Here There and Everywhere

Expat wanderer

Rules for Thank You Notes

My son’s sweet wife challenged me to do a blog entry on Thank You notes, so I think I will do it today, when everyone is out playing in the sun, BBQ’ing with family and friends, and not indoors reading blogs. 🙂

Thank you notes are a specialty of mine. Mom taught us the necessity of thank you notes when we were little; I think I remember we couldn’t play with something at Christmas or Birthday until we had written our thank you notes. We didn’t like it, but we got used to it.

As I grew older, I realized how much I liked getting thank you notes. I noticed that I liked them best when they were personal. When I worked for charitable organizations, I discovered that writing a good thank you note could 1) make a person happy they had given a good donation 2) increase the probability that they would donate again and 3) increase the likelihood that they would increase the size of their donation, as well as continuing to donate. All those are good things when you are raising money for a good cause.

I also discovered that I was likelier to be considered for a highly-sought-after position by writing a good thank you note. Every edge counts in a competitive job market. Thank you notes give you a big edge – out of 100 applicants, very few will take the time to write that note.

Many believe that hand-written notes have gone the way of the dodo, but they still exist, and they still are welcome.

I noticed that both of my parents became less likely to use their computers as they aged; one day computers will have greater voice recognition capabilities, but until then, the keyboards are difficult for older fingers, and the screens are difficult for aging eyes. The elderly love a hand written note, something they can hold in their hand, something they can pull out and read again and again, something they can share with a visitor.

So: Rules for thank you notes

1. A late thank you note is better than no thank you note. It doesn’t matter how late.

2. An earlier thank you note is better than a later thank you note.

3. You can write thank you notes more than once for the same item. For example, if ten years later, you pull out that Waterford bowl you got for your wedding, and have used for special occasions ever since, you can take a minute to write a note telling the giver how much your enjoyment of that bowl has been over the years, and he or she will be delighted to hear it again!

4. A handwritten note is better than an e-mail thanks, and an e-mail thanks is better than no thanks at all. Many people do e-mail thanks these days, like “thanks for dinner last night, we had a great time” etc. If you are REALLY thankful, hand write that note.

Here is a template for a sweet but short Thank You note:

Dear (name),

(Thank you so much) for the (wonderful) (fascinating) (beautiful)(lovely) (ITEM). We are (blown away) (delighted) (honored) (so grateful) (amazed) that you would think of us at this time.

(One personal line like:

“John says he can imagine us using this (X) for years to come!”
“We can see the sweet thoughtfulness you put into choosing something so right for us.”
“So-and-So says she is wearing it to school tomorrow!”
“You must have spent hours making that! We are amazed at the time and effort you must have put into it/them”)

Again, many thanks for thinking of us and sending such a nice gift.

No-No’s

(Under NO circumstances can you say:

“Why on earth did you think we would like that??”
“That doesn’t look like me at all!”
“It’s horrible! Unspeakably horrible!”

And then you sign. It helps to have little sets of notecards, not too large, so you don’t feel like you have to fill the whole thing. If you have kids, have them draw or paint a picture to enclose. Or send a photo. Put a stamp on and post it. Yes, the old fashioned way. If you don’t have the address, get it. Sometimes you can even find addresses online. You know, Google it. 🙂

So I challenge YOU. Try it. When you receive a gift, write a quick thank you and mail it off. If you think about someone with gratitude, write them a short note to tell them. You can even e-mail a thankful thought, it’s better than not sending anything, even if it is not a handwritten note.

July 4, 2012 Posted by | Aging, Arts & Handicrafts, Character, Civility, Cultural, Experiment, Marketing, Tools, Values, Work Related Issues | 2 Comments

“Diesel’s in Time Out”

“Where’s Diesel?” AdventureMan asked our Happy Little Boy, who is now talking up a storm and we are loving every minute of it.

“Oh, Diesel’s in Time-Out,” Happy Little Boy replies, as he continues to roll one of the locomotives around the wooden track. Sometimes he likes to set it up on the table, and have the trains drive off the edge. “Accident!” he crows!

“Why is Diesel in Time-Out? What did he do?” AdventureMan asks.

“Diesel hit Thomas!”

“And Diesel hit Percy!” (big eyes popping out of head!)

“AND Diesel hit Mr. ToppemHat! He had to go to Time-Out!”

He is learning so much, and we love hearing what is going on in his life. We are so glad to live so near, and to be able to be a part of his life.

June 28, 2012 Posted by | Adventure, Aging, Character, Communication, Family Issues, Humor, Pensacola | Leave a comment

Customer Service; the Good and the Ugly

We are not rich people. You might look at the places we go and the places we stay and think that we are more comfortable than we are. We learned a secret a long time ago, and that secret is to live UNDER your income. We live under what we can afford, we pay our bills in full, and we pay attention to small leaks that can add up to big financial leakages over time.

First, the ugly. Today I checked my KLM Flying Blue mileage, and they only gave me 25% of the miles I earned flying from Pensacola to Johannesburg and back. That should have been a huge number, but 25% of that number is very very low. I did some exploration on KLM and learned it has to do with a lot of factors, including type of ticket you buy.

To me, that’s just sleazy customer service. A person who buys a ticket should get the full mileage. If you want to give bonuses for higher levels, then do so, but give me the miles I earn, don’t swindle me with a fraction of the miles I flew. It leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. Honestly, I don’t think Delta is all that much better, but I may switch my frequent flyer program to them because now I am flying Delta more often. I had thought because they were all “Sky Team Partners” that the miles were all the same, but I was wrong. And try booking an award ticket on one of the partners – they have wires and mirrors and a series of hoops to jump through, and you get to the end and the answer is not only “No” but then they have the gall to ask “Can I help you with anything else?”

I promise you, I am very polite, but when they ask that, I tell them “You didn’t even help me with what I asked help for!”

Here is the good. I paid as many bills as I could before I left, including some significant travel costs associated with the Grand Canyon / Mesa Verde Trip , but when I got home, I found a letter from the credit card service company, with the check my bank sent, saying that there wasn’t enough account information on the check to credit it. I could see the last five numbers of my account on the check, which I believe many banks are doing to help protect client privacy and exposure to identity theft, so I sent the check back with the account number and today I called and complained, and especially that they had charged me an interest charge, when I had paid the bill in full, they just hadn’t credited it to my account.

They credited the interest charge immediately, no argument. They were pleasant and helpful, and I felt like they were on my side. In a time when banks are not our friends, I had a positive feeling toward our card provider.

I smile when I hear AdventureMan in his office, talking with medical claims people – when we had a recent vaccination, a very expensive one, I was re-imbursed and he was not. He is taking on the bureaucracy, slowly and patiently, to make sure he gets that money back. He is also seeing what can be done about getting re-imbursed for our yellow fever immunizations. It takes a lot of patience and persistence, and it pays off. We laugh that we are becoming those old farts who have enough time to make those phone calls.

Little drops of water . . . and paying attention. Battling bureaucracy, trying to make the most of opportunities . . . that’s how we manage our lush lifestyle.

June 19, 2012 Posted by | Aging, Bureaucracy, Customer Service, ExPat Life, Financial Issues, KLM, Living Conditions, Random Musings, Travel | 2 Comments

Up in the Air

Every now and then, when it doesn’t matter, when I don’t have a tight connection, I take a window seat because I really love topography. I especially love flying the polar route, seeing the ice fields in Greenland and northern Canada, and I always love mountains.

This flight, I have a great seat, 20F, and I love it because while it is a window seat, there are only two seats in front of us, so I can exit and enter my seat as I please, without disturbing anyone, so it is like having a window seat that is an aisle seat, LOL.

Warning: don’t try this at home. Often, when you schedule for 20F, the plane reconfigures so that there is a three seat across in front of you, so you don’t have that easy enter and exit. One time, row 20 wasn’t even in the plane and the rows started with 21. Life doesn’t come with guarantees, especially when it comes to flying cattle class, so just relax, have a good engrossing book, some snack that will tide you over until your next stop and headphones, if that helps you shut out the world you are in.

Here is some of what I enjoyed (fortunately, my seat mates were also readers and preferred having the window shade open; I’m not always so lucky)

It almost hurts me physically when I have to leave the mountains behind . . .

Don’t you love the way the snow and ice appear to drip over the side of this Rocky Mountain area plateau?

The sheer natural power of the river+time combination that ate these paths awes me.

Back in the flatlands, with some puffy, billowy cloud cover. I keep hearing Joni Mitchell singing . . . . 😉

May 17, 2012 Posted by | Aging, Beauty, Geography / Maps, Travel | 7 Comments

May In Seattle

From the bone chilliing 47 degrees mid-day on my arrival, the temperatures in Seattle flew up up and up. By Sunday, the American Mother’s Day, the temperatures were up 30 something degrees, in the mid to high 70’s, and Monday and Tuesday were the same. Good thing we got most of the heavy sorting and tossing andhauling done during the beautiful, but cooler weather before the weekend.

We had a lovely Mother’s Day, Mom got to sit out in the sun, under a huge umbrella, got to play with her great grandchildren, had all her children surrounding her. It was a gorgeous sunny day in a beautiful setting. We all had a lot of fun.

To add icing to the cake, I had the great luxury of time with my best friend from college, time to sit around and catch up, philosophize, all the things we did before husbands and children came along. Now we have as much to talk about as ever, and the great luxury of time in this trip to get to know all the little things, too. What a great blessing. Back to Pensacola, and gearing up for the next big trip!

May 16, 2012 Posted by | Aging, Community, Cultural, ExPat Life, Family Issues, Generational, Pensacola, Relationships, Seattle, Travel, Weather | Leave a comment

The 700 Years Tour at Mesa Verde

Early early in the morning we are up and ready to grab a bite of breakfast at the Far View Lodge and to take the 700 years tour. When we called for reservations at the Far View Lodge, the desk clerk asked if we would like to sign up for the 700 Years of Culture tour, and since Sparkle had told us that the tours fill up early, we signed up.

The light in Mesa Verde is beautiful at eight in the morning, and we were shocked when thirty-something people around our age (I guess we are all out exploring America!) got on the bus. Somehow, for $45, I had thought it would be a tour of five to seven people. I didn’t think so many people would pay so much for a tour!

The guide, Dave, and the bus driver, Leiter, were both local men, living in Cortez, men who double as guides a couple days a week to liven up their retirement. Dave’s depth of knowledge and investigative spirit was impressive; clearly he has a passion for the Ancestral Puebloans, and reads everything he can get his hands on. He has read all the latest studies and speculation, and as a farming man, he had some of his own down-to-earth speculations which he shared with us. It was all good stuff.

First, we went to look at early pit dwellings:

And then we headed off to visit some of the more and less famous cliff dwellings:

Does this remind you of anything? (Hint: see previous post)

Look at the terrain – so similar to other places where similar dwellings have evolved . . . (Hint Hint: Les Eyzies de Tayak) There are cliff dwellings in almost every conceivable concavity.

From pit dwellings to small family dwellings, to multiple family dwellings, small villages . . .

This is the Cliff Palace, a multiple family dwelling:

And then, the old legend goes, they just disappeared . . . or did they? Dave, the guide, tells us that the Apaches and Navajos won’t come any where near the Mesa, that the mesa is full of old spirits, not their spirits. The Hopi, however, a little further South, have no fear; the customs and dwellings of the Ancient Puebloans are familiar to them.

It’s kind of like conspiracy theories. We all love a good scary story.

“And then, they all just disappeared!”

But Dave thinks they didn’t disappear, that maybe they just moved on. Maybe too many years of drought, or maybe the soil they were farming gave out. Maybe they heard life was easier a few miles down the road and just picked up and moved a little on down the road . . . which seems to me to be a more logical, if less romantic, possibility.

Anyway, one of the things I really liked was that these ancient peoples, whoever they were, built their dwellings in locations and styles similar to the pre-France people of . . .umm . . . err. . . France.

I need to add a footnote here. This doesn’t happen to everybody, but it happened to me. Once I got to Grand Canyon, activities that I normally do without batting an eye began to be harder. I am a walker and a hiker, but any time I had to hike uphill in the Grand Canyon, I was huffing and puffing like a geezer. “Oh no! Oh no!” I was thinking to myself, “I must have some terrible respiratory condition! I’m suddenly getting old!”

Not so. As it turns out, I am just sensitive to high altitude. I should have known. I drove through Colorado once, and my eyes turned bright red, tiny little capillaries in my eyes burst.

At 8000 feet, in Mesa Verde, I could function, but sometimes found myself huffing and puffing. As soon as we descended a couple thousand feet, I was fine. Leiter, the bus driver, told me that many athletic teams train at high altitude so that when they perform, at a lower altitude, they will exceed themselves. It is such a relief to be able to move fast now, and not puff. I always took it for granted before. Not now.

May 9, 2012 Posted by | Adventure, Aging, Arts & Handicrafts, Beauty, Building, Community, Cultural, ExPat Life, France, Living Conditions, Road Trips, Travel | , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Carlsbad Cavern Desert Trail

Here’s the thing . . . I’ve kind of lived a life a little on the edge. We’ve taken chances. We were young, we took risks we didn’t even know we were taking.

The result is that while I am still determined to live my life to the fullest, there are things I won’t do. Jump out of a perfectly good airplane, even with a parachute. Walk out on clear platforms over the Grand Canyon. Go in bat caves. Go into just about any confined space – I just don’t do it. There are things I don’t like doing but I do them, but there are things I just won’t do, and I’ve stopped doing caverns and walking close to the edge in very high places.

So we went to Carlsbad Caverns, visited the visitor center, then took the Desert Drive.

We are here at an awesome time of the year. Things are blooming, and we are awed at the persistence of life. The temperature has hit ninety something (fahrenheit) by 10 in the morning, but these plants are thriving. So thriving that one plant burrowed through two layers of cloth and into AdventureMan’s flesh!

These are old familiar plants, the Prickly Pear. I first saw them when we lived in Tunisia, and they were used as boundary borders, and a formidable boundary marker they are – tall and tough and very prickly. The Tunisians used the prickly pear to make jelly, but they also used the leaves, trimming off all the prickles, peeling off the tough outer skin, pounding the fibrous center into submission and then, I think, breading them and frying them. I love it that something so tough and which grows so persistently can also provide nutrition to hungry people.

I’m just throwing this one in because it cracked me up; the stick looking a little like a snake by the sign:

April 28, 2012 Posted by | Adventure, Aging, Beauty, ExPat Life, Road Trips, Travel | , , | Leave a comment

Old Dog, New Tricks or I Greet New Technologies

About a year ago, I finally bought an iPhone. It could do so many things, it scared me, but when my little (then) 18 month old grandson fearlessly showed me how to play Tozzle, and Zombies in the Garden, and Angry Birds, I knew it was time for me to step up my game.

I don’t want my identity stolen, I don’t want Google tracking my searches, I don’t want targeted advertising, so I’ve been really careful about what I do. And then I though about the CIA. The CIA and NSA (aka No Such Agency) and several other highly technical services find themselves inundated with so much information these days that they have a harder time sorting it and then determining what is important and what is not. That gives me hope. I’m just not that important. Who would want to track me?

So, after a year, I finally synched my iPhone with my computer for the first time. Very scary. Then, when it didn’t work, I don’t know why, I restored the original settings, losing what little I had stored on the phone, but it wasn’t much.

Mostly, I like ringtones. I like for the people who call me regularly to have identifiable ring tones, and I have been really happy with the ones I have except for my daughter-in-law, I wanted an Edith Piaf song for her, and I never could find it.

Today, I girded my loins and bought a ring tone from a non-iTunes provider. Yes. Scary. And I thought it would magically go straight to my phone, but no, I had to download it, save it into iTunes, then synch my phone.

Earlier, I had taken another giant step and subscribed to “the Cloud” so, I thought, my computer, iPad and iPhone would all have the same music, but as it turns out, not everything goes to the cloud, like ringtones that you don’t buy from iTunes. So I had to risk everything and Synch again. It warned me that I could lose everything! I hesitated, then asked “what would I do if I were 11?” and pressed Synch. Woooo HOOOO, oh, the exhilaration!

There are some things I don’t want my devices to share, like financial information, etc. I don’t really want something like my iPhone, which gets carried everywhere and has the highest probability to get lost or stolen (although I have activated the Find My iPhone program, too). It’s a good think it’s not all-or-nothing, but it takes a longer time when you want some things but not others.

Now, I am all synched-up, and oh, I feel so dramatically technological, as I jump into last years technology. I know that my problem is over-thinking; the secret is to just jump in, just do it. I am just so thankful I have a son and a grandson to help me make the technology leaps.

April 18, 2012 Posted by | Adventure, Aging, Communication, Entertainment, Exercise, Experiment, Humor, Interconnected, iPhone, Living Conditions, Technical Issue | 5 Comments

Late Afternoon in DeLuna Park

One of the great joys of living in Pensacola is seeing our grandson often. Yesterday, we were picking him up and keeping him until dinner, so we decided to take him to run in the fountains, only to discover that the fountains stop at 5 on Mondays – Wednesdays, and run until 8 on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. No problem – there is always something going on to thrill a two years old’s heart.

Yesterday, it was a tug-boat bringing in a huge dredger, with CRANES! Our two year old is all-boy. He loves car words, and truck words, and words like bulldozer, and pick-up, and CRANES. Watching the tugboat bring in the dredger thrilled his heart.

The crane lowers a cage onto the deck:

The pelicans are enthralled; the churning engines stir up fish and make finding supper easy pickings:

And then, chasing the pigeons! Where do they get the energy? A two-year-old can chase pigeons endlessly!

April 17, 2012 Posted by | Adventure, Aging, Beauty, Cultural, Entertainment, Exercise, ExPat Life, Family Issues, Florida, Living Conditions, Parenting, Pensacola | 6 Comments

Blood Sugar Solution

When I read the hype for these two books, I bought them – again. I bought them the first time when we were still in Kuwait, but gave them away in one of the moves. This time I actually read them. I stopped, however, when I came to the part where you give up caffein. Nope.

April 17, 2012 Posted by | Aging, Health Issues, Hot drinks | Leave a comment

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