All the best to you and yours this holiday season!

First, make merry with this White Christmas video from a trusted friend, who got it from a friend in Europe.

We look back at 2007 – a big year of social networking (Web 2.0). Marj and I stayed close to home, and at the ready to slide into a stool at the Steelhead Diner in the Public Market.

We followed some dear friends around Latin America by flying on Google Earth from Santiago (Chile) to Mendoza and Vista Flores (Argentina) and back to their home to San Carlos (Mexico).

Last week, our daughter, and son-in-law touched down in Ho Chi Minh City, from where they video conferenced with us. They visited several of the temples at Angkor Wat, Cambodia, with colleagues. On Christmas Day, they called us from the top of their uptown hotel in Saigon, which we saw on Google Earth. Santa is as much a craze as Levi jeans and Michael Jackson for kids and disco clubs. Joel’s Kids First Vietnam wheelchair factory is located in Quang Tri, north of Hue, near those beautiful beaches.

As FREE radio from the Music Genome Project, you can launch Pandora to get a radio station to play your favorite artist, song or composer. You can share if you’d like. I have created seven radio stations (composers from Dominico Scarlatti to Maurice Ravel; jazzers Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson and so forth), and produced a QuickMix for a broad range of selections from classical, world and jazz stations.

I am maintaining my entry to Wikipedia, the encyclopedia for everyone on the planet. I created an entry on Gregory Short, who taught me even more about music, musicians and piano. The Kirkpatricks¹ wrote about my learning measurement program on how training the right topics for our constituencies at Regence, whose mission is to end the tyranny of health cost and confusion.

If you are interested in more about podcasting and Wikipedia, check out TEDTalks video presentations of annual sessions on breakthrough concepts and practices that are held in Monterey, CA, near my home town of Carmel on the beach. Once you have downloaded iTunes > iTunes Store > Podcasts, search for TEDtalks. If you subscribe, find Jimmy Wales (2005), who is founder of Wikipedia – in the self-organizing, self-correcting, ever-expanding, and thoroughly addictive encyclopedia of the future. In this presentation, he explains how Wikipedia’s collaborative systems work, and why they succeed. While we’re here in iTunes, check out Herbie Hancock Playlist on the Celebrity Playlists covering composer Igor Stravinsky to jazz artist, session leader + composer Miles Davis.

Be sure to check out Marj’s new book, The Manx Cat: A Short Tale. Just go to Blub > Bookstore. In the Search box, enter Manx. To find out more about the contents, double-click the cover. Awesome!

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¹ Donald L. Kirkpatrick and James D. Kirkpatrick, Implementing the Four Levels

Patty’s garden

By Debra Smith, Herald Writer

Everyone in the small community of Edmonds town homes owned the weedy little rectangle at the end of the building, but no one wanted anything to do with it.

No one except Patty Steele-Smith.

She saw the potential for something peaceful and profound in a neglected, less-than-nothing spot.

She envisioned a garden; not just a retreat, but a piece of living art. She didn’t know much about plants, but creating was familiar ground.

At Cornish, she studied how to create installations, three-dimensional spaces meant to involve all the viewer’s senses.

She learned about plants along the way, and in a few short years, her work of art was winning awards and on garden tours.

You can see it and five other gardens on the Edmonds Rhythm and Blooms Garden Tour, set for 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sunday.

The garden is small, just a slice of land next to her townhouse. Its design is based on the ancient principles of feng shui, and the garden is as much about the physical features as it is about plants.

“Plants, water, rock – all of these have life,” she said. “They draw you in and make you feel a part of nature.”

Steele-Smith, 44, works as a personal trainer and coach. She shows her artwork at an Edmonds gallery.

The garden includes eye-catching pieces, such as an assortment of containers, and her artwork, including a path of 202 handmade mosaic stepping stones. A Plexiglas spiral hangs above a circle of multi-colored glass pieces.

And then there are the cats. Her kitties love to loll in the garden, and she created two special cat paths with cat mosaic stepping stones just for them.

The garden’s most eye-catching feature is a ceramic black panther bursting through a mirror, its claws streaming water. Steele-Smith made it, saying the panther is a defender against bad spirits.

“When you have a talent, it’s a gift,” she said. “This has allowed me to share my talent with the community.”