We wanted to thank everyone who made this trip to the Los Angeles area so great.  It was fun to meet all the girls at Oasis Fitness in Woodland Hills and getting to spend some time talking to Kimara and Heidi at X-Pole was great.  It’s always so much fun to meet people around the country and sad to leave.  We wanted to post a few photos from our trip.

June 16th is StudioVeena.Com’s one year birthday.  Why a birthday and not the more business typical anniversary?  The answer is simple, among the many circumstances that led up to StudioVeena.Com was a pregnancy. It was this pregnancy that made starting Studio Veena as an actual, bricks-and-mortar studio unrealistic and led us to take the studio online

In The Beginning

StudioVeena.Com started June 16th, 2008 as the result of Veena and her husband Chris, who you all know as Webmaster, working together across an almost two-thousand mile distance, to accomplish what was then only a dream.  StudioVeena.Com didn’t start as a website, it was the culmination of an amazing set of circumstances.

The Pole

Veena fell in love with pole dance the moment her hands touched the smooth, cold steel.  It was the most thrilling thing she had ever done! The day after her first pole experience she was hooked.  Her whole body hurt, her shoulders ached and she could hardly lift her arms.   After searching the Internet for more information Veena found she could get a pole for her home.  She bought her first pole, a stainless steel permanent that took the better part of an afternoon to install.

It wasn’t long after starting to pole dance that Veena decided that she wanted to teach others to pole.  Within weeks after deciding this she started lining everything up.   A timeshare at a local performing arts building would be the studio and poles were on their way, five beautiful X-Poles.

Before the poles even arrived fate changed the lives of Webmaster and Veena.  Webmaster’s parents were in town visiting when another visitor failed to make her appearance.  Veena was pregnant.  While this was a challenge, the immediate reaction was that it was doable, Veena could teach as long as possible then find a student who could pick up the slack until the baby was born.

The next day came the next big hit.  Chris lost his job.  Everything seemed to be falling apart.  Another child was on its way, a lost job and the dreams of Studio Veena feeling further and further away.  It was what seemed like a soul crushing defeat.

While Chris was job hunting Veena got to work.  If she couldn’t teach, she could record some lessons to start with.  As Veena was recording her lessons job offers started to come in for Chris.  It seemed that fate had one more big change in store.

The Big Move

In a fairly short time Chris found a job.  It was a good job that paid well and allowed him to use his talents.  That job was in California.  So the preperations began for the move.  Veena would stay behind for three months to get the house ready for sale and let the kids finish school.  The urge to teach continued for her though.

Over the next couple days a plan came together, the lessons would be part of a website.  It wouldn’t be just just a plain vanilla website, it would be a community where people could come together to learn and share their own experiences.  It would be focused on empowerment and avoid the negative.  The best part of the plan was that it could be worked on while they were separated, making the best of a bad situation.

Almost three months later StudioVeena.Com was born.  It took a lot of hard work and Veena and Chris weren’t even in the same state.   But their persistence and hard work paid off, and only a couple weeks after launching the site they were back together with their whole family in sunny California.

Veena

Veena grew up on a farm in the small town of Regan, ND, a town that is pushing a mere twenty people now.  Hardly the place you would expect to find the next diva of the pole.

As a child Veena dreamed of athletic achievement, artistry, and leadership.  She dreamed of being a Rockette and during the summer months she played at gymnastics.  In the winter Veena dreamed of Olympic achievement as an ice skater, teaching herself to skate on the homemade rink her father would flood for her.  In high school she took some lessons but as with so many other things life got in the way.

In her early twenties Veena bought Skating For Dummies so she could start teaching herself to skate again.  She enjoyed going to the local skating rinks, and even taught youth skating for a time.  Teaching was in her blood.

At this point everything took off.  Veena got her ACE certification for personal training after finding an interest in weight training, and became a trainer at the local YMCA.  After moving to Minneapolis she started taking dance lessons at the local Bally’s gym.  Finally after trying out a dance pole at a party she said, I need to get one of these.

Veena has always been fascinated by health and fitness.  She credits her rapid recovery from her four pregnancies with her insistence on continuing her workout regimen even after finding out she was pregnant.

Webmaster

Chris, the husband half of StudioVeena.Com, grew up about twenty miles away from Veena, in North Dakota’s  capital city of Bismarck.  A thriving town of about fourty-thousand people, Bismarck was North Dakota’s second largest city.

From an early age, Chris had a great affinity for computers.  His first computer was a TI-99/4A, with not much more power than your typical digital watch.  Using this, then state-of-the-art, digital tool, Chris wrote his first code before graduating first grade. Over time other interests grew.  Art was a large part of Chris’s younger years, and business grew from a passing interest to a major consumer of his time.

Shortly after graduating high-school Chris started a web-design company, he built websites for the largest media companies in town, and some of the first e-commerce enabled websites in Bismarck.  Before selling his business in 2003 he went on to start Bismarck/Mandan’s most trafficked website, BisManOnline.Com, that is still thriving to this day.

After helping build another business, heading up research and development for the Geek Squad and managing sites for AT&T, Dell and Adidas , Chris is ecstatic to be working on his favorite project ever.  StudioVeena.Com has allowed him to work closely with the love of his life, Veena.

Just wanted to share a few more photos from last weekend.  You’ll notice that SaschaPoles and I were able to get out and have a little fun.  We saw the bay, hung out in the city and all-around had a bunch of fun.  Unfortunately due to the fog we didn’t get to see the Golden Gate Bridge in its entirety.

So we aren’t going to tell anybody whats going on, but we are going to hint.  We have big things happening here at StudioVeena.Com just look at the pictures below (is that SaschaPoles I see?).  I wonder what could be happening?

Twitter is the new online service that is taking the world by storm.  Called micro-blogging, twitter allows you to post comments to your twitter feed that are no more than 140 characters in length.

Twitter creates an environment that provides for a large ongoing conversation between you and your followers and by proxy your followers’ followers.  Think of it as a cross between chat and a forum.  It’s more available than chat and more agile than a forum.  While it is not a replacement for either of these services its a great way to see whats going on with your favorite websites, meet people with similiar interests and keep up to speed with your friends.

To follow us on twitter sign up for your own Twitter account at http://www.twitter.com then follow our account at http://www.twitter.com/studioveena.  It’s easy its addictive and its fun, once you start you will find yourself tweeting to your friends all day long.