshop is SOLD OUT!!!

And the waiting list is going!

If you are already signed up and wondering about hotel rates, our wonderful workshop hostess, Gretchen, is working away on this. She hopes to have some ideas to us by next week! Stay tuned!

And if you are signed up and wanting to join us for the amazing Add On Day with Bob and Dawn Davis, hold your horses! We are going to allow all registered attendees to sign up first and then if there is any room left, we’ll open it to the public. For registered attendees, look for an email in the next week about how to sign up to see Bob and Dawn!

One last workshop item. Start thinking about a woman you know who is Running On Empty. That’s right, we have the Running On Empty contest for the Chicago workshop coming up! We want to bless a woman out there who is in desperate need of a break from life, an encouraging word and creative inspiration. Be thinking because the nominations will go live in the next couple of weeks.

I lied, one more workshop item. We are still thinking about having a Seattle Workshop the first weekend of December (6th and 7th). I just need to see if our schedule can make it happen. We’ve got a couple crazy, big projects going right now (I mean CRAZY-BIG!). As soon as I have it figured out, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, feel free to keep sending me your emails if you’re interested. I’ve been collecting them into one big folder and plan to send a note out to all of you when we are official on the Seattle date.

If Chicago isn’t your city, where do you want us to consider coming in 2009? You can always email us at mera@fioria.us and put the word in!

Next…The FORUM, the forum, the FREAKING FORUM!!!!! Can you hear me scream this? 🙂

The forum has been a journey all in itself! Brian emailed a half dozen of you that replied to wanting to be Beta Testers (thank you, thank you, thank you for volunteering!). I guess he got so many emails that he asked if I would jump on here and thank everyone. If you didn’t hear back from him, it’s because he has already moved forward. But he wanted me to make sure you knew it wasn’t a personal thing! As soon as our Beta Testers are doing trying out a few things, we’ll be that much closer to going LIVE!

Last…the Photo Contests! (yeah! We love the Photo Contests!)

We’ve got the Water Contest to finish up! I’m so excited to post our top Five Finalists next week for the Water Contest! I don’t think we ever said what the prize would be. How about a copy of Adobe’s Lightroom software! Keep an eye out this coming week for the Five Wonderful Finalists!

And a special word to all our voters!!

I had so much fun creating my own “Starbucks Gift Cards” (you know you can customize the image and text!) that I want to do the same thing for the Random Voter Awards on the Water Contest and Pet Contest. But it has to be $25 instead of $20. I know, bummer. Starbucks will only let you have $25. 🙂 And if you don’t like Starbucks, we’ll give you another option or two.

The last day to submit photos for the Pet Photo Contest is the last day of August. The contest officially ends on Sunday, August 31st at midnight PST.

Have a wonderful weekend friends!