Bahamas
February 21st, 2011 § 1 Comment
Time for a little update! Drew and I recently got back from our trip to the Bahamas and I’ve been meaning to blog about it but it’s taken a little while 
All in all we had a great time.
It’s funny…we’ve been together for five years and it was our first big trip together, just the two of us. It was really nice, definitely needed. The day-to-day stuff, at least for me, can get really draining after a while, and it honestly took me a day or two to just RELAX!
But after that it was great, goofing around and acting like a kid, unabashedly falling into the mode of lovestruck teenagers as we wandered around our fancy resort.
It was nice waking up in the morning to just giggle and tumble around in the sheets, browse real estate online and plan where we might be in a year or two, dress up like it’s our first date and walk everywhere with our arms wrapped around each other, converse with slightly tipsy strangers about how awesome it is the number of times you can have sex on vacation compared to at home… It was everything I hoped it would be and more–fun, romantic, and now I can’t wait to plan our next trip!
I’ll be honest, some of the “magic” definitely started to fade after the first two years of us dating, and sometimes you wonder if you can get it back, even just for a second, when you’re having the same old conversation about what’s for dinner, or waking up before dawn to take out the dog, or looking at the clock at work and realizing you’re going to be home late again. I guess if it’s the right person you can, and that was the best part of our vacation (although the weather, the beaches, and the Bahamian people were so nice as well!).
We’d already made it part of our plan to take a trip around our birthdays (late Aug/early Sept) as gifts to each other, and I think we’re even more committed now to taking a trip just the two of us at least once a year.
I never really understood when people would say it was an investment in your relationship, but I totally get it now. So even though vacation is freaking expensive (honestly I don’t think we had a meal under $40! When we got back to DC we immediately went to Chipotle and sighed a breath of relief that we were back under $20), it’s so so worth it to relax and enjoy each other. Who knows where we’ll go next–maybe California this summer, and we’re thinking Portland/Seattle in the fall. Woo!
Happy New Year!
January 2nd, 2011 § Leave a Comment
2011 is going to be great. I just have a feeling.
2010, for me, was kinda hard. I started my first real job, Drew and I moved to a new place, Downing moved in, and lots of family drama went down. I’m still trying to learn to cope with it all. I spent the last few months worrying a lot–about my job in particular. I work at a software startup, and the marketing team got taken down to just me and then built up again over several weeks. Things got kind of crazy, and we had to plan for 2011, where we’re trying to double the size of the company, and I went a bit insane trying to do everything myself. I’m glad we have a team now, and I’m trying to learn to delegate. There’s a ton to do, and I feel like I’m already behind. But we’ll get there. This week might be rough. But I’ll make it.
I do want to make a few new year’s resolutions before I find myself without a purpose a few months from now. So here they are:
1. Write more. I have a new schedule where I’m going to write more (in this blog, on my novel–yes! I have a new one!) that I think will help my sanity level
2. Cook healthy meals for dinner 3x a week
3. Exercise 3x a week (maybe with Drew on the Kinect???)
4. As a corollary to #3, start running again. There are few things as relaxing as running, and I feel I owe it to myself to take this time…and with my new running gear hopefully I can take Goliath with me outside! That’ll be interesting… 
5. Worry less. There’s always more work to do, but it’ll always be there in the morning. I really surprised myself with how worried I got over work, I never thought I would be that kind of person, but once more responsibility started getting piled on, I suddenly turned into my freshman year roommate that would watch a movie and think, “Should I be doing this? I have a white paper to write. It really needs to get done, because then I have a webinar to plan and I should have gotten the slides out last week and did I plan enough time to do a dry run? Oh but I also have to set up all the emails and landing pages first. OY I’m not gonna finish. I am so lazy I need to get back to work,” and then I’d just sit there stewing all night. The only relief I got was through reading, watching TV, or sleeping–sometimes cooking. I just had to find an escape and forget about it for a while. But I’m resolved to realize that the work never stops coming, so unless I want to worry myself to death, I just have to get over it…work hard at work, and come home and relax. Sheesh!
So I hope everyone had a great holiday (I took off last week so I had a nice extended break!) and is looking forward to 2011! I think it’s going to be my best year yet.
Marketing Monday: A Recap of CapCon 2010
October 4th, 2010 § 1 Comment
I’m starting a new feature on Make My Day today called Marketing Mondays. As you know, most of my posts are about books, fashion, interior design, and cooking, but I do spend the greater part of my waking hours doing marketing for a software startup outside DC, and I thought I would try to document some of my marketing lessons “from the field” and incorporate them into the blog. So welcome to my first Marketing Monday!
This week I wanted to share my first-ever conference experience, including all the great best practices I learned while I was there. It was local, so it wasn’t quite the same as flying somewhere exotic, and staying alone in a fancy hotel room, but it was a lot of fun nonetheless! A few weeks ago, I spent the latter half of the week at National Harbor attending CapCon, a software marketing conference hosted by Capterra. Overall, the presenters were great and I got a lot out of it—definitely a long list of ideas that I’ve started cracking away at since I returned to the office (it’ll take me a while to get through them all!)…I’d highly recommend it to all software marketers who want to learn the latest marketing best practices, what to test, how to test, and how to better work with sales (they’re such a pesky bunch, no? ). Overall, my three big takeaways were the following:
- The critical metric of marketing effectiveness is the number of sales-ready leads produced per time period. There needs to be a common definition between marketing and sales on what a qualified (sales-ready) lead is to hold each area accountable.
- Define the message map for each buying persona/market. Create content to answer their questions throughout the research/buying process and REPURPOSE everything (blog posts into e-books into white papers, articles, videos, etc.)
- There are lots of easy tests we can be running to optimize our landing pages (images, headlines, length of form, videos, etc.)
We went over the following topics…my favorite presenters were Anne Holland, Ardath Albee, and Paul Gillin):
- Top Ten Website Mistakes (presented by Besa Pinchotti, Marketing Director at Capterra)
- Your Website Is Never Finished—What to Test and How (presented by Anne Holland, founder of MarketingSherpa)
- Nurture Marketing – How to Design and Build a Nurture Flow (presented by Cari Baldwin, co-founder of BlueBird Strategies)
- Capturing and Keeping Buyers with Creative Content (presented by Ardath Albee, author of eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale)
- Testing to Improve Your Conversion Rate (breakout session with Anne Holland)
- Building a Nurture Track for Your Business (breakout session with Cari Baldwin)
- Integrating Social Media with Your Content Strategy (breakout session with Ardath Albee)
- Staying Ahead of the Competition with Link Building and SEO (presented by Wil Reynolds, Seer Interactive)
- What’s Working Now in Email Marketing (presented by Jeanne Jennings, teaches MarketingSherpa’s email workshop)
- Software Sales Leads By Phone: What’s Working, What’s Flopping and Where the Money Is (presented by Michael Brown, sales consultant)
- Successfully Marketing to Software Buyers With Social Media (presented by Paul Gillin, founding editor-in-chief of TechTarget)
Rather than bore you all to tears, I thought I’d post all my notes (8 pages) on Scribd so anyone who’s interested can benefit from EVERYTHING I found interesting, useful, powerful…basically anything worth noting during the entire conference. I break down each presentation, share the case studies we covered, my biggest lessons, tips and tricks for improving results, and tools I heard about to better manage all the moving pieces and figure out what’s going on. You can read them online or download them to your computer.
Read my notes from CapCon 2010
Enjoy!
Fall of Giants
September 28th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Remember how excited I was that Ken Follett was coming out with a new book that chronicles 5 families through the 20th century? I am now boycotting it because of the $19.99 price tag. We’ll see how long this lasts. So disappointed but I just can’t justify $20 for an electronic copy of a book. Hmmm…
National Book Festival 2010 Review
September 28th, 2010 § 3 Comments
This past Saturday was the 2010 National Book Festival, held on the National Mall in DC. I first went last year, shortly after we’d moved to the area, and I had so much fun I had to go again this year. For anyone in or around DC who loves books, it is a great event! Basically it’s a group of huge tents with author speakers from many genres like Fiction & Mystery, Teens, Historical, Kids, Poetry, Contemporary & Life, etc. Each author gives a15 minute talk and then has a 20-minute Q&A with the audience about what they’re working on, how they write—basically anything! It’s really fun getting to know writers whose work I love on a more personal level. And awesome for learning about new-to-me authors as well! This year I went to see Ree Drummond, aka Pioneer Woman (!!! Yes!!! I almost died when I saw her in the program), Diana Gabaldon, Elizabeth Kostova, Julia Glass, and Ken Follett (!!). Here’s what I thought of each:
Ree Drummond: So overall she was adorable. I think she was counting on the fact that the people who came to her talk would already know who she was, so she didn’t give much intro at all before opening it up for questions. Thankfully, someone pointed this out and asked her to back up and tell her story, so we did get to hear some! Her life just fascinates me, and she’s such a real, down-to-earth, country gaI—and so funny! If you haven’t heard of her blog, go immediately to The Pioneer Woman. Her humor and compassion and fastidiousness in documenting recipes step-by-step with 46 pictures to boot is hilarious, and also super helpful. I was also excited to her about her new book coming out!!! It’s called Black Heels to Tractor Wheels, and tells the love story of meeting her husband on a trip back to her hometown in Oklahoma. It comes out February 2011 and you can pre-order it here. Overall, a good start to the day (hopefully if she comes back she’ll get a later timeslot, since at 10:30am not many people were there yet).
Diana Gabaldon: So I had never heard of Diana before, but after hearing most of her talk, I want to read her books. She has to be one of the most engaging and funny speakers I’ve heard in a long time. She is quirky, talks fast, makes fun of herself, writes these epic-long novels that many people commented on how multiple generations of their family are obsessed with, and overall very entertaining. She writes the Outlander books, which sounds like an action/romance/mystery/fantasy sort of series? By all accounts they sounded like odd, impossible-to-categorize, and can’t-put-them-down types of books. So, how can I not check that out? Oh, and she’s also like 4’11” with dark hair past her waist. Just thought I should add to your mental picture. J
Elizabeth Kostova: So Elizabeth was much different than the previous two. She went to Yale, and overall I found her more methodical, analytical…more academic in the way she approached her writing. She wrote The Historian, which I didn’t read, and honestly it doesn’t seem super up my alley, but all the same it was very interesting to hear her talk about the process of writing it. It took her 10 years to write with 3 kids under the age of 6, so she wrote mostly at night while everyone was asleep. I guess The Historian (based on the Dracula myth) isn’t like most novels in that it is one long piece of prose; instead it is a (LONG!) document that contains letters, memos, articles, anecdotes, and the like and together they’re woven together to create a story. A very interesting—but quite daunting!—task for putting together a novel. Her new novel, The Swan Thieves, sounds like a more traditional historical novel, but it also deals with the idea of myth, so if you’re into that—check it out!
Julia Glass: Julia was a real disappointment for me. I missed her last year when she was presenting in the morning and I couldn’t get myself downtown in time. So I was really looking forward to her this year. I really enjoyed her first two novels, Three Junes (which won the National Book Award) and The Whole World Over, as they’re so beautifully written, you’re just lulled by the rhythm of her prose. But…I just didn’t like her very much in person. She had quite a long speech prepared, and overall I found it unnecessarily political, pretentious, and boring. It felt like she was reliving her life for her own benefit, not inviting us in. She also seemed to have a chip on her shoulder that she was basically the opening act for Ken Follett, and she let us know about it. Overall I just wasn’t impressed, and honestly it makes me want to read her books less now that I know who’s behind her beautiful writing. Sad, really.
Ken Follett: I was really looking forward to hearing Ken speak, and he definitely didn’t disappoint! So first off—I didn’t realize he was English, so surprise accent! Off to a good start. He started by telling us about his new book, Fall of Giants, which is the first book in a planned trilogy that will follow five families around the world through the 20th century. Each book will focus on a war (WWI, WW2, and the Cold War), and he explained that he wanted to do another epic after everyone “responded so warmly” to Pillars of the Earth and World Without End (don’t you just love the Brits?). He read a passage from the book and it sounds very good. He did quite a bit of research, and all of the quotes by characters that existed in real life were taken from historical documents, memoirs, etc. so it sounds like it will relatively accurate from a historical standpoint. And you know how terrible I am at history so if he can find a way to make it interesting to me so I actually remember it, HOORAY!
So, all in all, a very successful National Book Festival. Definitely check it out if you’re in the area next year!
ps. One person I didn’t get a chance to see was Suzanne Collins, the author of the Hunger Games trilogy (young adult fiction…the first book was a cross between Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Lord of the Flies), which I spent Sunday devouring. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend. I’m partway through the second book, Catching Fire, and it seems just as good so far.
Check out my Living Social Books profile for what I’m reading and book reviews.
Furniture from Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie
September 19th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Some fun furniture pieces from Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie…if only they weren’t so expensive! I need the Target version of all of these.
Urban Outfitters
*cute blue ikat slipper chair!
*midcentury modern rocker
*funky teal bench!
Anthropologie
*apothecary cabinet! i want one of these so bad.
*beautiful watercolor midcentury modern occasional chair. too bad the colors are more muted in person.
*blue and white hollywood regency armchair! i actually considered buying this one. especially when it went on sale.
*the same in a graphic orange print.
West Elm Has Awesome Duvet Covers
September 16th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
I am on the hunt for a new duvet cover. We’ve been using my awesome lime and white quilt from The Company Store, but after Goliath, well, being Goliath, it is about on its last legs. I’m hoping to find something that isn’t so white…even though I love the look, it’s just too easy to get it dirty, and then I am annoyed until I wash it (a big production, as the quilt doesn’t fit in our stackable washer/dryer, and thus necessitates a trip to the laundromat, or to Mom’s). I got an email from West Elm the other day and fell in LOVE with one of the duvets below, and after browsing the rest of their selection online…now I can’t decide! Help me choose!
My initial favorite was the cherry blossoms (#1) but now I’m kind of leaning towards the bright orange! Which do you like best?
And I’m Back
September 14th, 2010 § 1 Comment
Well, I took a nice long break from the blog this time. Since…February? Ay. I’m sure you all got on fine without me, but I’m happy to be back! I’ve missed writing and I think life has finally settled down to where I can blog with any sort of regularity again. So yay! A quick recap of what’s changed since my last post:
1. I got a job! That’s right, I’m a real adult now with a real job. I work in marketing at LogiXML, a software startup outside DC.
2. We moved! We’re now living in a beautiful 2-bedroom condo in Old Town, and we like it a lot. Lots more space for the dog…and our new roommate! Downing moved down from New York and is staying with us until he finds a job here. It’s actually been a lot of fun having him, so hopefully he doesn’t find anything too soon.
3. We found out that Goliath has epilepsy, which apparently is pretty common in dogs and not life-threatening at all. He’s had three seizures so far, each about 2 weeks apart, and while it was scary at first, I think we’re getting used to it and it’ll just be something we live with from now on.
4. We went on our first family vacation! (I know, gag) In August we packed up and drove to Philly to meet up with Mom, Todd, Michael, and Wrigley, and then we all drove out to Grandma and Poppa’s lakehouse in southwestern Michigan. It was a lot of fun—very relaxing—and Goliath had a blast swimming in the lake. Hope to be back soon.
I think those are the big things. I’m sure other things will come out over the next few posts. I have LOTS of images saved and fun home projects of my own and 1000+ unread messages in my Google Reader (yep, I took a break from that too), so I’m sure I’ll be very busy catching up over the next few weeks. Stay tuned!
Valentine’s Update (and my new hair!)
February 15th, 2010 § 3 Comments
We had a lovely Valentine’s Day yesterday…hope you did too!
Well, full disclosure–we woke up yesterday morning in a fight, which was torture as I made Drew’s Valentine and tried to think of something lovey and true when all I could feel was the fact that we were not okay. I ended up with a somewhat depressing but longhaul-themed card, to the tune of “I’m not happy with you right now but I will always be here for you and I love you very much.” Yeah. But luckily Drew found me scrubbing the kitchen sink and doing a load of laundry when he woke up (a sure sign that I am…pissed) and we had a nice talk and made up. Hooray!
We spent most of the day watching the Olympics, playing with the dog, etc. and then Drew read his basketball book while Goliath and I took a nap. Around four five I decided I should start the beef bourguignon, so I got to work. I sauteed the bacon, browned the beef, sauteed the onion and carrot, and put it all in the pot with herbs and wine and stock. And then into the oven. By this time it was nearly 6 o’clock, and then I read that the stew should simmer for 3-4 hours. Hmmm. Eat dinner at 10 o’clock when I was nearly passed out and ready to go to bed, or save the beef for tomorrow (today) and go out instead? We chose option B. Drew took us to kora, a new italian place near us I’ve been dying to try. Drew had the roast chicken with bacon and cheese macaroni and some sort of green sauce. I had seared sea bass and saffron orzo and asparagus. Both were quite tasty! And Drew decided that he may like white fish after all, so I am very excited about the possibility of making some at home soon Oh, and he REALLY liked the herb ciabatta they had to start, so I think I’ll have to go back and make that for him since I was in PA when I first made it. We were going to get dessert but the waiter took a lifetime to check on us, and in the meantime we decided we were more in the mood for Coldstone, so we walked over there instead. We got back to the apartment with 11 minutes to spare on the timer for the beef–just enough to take out the dog and have a short singalong with matching fantastic dance moves to “Come on Get Higher” (on repeat, since I only know the chorus). We were interrupted, however, by a friendly neighbor who asked, when we were done goofing off, could we tell her if she could park along the service road? Sorry lady, goofing off is how we roll, but yes, you can park on the service road. We giggled to ourselves as we made it back to our apartment, where we snuggled in to eat our ice cream watch Julie & Julia (chosen to educate Drew on beef bourguignon, as earlier that day he had never heard of it before), during which, inevitably, I fell asleep…somewhere around the 3/4 mark. But it was quite good and a happy day for us, and in the end that’s all that matters.
I did manage to get Drew to take a picture!
And happy day, beef bourguignon for dinner tonight
