Hotel San Giorgio - Here We Come!

One more EuroTrip hotel booked!

Late last month/early this month I created a short list of lodging options for Venice, Vienna and Rome with the idea that Ross and I would pick our hotels together from that list. This morning we knocked out Venice!

Hotel lobby

We'll be spending two nights in the Hotel San Giorgio. As Venice is a spendy city to visit, we'll be staying in an economy double. But since I'd rather be out and about enjoying Venice, a small room is no problem.

Among the reasons we selected this hotel were the good reviews on TripAdvisor, the central location and the inclusion of breakfast. (We're all about included breakfasts to help power us through the day.)

Review: Wired and Dangerous

I don't know if I would go as far as to call it a new year's resolution, but instead of just blogging about moi all the time, I would like to spend more time this year reviewing books, movies, events, restaurants, destinations, etc. I'm thinking we can sum them up as the lifestyle section of the blog. (In fact, I think I'll create a new "lifestyle" label. Yes, yes I will.)

Last month I read Wired and Dangerous, by John Patterson and Convio Summit 2011 keynote speaker, Chip Bell (hence the interest). It was definitely a work read so to be honest it took me a little while to get through. It was a good book, and I'll hit some of the highlights, but you know how it is, after working all day, who relaxes with a work read?

Like I said though, good book. The big idea is that consumers today are more demanding and more vocal than ever. We're more demanding because a few stand-out experiences, like working with Amazon and their amazing customer service, have really started to raise the bar. We're also demanding because we're less tolerant of human error - just think of how often you go to the self-check out lane or ATM instead of conversing with a real person. It's just like they say, if you want to get something right, do it yourself...so we do.

We're more vocal somewhat on accident. Many moons ago if we had a bad experience, say at the airport, we would moan about it to our friend who picked us up after the flight. Now we tweet about it from the runway, consequently reaching way way more people. We've also started to learn that if we moan in a public enough way, someone might fix it for us right then and there. Quite reminiscent of Pavlov's doggy experiment.

All that means that as customer service people, we have to work a lot harder to make our customers happy. You have to remember what their most recent site search, recommend books based on their last purchase, alert them of deals based on their habits. Admittedly, it is a little daunting.

Throughout the book John and Chip share personal stories of customer service gone wrong (very funny in many cases) and customer service gone oh-so-right (make you say WOW). And even if you don't think your job is about customer service, their stories help you see how all of our jobs are about customer service in one way or another. It's a good read for thinking about how you approach your job, your clients, the retention of clients and all the people who are serving you and their performance and the fact that maybe you should cut them some slack for simply being human. After all, it happens.

California Girl

It's been unofficial for a while but now it's official - for six nights this spring I'm gonna be a California girl! I'll be adventuring first to San Diego to see Kevin for two nights and then on up the coast for a four night business trip to San Francisco. I've never been to either city so between that and seeing little bro, and knocking "San Diego Zoo" off my bucket list, I'm quite pleased.

Hotel in San Fran

This officially solidifies the first half of 2012 as just pure crazy. Pure wonderful fun crazy. Check it out:

• January: 3 speaking engagements, 1 in each city: Austin, Phoenix and NYC
• February: This is the month I sleep. So far nothing other than Valentine's Day here.
• March: Cirque du Soleil date night, SxSW, Boston for Jane's wedding, start California trip
• April: Finish California trip, Easter, Ross' birthday, my birthday
• May: EuroTrip

I totally dig it.

2012 Resolutions

It's quite late but I'm still up (and yes, mostly because I had to watch just one more episode of Friday Night Lights). I just read several of the Deltas' new year's resolutions and I have to admit, I felt kinda left out. So I'm going to share just a few of them (the others I'm trying not to jinx so you'll just have to wait until I achieve them to learn about them).

• Travel. It's lookin' good. EuroTrip and Boston flights have been booked and tomorrow I hope to book my San Diego plane tickets. With any luck, I'll accompany all those flights with hotel rooms. A January sub-goal is to book hotels for Rome, Venice and Vienna and to come in near-ish to budget. Those might be mutually exclusive clauses; we'll see.
• Work out 4x per week. I pretty much do this now but I'd like to 1) keep it up and 2) nail it even on busy work/travel/social/whatever weeks.
• Take my vitamins. Well, I just realized that I've already missed the boat on doing this every day. (I need to take them with food so today I took 1 to work with me where I was going to eat breakfast and I just realized I never took it. Damn.) However, maybe I can still come in at 90% or higher and score an A overall for this.

PS Seeing as I shared 3 resolutions right here, it looks like I'm not going to achieve my original resolution (which makes 4 total shared resolutions I guess) to have less resolutions.

Latest Addiction

In high school I read Friday Night Lights and it quickly became one of my favorite books of all time. (Summary: small town loves high school football and goes to the extreme to support it [Interesting note, our friend Stacy grew up out there in West Texas. He and even more so his older brother, were high school students at that school during the time the book takes place.]) I was stoked in college when they made a movie of it but was sorely disappointed when I saw it. Such gratuitous teenage sex, drinking, drugs, etc and they totally changed the ending, I mean as dramatic as making the Titanic not sink. I was so disappointed in fact that when they made a TV series, I didn't even bother. I figured it was the same characters from the movie in a "what happens next" sequel style series.

Fast forward many moons to this holiday season. Our new BluRay player is smart and thus we can stream in Netflix. Totally awesome. The Friday Night Lights TV series was filmed here in Austin so locally it's discussed often and many people I know, with varying entertainment interests, have raved about the series. Rave reviews, filmed in my (new) hometown and now free on-demand via Netflix. What the hell. I'll give it a shot.

Well that was three days and 12 episodes ago.

First, the TV series is not an extension of the movie. It's just loosely based around the same familiar story of a small Texas town infatuated with its high school football team and the holy grail of winning state.

Second, the characters are so loveable. The coach with his guidance counselor wife and their daughter who is so over football. The unlucky start QB who suffers a major injury. Then the self-conscious second string QB forced to step up as an underclassmen and who develops a crush on the coach's daughter. It's wonderfully cheesey, dramatic and wholesome.

And finally, the oh-so-familiar scenes. It's like looking into my life at times. In some ways, literally: the game scenes were filmed about a mile from the house at Pflugerville High, which I just confirmed via Wikipedia but which I ran across the house to tell Ross when I recognized the district office building in the back of one game scene. (This makes living in a town with such an absurd name a little better. The realtor should have told us this back in 2009; I would have felt a lot cooler moving to P-ville if she had.) I also recognized the shopping center across from our house with the ridiculous ice cream sundae shaped building. You can't fake that kind of ridiculousness folks. And according to Wikipedia, there's one future episode filmed in Boston, including a segment at BU.

But beyond the neighborhood scenery, the plot has some crazy familiarity. Like the scene where the football players dress in drag as cheerleaders for a pep rally. Oh Friday Night Lights, that was so CLHS circa every year 1999-2003. Or the CheerAmerica Classic which I'm pretty sure I competed at and won my division in back in sophomore year of high school. And while we thankfully didn't have any injuries as severe as the starting QB in this series does, my sophomore homecoming date, starting QB Michael, did break his femur one week before the dance.

So basically take my new home, plus my high school years and add in a little more drama and scandal and you've got Friday Night Lights. It's no wonder I'm addicted. The only thing standing between me and all five seasons is the inability of our internet to stream both Netflix video and Ross' new online computer game addiction.

Happy New Year!

2012 is here! At our house you can tell its New Year's Day because the Christmas decorations were all down by lunch, Christmas tree scented candles have been replaced by "soft fluffy towel" candles, the wreath on the door has been replaced by a "Home is Where the Heart is" Valentine's decoration and the Texans are on the TV. Sounds like January to me.

When Ross and I started 2011 we decided we just wanted to have a normal year. I kinda giggled at the idea of a "normal" year (I mean, really, what's normal?) but I have to say, it was. We didn't have any life changes and thankfully our families all remained happy and healthy. I know most years won't be so wonderfully uneventful and for the most part that's good (because it often takes an event to get to the next great thing). But after our crazy 2009 and a fairly eventful 2010, I'm very thankful for our blissfully easy 2011...and am breathing easier now I can say it without knocking on wood.

Here's lookin' at you 2012.