Introducing our dream

We are progressing slowly toward laying the groundwork for our business venture. At the advice of friends, we've established a presence on the web by creating this blog, securing Internet domains and creating a website and Facebook page.

With that done, we'd like to tell you a little more about our dream. We've named it the Arkansas Diamond Mine Adventure. Check out our first attempt at a website (arkansasdiamondmineadventure.com). It's going to take a good deal of money, which we have precious little of at this point, but we believe it will succeed and hope people across the country will help us make it a reality.

The idea came to us one night last summer as I watched our 8-year-old son play at McDonald's. A manager had to come and run off several teenagers who wanted to play in the kid's playground area. The idea occurred to us that lots of people (children of all ages, if you will) love to play, climb, swing, slide and race. And as big fans of "Survivor," "The Amazing Race" and "Wipeout," we've wished we could participate in obstacle courses like the ones on those TV shows.

We started doing some research and writing a business plan after I learned that I was getting laid off at the end of August. We previously mentioned that we sent our plan to Warren Stephens at Stephens Inc., and he gave us the name of the Diamond State Ventures venture capital group in downtown Little Rock. When we saw the name, we thought it was to be one of those God things because of the similarity of the names and they would write back a few weeks later with a check enclosed. That was September 9. For whatever reasons, they haven't written back or returned our phone calls. So we've decided to put feet to our faith and try to do what other people have done in recent years: raise funds on the Internet.

We enlisted the help of a gentleman whom I worked with on various projects in Atlanta, a fantastic artist with Stormer-Brooks Illustrations. We told him about the business idea and asked for drawings of a boy playing in the forest/jungle for a logo for our company. Scott gave us five plus one of a boy and a girl. [Thank you again, Scott, for the great job.] These also are on our Facebook page.  Our family narrowed the choices down to the boy swinging and the girl and boy.

We invite you to help us establish this business, and the first thing you can do is to vote on which image you think would make the best logo. Vote early and vote often, as they say in Chicago, because we want to move forward as quickly as possible.

We now have the drawings on our Facebook page and have invited visitors there to cast a vote. You can go to our Facebook page or send us an e-mail at info@arkansasdiamondmineadventure.com. Vote for the boy swinging or the boy and girl searching. Thank you very much for your interest and encouragement.