Monthly Archives: June 2009

I’ve been everywhere, man, I’ve been everywhere…since about February. So far, in 2009, I have been on business trips to:

– NYC (three times)
– Philadelphia
– Atlanta (well, the suburbs, anyways)
– San Francisco
– Sarasota/Jensen Beach (the “Tour de Florida”)
– Charlotte, NC (technically Statesville)
– Chicagoland (Schaumburg, IL)

I THINK that’s all of them. I could be missing one. I have been on the road so much that I HONESTLY DON’T REMEMBER, which is a little scary.

Then, for personal travel, I’ve gone to:

– Victoria, BC
– Savannah, GA
– Philadelphia/Toronto (Ben’s East Coast Tour)
– Pittsburgh

And for the vast majority of that travel, I flew Alaska’s partner airlines: American, Delta/Northwest and Continental. I flew USAir a couple times (ugh) and Virgin America for the San Francisco trip, as well as from NYC twice (makes the long flight more bearable), but mostly, I’ve been funneling a lot of miles into the Alaska Airlines frequent flyer account I’ve had for thirteen years.

Today, I received an MVP status card from Alaska, because I have logged over 29,000 miles with them, YTD, in qualifying partner miles alone. Somewhere in there are a couple thousand hotel and rental car miles, but still – that’s a lot of flying. And it’s also the first time I’ve ever received priority status on an airline. Unfortunately, free upgrades aren’t very useful to me, since I only travel on Alaska for personal travel, and I have Paul with me in that case, and it may not be possible to upgrade him without a hefty ticket charge. But it DOES get me closer to Gold status, which I will get to after three more round trips this year. At THAT point, both of us get free upgrades to first class, AND free access to the Board Room executive lounges.

Let me also explain why this even matters. It isn’t just that I like having preferred status in travel, to make the journey easier. The big reason this is a real benefit to me is because I travel with a baby when I’m on personal time. Ben can be an infant in arms for another year, but the space afforded to two coach seats just isn’t enough for me, Paul and Ben to all be comfortable for more than two hours. Therefore, we were planning to start buying him his own seat…unless we have the added room of First Class. Additionally, Board Room access gives us a quiet, clean place to hang out during layovers. Priority boarding means getting on a plane, with all our baby gear, before everyone else does. This isn’t just about me having a better travel experience, but about having a better travel experience for me, Paul and Ben. If I have to travel for work, then I may as well get a benefit from it that I can apply to traveling with my tiny family.

Also, I’ve realized, travel points programs are my coupon clipping/green stamps. We just saved almost a thousand dollars by using Starwood points to pay for a hotel suite in Savannah for three nights in August for my cousin’s wedding. We saved another couple hundred dollars by using a companion fare ticket that came with our Alaska Airlines credit card for part of the plane fare to Victoria this summer. If I can get free upgrades for both Paul and I to the roomier First Class, we won’t have to buy Ben his own seat to have more space in coach. Some of this stuff, when you keep at it, does start to pay off…and when you’re far away from all of your extended family, it definitely helps to get a little break on the costs of going to see them.

Hrmph. My identity is compromised by Sandra Bullock’s character in “The Proposal”. Not only is she a high-powered career woman from Canada, but she also has the last name of Tate. I feel this depiction of Canadian women working in the US, with the last name of Tate, is insulting!

Last night, I went to Bar Bar Nineteen 12 for one of my co-workers birthday party. This is the first time in months I’ve been out someplace that isn’t:

a) Bootie
b) a Venice dive bar
c) on the Los Angeles goth circuit.

Regardless of having to go out into “normal” Los Angeles, I was delighted to be invited. This was a celebration for a co-worker I actually like quite a bit, and who I am currently trying to recruit for my Emerging Technologies department. Her roommate and best friend is also one of my work buddies, a girl I chat with during the day. And I knew it would be fun to see socially the other colleagues from my team who were planning to go.

Nineteen 12 is the bar at the Beverly Hills Hotel, which was chosen because bottle service had been offered as a present to the birthday girl. The Beverly Hills Hotel is one of those few places actually left over from a glamorous time in the past, a time when movie stars started making Beverly Hills their home and their community. Being there always makes me feel like I’m in a Judith Krantz novel. Unfortunately, Scruples took place over thirty years ago, and is now quaint and outdated and classy in comparison to the reality of what happens in those elite bars today. First of all, the music was genuinely dreadful – remixes of songs that were already two, three, five years old. Second of all, even I can spot the difference between designer club tacky and Fashion District knockoffs, and this was the latter. And third, it was FULL OF HOOKERS. And not the high-end, post-Pretty Woman makeover escorts, but actual GLARINGLY OBVIOUS escort types, girls with lots of plastic surgery attached to older, tacky men.

Oh, and also, the bar was full of cougars. Ridiculously so. So much that I would have been afraid to take my friend Graham in there, because he was always a cougar magnet back in Vancouver. As it was, I feared for my male co-workers, who are in their mid-20s. I half-expected to see one of the Forever 21 clad cougars leap and pounce on one of the boys. As it was, when we left, there were four of them happily dancing to “Jump” on the dance floor, and one of them was actually doing a little Jazzercise type move when the chorus told her to jump. (I imitated this afterwards in the lobby of the hotel to great laughter.)

And did I mention the music was ridiculous? I heard such cutting edge tracks as “In Da Club”, “California Love”, and “Crazy In Love”. The most modern thing played was Beyonce’s “Single Girls (Put A Ring On It). Now, I KNOW I am out of it when it comes to what the kids are listening to – I can tell you the latest tracks at Bar Sinister, or about some new indie-rock, but I’m usually a year behind when it comes to dance and R&B. I didn’t even know who Rihanna was until I heard “Umbrella” mixed up at Bootie, which is my major exposure to mainstream music. But even I considered these tracks hopelessly out of date. And Journey is absolutely NOT ACCEPTABLE unless it is the Mysterious D mash-up. You know you’re in a cougar bar when all the tracks date back to an era when you were still young enough to be hearing the music for the first time in a trendy club.

Despite these factors, I had a wonderful time. I do genuinely like the individuals that I was out with. And it was just so nice to be out, at a bar, having my one drink and hanging out and chatting and generally being sociable. I was so excited to be out as a NORMAL PERSON, and not as on a Mom’s Night Out. I’m still struggling with the idea of being a mom on a night out now, as opposed to being just on a night out, as a normal course of action.

Oh, and we didn’t actually SEE any blow, but there’s just no way you can have that many hookers in a venue without someone doing coke in a bathroom. There’s a throwback to the Judith Krantz era right there as well.

OMG. I did the practice game for Day in the Cloud (get it? cloud computing?) just now, and it is HARD. There’s five very difficult questions, plus a creative round using Google Apps. The creative challenge is to make a slide that underscores the key points of your favorite song – here’s mine.

I can tell this may require some studying before the actual game on the 24th.

Its a bit like a slap in the face everytime I see a Father’s Day promo.