ryan l.

As Bryn and I wind down our trip here in Oahu, it’s not hard to reflect on some of things that make this place unique and a true getaway.

No matter what, I don’t consider this place part of the United States. That’s no knock against the state of Hawai’i, but more so a compliment. It’s amazing here - from the weather to the food, the water and sand to the people and culture. It’s all so different, pleasantly different.

The latter there, the people and culture, are the things I’m going to miss the most. Other Americans could take a lesson in humanity from the people of Hawai’i. I’m sure there are jerks and assholes here, too, but there’s something about their approach to interaction, interaction with tourists and locals like them alike. It’s simply something you cannot find in California … maybe Texas, but not where I’m from. I’m going to miss that.

We’ll make it back some day soon hopefully.

We can park the van and walk to town
Find the cheapest bottle of wine that we could find
And talk about the road behind how getting lost is not a waste of time.

I love every part of this woman.

Why is it that it doesn’t matter how much money you spend on shipping, you still can never count on these fools to do their jobs?

How does it work?

Hmm, put it in a box, put some padding around it, put on truck, pay attention the big, black, bold letter all over the box that say FRAGILE THIS SIDE UP (!!!!), deliver, keep paying attention to the instructions: FRAGILE.THIS.SIDE.UP - or just stand the damn thing up since we know glass is more easily broken when laying down.

I guess that was too difficult to understand. After nearly $300 for shipping alone of our bed set, which included this mirror, we received the damn thing broken with nice big holes in the top of the box with little brown packing tape put over them. Really subtle, guys. Unbelieveable.

But, this isn’t just a short story about irresponsible people, it’s one about great customer service.

After opening the box to find this mess, I called JCPenny customer service and talked to this sweet, older sounding, woman presumably from the South given her thick drawl. She apologized up and down. She checked what they had in stock and promptly ordered us a new one, this time electing to send it with EXTRA PACKAGING (which she noted on the order) and via FedEx … hopefully they’re more careful.

Here’s the last communication I received from them. We may still be waiting for our new mirror to come, but it doesn’t get too much better than this when you have a problem. Customer service actually understands and values its job at JC Penny, or at least this particular lady did. Thank God.

If there’s one thing Bryn does well it’s sleep. The woman can crash whenever she wants to, which consistently makes me jealous and, ultimately, motivates me to find stuff like this …

There’s not a whole lot I feel like I do well, but one thing that I’ve done a lot is pack and move. It’s a pain in the ass that most of us have to endure at least a handful of times in our lives, but for me and Bryn, well, it seems like an annual activity. That time came about two weeks ago and today we finally finished unpacking and setting up. For us, the end product is quite pleasing and mostly a relief.

That’s just the living room, one that is almost as big as our last apartment, or at least it feels that way. This place is much more spacious than our last and a major step up. Of course, big steps up also bring my bank account to tears once a month, but that’s ok because it’s certainly worth it to have such a nice place to come home to every day, even if it’s in sweltering Dublin.

We’ve had the apartment in pretty good shape now for more than a week, but we were missing one thing: our new bed set. Apparently, the shipping company thought it would be funny to hold our merchandise for well over two weeks without so much as a call to schedule the delivery. It took my pushiness to finally open the lines of communications and even then it still took them about four days to get our stuff to us. Naturally, everything came on a day we had plans in the evening, so we felt a little rushed to set up things. But, we got it together in time to get out of here on time … except we had one problem - the mirror was broken. Awesome. After nice lengthy calls to both the shipping company and JC Penny, our new mirror was ordered, but who knows when it will arrive. Oh well, we wait.

Tonight we have Bryn’s mom, dad, and brother coming over for Father’s Day dinner. Should be fun provided some things happen and others don’t. I’ll just leave it at that.

This is what happens when you combine a lack of sleep with an unending desire to not have to reach deep inside of a bag to get some more pretzels. Ay dios …

What an awesome video. I can’t claim the “D” as my affiliate, but this is damn good.

via Laughing Squid

So much is in motion these days that I haven’t given the blog a second thought after the long days and busy weekends. I hope to change that in the near-term, but I think I’ll be abandoning the “professional” blog approach. Like others out there, I feel like there are just too many voices online who are far smarter than I, and contributing/driving the comms/PR/new media conversations forward for me to spend too much time feeling guilty about not writing anything. I hope to make my mark on my industry with the work I do rather than anything I could possibly write on a site like this.

Moving forward, I’m planning to transform this space into a person one. No, not a diary, just a log of things I and my family care about. Now that me and “the boss” (aka my wife, Bryn) are out on our own for the first time since we were married last June, this is as good a time as any to change direction.