Hi, I'm Collis!

As of a couple of days ago Cyan is out of her first trimester and it seems that by next March, I’m going to be a dad! We had an ultrasound on Friday and saw Moosh (which is our temporary name for baby and means Mouse in Farsi) bouncing around and looking surprisingly human!

We don’t know if Moosh is going to be a boy or girl yet, though apparently in a month or so we get to find out. I thought they’d have some sophisticated test, but it seems that they just do an ultrasound and look for boy bits - not very futuristic.

So this will be my second baby, there’s the Envato baby and now an actual baby! :-) Let’s hope the sleepless nights, constant attention requirements and hard work that the first has required, prepares me for Moosh’s arrival!

Next Friday Cyan and I are heading to Chicago for our inaugural Envato remote staff meetup! There’s going to be about 30 of us converging on the windy city for a few days of meetings, presentations, chats, coffees and work, followed by a day of “Amazing Race” around the city.

One of the oddities of our company is that this will be the first time I ever meet in person all of these people. It’s really amazing that we’ve worked together, in some cases, for over two years and never actually seen each other. 

I’m very excited, though it’s going to be incredibly hectic. I’m hoping to have one-on-one meetings with everyone coming … so that’s like 20 something hours of meetings just there - yikes! 

Happily afterwards Cy and I will be heading to San Francisco and California for 2 weeks which will be half work, and half pure holidaying!

There are five of us from the Melbourne office going, so although it’s going to be a horribly long trip over, it’ll be fun going as a group. 

Photos to follow!

I was interviewed last week on our Envato Community podcast with the fabulous Jordan and Drew from our Community team. It was really fun chatting about work, life, how we started Envato, what I do on Saturday nights (?!), and a bunch of stuff. 

If you’re interested you can grab the podcast from our brand new Envato Notes site.

Meanwhiles … apparently I giggle a *LOT*. What is wrong with me? I think I may have a giggling disorder!

Writing books is quite a painful process, particularly near the end when it’s a real struggle to get the book finished, finalized and published. When I returned from holidays in January with what I thought was a pretty much finished manuscript, I told Cyan that it would take me a week, or two at the most to finalize it … it took six months.

So, unsurprisingly, a few weeks ago when the book - Blog Business - was released, I swore off writing other books, for “at least a couple of years”. But this morning in the shower I found myself planning out the contents of a new book.

I’ve heard that when women go into labour the pain is unbearably intense and that most would swear they’d never get themselves into that position again - thankfully not something I will ever know firsthand. But the beauty of pain is you forget, and sure enough many women end up deciding to have more children. 

So I guess for me writing books, is a tiny, little bit like giving birth (albeit much, much, much less painful). 

Now that my expectations have been adjusted by the reality of actual sales life, I’m excited again, and hoping to get it over 1000 sales by the end of this month :-)

I love the first day of a new month. Why? Because all of a sudden I have a ton of new reports and stats to pour over. It’s been a big month across our sites which is great, and a nice way to kick off the second half of the year. 

Of course August is going to be huge, thanks to our Birthday Bundle 2010 and assorted other surprises and announcements!