People I enjoy!

We faced a choice for this weekend. A week ago we were deciding how long to make our July 4 vacation. Would I take the entire week off from work so we could travel 9 days? Honestly I didn't feel like it. I looked at the weather report and saw that Saturday and Sunday were forecast to be beautifully warm days— with afternoon highs of 84-86°F (29-30° C)— and decided I'd rather stay home for the weekend and enjoy some #PoolLife. Plus, I had too many meetings on my work calendar already to feel comfortable taking off the whole week, so I'll work Monday and part of Tuesday.

Friday evening we had dinner with friends and I shared my totally un-ambitious weekend plans. "We're going to take advantage of the warm weather and enjoy some pool life," I boasted.

"Ah, #PoolLife!" Bobbi replied, pronouncing it as 'hashtag pool life'.

I had a moment of "WTF?" wondering if Bobbi is reading my blog. I introduced 'pool life' as a tag about a year ago. Meeting someone who might have read my blog is weird because I have, like, maybe ten followers... and at least 2 of them are bots. 🤣



So how was it? It was glorious. The temperature was already up to 85 or 86 as we drove home from dining out for lunch and running a few quick shopping errands. Later in the afternoon it hit a high of 88, according to the weather app. We splashed around in the pool for a while, doing exercises going back and forth, then floated to relax in the warm sunshine, then soaked in the hot tub, then laid out on the lounge chairs.

I wiled away the afternoon mostly in the shade, as you can see in the photo above. Hawk took a spot mostly in the sun (not in the photo). I had my laptop with me, and Hawk had her tablet, so we kept ourselves quietly occupied for at least an hour while drying off and enjoying the warm weather.

It was satisfying to spend this day by the pool. I've been waiting for the weather to be warm enough to do this for a few months. This weekend isn't the first legitimately warm weather we've had this year, but it is the first we've been here for. 😅 I think there were a few warm days in April when we were traveling in Georgia and then a few in late May when we were in Italy. I hope now that we're really into summer we'll have plenty more like this, so I can enjoy more afternoons by the pool.

Oh, and the next afternoon by the pool? Today. (Sunday.) The weather's similar to yesterday's, and like yesterday, I've kept my schedule clear of commitments so I can relax and enjoy some... #PoolLife.

Hawk and I have made hotel reservations for a trip next week. We're taking extra days off ahead of July 4. For our 6 nights in 3 different cities (we're driving) we looked first at the main brands where I have elite status and frequent guest points: Hilton, Marriott, and IHG. And out of 6 nights we booked... none of them at these hotel brands. They're all too expensive!

We saw rates of $250-300/night or higher for the areas we checked. And we're not staying in Beverly Hills or Manhattan, BTW. We're looking at roadside motels in the mountains of California and Oregon. I'm willing to pay a reasonable premium to get the benefits of my top-tier elite status (or next-to-top tier) with each of these brands, plus earn more points, but these price premiums were completely unreasonable. We booked all 6 nights at lower-rung hotels. Are they as nice? Probably not. But they're also literally half the price of Hilton/Marriott/IHG.

This week a few colleagues and I ran a booth for our company at a small trade show. I say "small" because it wasn't even a trade show, per se. It was a "Developer Day" at a major bank that's one of our customers. This "Developer Day" was like a trade show, though, in that it was an exhibit showcase by multiple vendors, plus various internal teams that platform our solutions. We had table on the exhibit floor.

Here are Five Things:

1. Like with most trade shows, the most common question we got was "So, [Company Name]... what do you do?" But unlike most trade shows, once we gave a one-sentence explanation identifying how we're used in an internal platform, almost everybody was like, "Oh, yeah, I use that daily. Cool." Thus the challenge I put to my team internally was, How can we increase our brand awareness within the bank?

2. We had a good spread of swag...at least to start. We had logo hats, logo socks, USB charger/adapter cables, logo air fresheners (like for a car), and the old trade show standard, logo stickers. I quip at least to start because we sold out of the hats pretty quickly. They were gone within the first hour. The socks went next. Then the charger cables. The air fresheners were a dud until all we had left were those and the stickers, then everybody at least took a whiff of the air fresheners to decide if they like them. 😅 We had, like, a bazillion of them, though, so we packed most of them to send back. I took two home thinking Hawk would like them, since they're lavender. She was skeptical at first but then noticed they were lavender— and purple. She took both.

3. I was bemused at how fast attendees scooped up our merch. I've written before about how all trade shows have a certain class of attendee, the "swag hound". These people cruise from booth to booth, not really interested in what any of the vendors do but feigning just enough interest to hoover up all the free giveaways and enter drawings for big prizes if there are any. Typically, in my experience, swag hounds match one of two stereoptypes: students/very entry level tech workers (i.e., people who are still impressed by getting cheap things for free) and, oddly, mid- to late career government employees (who maybe also are still tickled to get cheap things for free 🤣). But the attendees at this show were all software developers well employed by a major bank. You'd think if they wanted ballcap or a pair of socks, they could afford to buy them.

4. Yes, socks. They're the "it" thing for trade show swag right now! I was very much 🙄 when I saw this fad emerging two years ago— like, really, socks? People can't buy their own socks?—  but it works. Socks are just enough different from the trade show standard of t-shirts that they attract an extra dollop of attention. And my company's socks are actually pretty good quality. Plus, the logo design is just subtle enough that I can wear them with business casual/business dressy outfits when I'm visiting clients. When people at the bank were skeptical about our socks, I stretched my leg out alongside the table to show them I was wearing a pair.

5. Getting colleagues to stay in the booth was a problem, as always. I get it, most people hate standing in the booth waiting for questions— or waiting for real questions instead of people feigning the minimum interest level required to bag our swag. It frustrates me when colleagues who are supposed to be there with me wander off the moment there's a lull... because "Just text me if it gets busy" doesn't work. When it gets busy it gets busy. And when I have a crowd of people in front of me all trying to ask questions it is NOT the time for me to ask them all to wait while I pull out my phone to frantically text people. This show was like many, where I often found myself in the booth alone— because I have a stronger "This is the job I'm here to do" ethic than most of my colleagues. But this time I kept my frustration at bay by choosing to believe that my colleagues who skipped out of the booth were having high-value conversations out in the hall. Were they having high-value conversations? I'm sure they had at least one or two. For the rest of the time that's simply what I chose to believe while I was manning the booth, and facing the crowds, solo.

I've kind of lost interest in finishing Better Call Saul. I havn't watched an episode in... checks calendar... five weeks. And I'm just two episodes from the end of the series!

BCS switches gears after episode 5.09. That was the one where Kim leaves Jimmy. Arguably that emotional loss is what tilts Jimmy into going all-in as Saul Goodman. With that the essential character arc of the series is complete. Jimmy has full transitioned from "Slippin' Jimmy" the small-time conman, to "Johnny Hustle", the hardworking young lawyer trying to carve out a career amid various people who won't give him a chance, to Saul Goodman, the no-ethics lawyer who'll break any law to make a buck, as long as he can get away with it.

The writers could have ended the series with ep. 5.09. Yeah, it would've been a ragged ending. We viewers would've wanted some kind of closure, some kind of coda that ties the story back in to Breaking Bad.

The writers give us more than just a wrap-up or coda, though. Like El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie told the tale of how Jesse Pinkman escaped to a new life post- the events of Breaking Bad, they want to tell us what happens to Jimmy post-Breaking Bad. The last 4 episodes of the series switch gears— and years; jumping the timeline from 2004 to 2010— to do so.

And that's where the series lost me. I watched the first two "Jimmy post-Breaking Bad" episodes. They aren't bad per se; they're just... tiring. Not fun. I paused the second to last episode after the opening credits because I realized I'd rather do something else than continue to watch. I paused it, got up from the TV, and walked away. That was five weeks ago now.

There's a saying in writing. Okay, maybe it's not much of a saying. I think one of my friends coined it 30-ish years ago. I call it "The 7 Deadly Words". Those words are Why do I care about these characters? I call them the seven deadly words because when audiences start saying them, it's the death knell for a series.