"Not Yummy!"

I made some apple cinnamon muffins the other night. As C.J. was devouring his second, I asked him if they were yummy. "NOT YUMMY!" he replied in his angry voice, "Delicious." I can't believe I dared use such a childish word with my grown-up two year old.

Patent # D610,833

Yup! My first patent. It's only a design patent, which isn't nearly as cool as a utility patent, but I'll take it anyway. It's for the design of Close To My Heart's ink organization unit. Of course I assigned it to Close To My Heart as the owner and I share the inventor status with Ron Lunt, our former VP of Operations. It's been on the market for a year and a half, but the patent was just issued last week.

It can store 60 CTMH stamp pads, even more markers, and has a tray for re-inkers that sits on top. It can spin around and be disassembled. Some people want to see all of their inks at once, so these towers can stand alone on a desk or be mounted on the wall. You can buy it piece by piece (if you just have 12 stamp pads you just need to buy one stamp pad tower) or get the whole thing outright.

This was one of the many fun products I got to work on in New Product Development. I miss that job, but my new job is cool, too. For those of you who don't know, last November I moved out of NPD and into the Finance/Business Development dept. I spend about 1/2 of my time creating financial models and the other 1/2 brainstorming and implementing ways to generate incremental revenue for the company. My brain definitely gets a daily workout!