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USING PRICELINE TO GET A 3.5 STAR HOTEL ROOM FOR HALF PRICE.

P’wnd: Intentional or unintentional misspelling of the word “owned”. It is used primarily as an exclaimation by those that bear witness to someone getting put down or abused.

Forward: The following is a harrowing tale of incredible savings and awful customer service. I mean BAD.

Weeks ago, I stumbled upon the term Travel Hacking. This term is crawling across the Internet. Essentially, Travel Hackers scour the web for ways to earn frequent flyer miles and points. They always know when the hottest promotions are going on which airlines. Travel Hacking means that you don’t have to wait to win the lottery or for your kids to graduate college to travel the world.

Some of the best Travel Hackers are probably business travelers (such as our step-dad who racks up the miles with Southwest all on the company dime, the lucky dog), yet through my research I found that you don’t have to be a frequent flyer to earn miles, nor do you even have to own a credit card (yet owning one certainly helps in earning points), you just have to know where and when to look to find points, promotions, and how to turn those into miles. Or, have someone tell you where and when to look. More on this in a later post.

Since Jacob and myself aren’t bathing in cash, yet we certainly long to get some traveling under our belts asap, I decided that Travel Hacking is right up our alley.

HOTEL HACKING WITH PRICELINE

Excited about these new prospects, Jacob and I began to research how to get our mits on some discounted travel. It didn’t take long to discover Priceline’s Name Your Own Price feature. This in itself is a great way to save, but it really gets interesting when you find a way to hotel hack it. A website called The Bidding Traveler makes finding out just how low the Name Your Own Price feature will allow you to bid. In map form, The Bidding Traveler shows you which hotels are accepting which bids in the vicinity you wish the stay. Pretty sweet, eh?

SANTA FE ?

For a while Jacob and I have been trying to convince Jacob’s mother and step-dad to take a Spring Break trip with us this year. We visited Santa Fe last year with my father and have dreamt about getting back to those adobe buildings and green chili enchiladas ever since. So naturally, Santa Fe was the town of choice, as Jacob’s folks love it as well. PLUS Jacob’s mom is turning 50 this year (the woman doesn’t look a day over 40)! Let’s celebrate with a trip!

After finding the bids that Priceline was accepting for Spring Break 2011 in Santa Fe, NM (via TBT), we scurried on over to Priceline to see if our bid of $85/night for two 3.5 star hotel rooms would be accepted (checking to see that two rooms would be available, one for Jacob’s folks, and one for ourselves).

Well, Priceline knows what it wants. It wants your money. Priceline requires you to enter your credit card information before you can see if your bid is accepted, before you can choose which hotel you’d like to stay at. Instead, it selects a hotel for you, based on the star rating you selected. These are things that were not clearly stated on the Priceline website. Perhaps naively, Jacob and I assumed that if we entered our credit card information, entered which hotel star rating and bid, Priceline would give us the opportunity to select “YES” or something, anything, whatever… before charging our credit card.

A lofty thought.

“YOUR BID HAS BEEN ACCEPTED. YOUR CREDIT CARD HAS BEEN CHARGED” (read: you’ve been p’wned).

“Wait, what? Hang on – we just wanted to check for availability and pricing. We don’t even know if these dates will work. What the? Surely Priceline’s customer service department will help us to fix this situation – give us a refund, credit, a transfer, something!” After roughly 45 minutes on the phone with customer service, we found that a) absolutely NO refunds are given b) you cannot change your credit card information and c) Priceline customer service sucks.

YEP, SANTA FE !

After quite a bit of anxiety over the shock of the situation, the happiness set in. We’re going to Santa Fe, NM this Spring Break for 4 days and 4 nights of skiing, green chili EVERYTHING, and Southwest culture. We worked out the logistics, and our folks added an additional night onto our 3-night stay (which Priceline claims is actually one thing you CAN do to your Name Your Own Price feature, yet in our case they denied for no apparent reason).

The Positives:

• Our hotel is The Inn of the Governors, a 3.5 star hotel. Traditional King room on Spring Break week: $152.33/night. Our savings: roughly $75/night
• After calling the hotel, our savvy business-traveling step-dad had our rooms upgraded to a Superior King room at no additional charge: $172.33/night. Our UPDATED savings: roughly $90/night! OVER 50% SAVINGS!
• Priceline gave us a $10/night voucher for our next hotel stay
• Our 50th birthday gift to Jacob’s mom ROCKS, and it just kind of… happened. Honestly, being able to take this trip with them alleviates any of the frustration, since we get to celebrate with her in such a wonderful city. This kind of turned into a happy accident, but it DOES NOT absolve Priceline of their awful service.

WILL WE USE PRICELINE AGAIN?

The short answer is: yes. First, to redeem that $10/night voucher, eventually, and future only with caution and the complete understanding of their refund policy, which is nonexistent.

The moral: When using Priceline, make sure you have all of the correct information available (dates, credit card, etc) before even LOOKING at your computer.

Has anyone had a similar experience with one of the big online travel agencies? I’d love comments or feedback on similar travel logistics nightmares.

The following was adapted from a speech from the late David Foster Wallace; it was his commencement address to the graduates of Kenyon college in 2005. This speech made a powerful impact on me last week, as I stumbled upon it while reading quite an excellent blog post on the topic of minimalistic living. Even my abridgment of the speech is quite long, but I tried to keep only the “main” points while retaining continuity. I created the artwork above, which was inspired by the following:

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’

The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning. Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff.

So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about “teaching you how to think”. If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think.

But I’m going to posit to you  that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
 Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence.

We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind  YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.  It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master”.

And I submit that this is what the real value of your  education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large areas of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the  supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the  checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your  cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all  the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littered parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done  this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be.

And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating stuff like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for  all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way?  And look at how repulsive most of them are, and  how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the  checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line.

And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

You get the idea.

If  I choose to think this way in a store, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.

The thing is that, of course, I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more  tedious and painful lives than I do.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be  well-adjusted.  You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship. Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of  adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly.  And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. Worship power, you will end up  feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious.

They are default settings.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in a myriad of petty little unsexy ways, every day.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in a myriad of petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The  alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime.

And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.”

Let me begin by saying that I am quite aware of how fortunate I am. So often I hesitate to comment on the many wonderful things my husband does for me or with me, or express the fun and joy that we experience on a daily basis. I hesitate because it seems selfish, and pompous even, to only announce the good things about your spouse, your marriage, your kids, etc, out into cyberspace when the reality for so many people is daily turmoil, hardships, and strife. It’s true – Jacob and I have a marriage that I’m continually blown away by. He loves me, challenges me, sweeps me off of my feet. We grow and learn together, we set goals, and we REACH them. And yes, we also argue. Duh, man. But I’m not going to talk about the bad stuff online – arguments, quarrels, what have you – so if I’m not willing to talk about the good AND the bad, then I typically choose not to talk about us online very often (though I AM guilty of it on occasion).

But today is my husband’s birthday. And despite my hesitation to announce ONLY the good things about our marriage and life, that is EXACTLY what I’m about to do. Because on your birthday that’s exactly what you deserve: someone to scream from the mountaintops how wonderful you are, and how much you are loved and appreciated. But I don’t have a mountaintop, I have this blog… you’ve been warned.

Here is a small fraction of what makes Jacob so incredible:

Jacob made straight A’s this semester in grad school, while working two jobs to support our family. The man worked his butt off, waking up at 5:30 and 6:00 most days to get to one job on time, and stayed up until 3, 4, 5:00 am on test weeks to study and write papers. This kind of selflessness and discipline allowed me to pursue freelance graphic design. And when I tried, and I’ll tell you I TRIED to convince him that I should find a full-time job at a company in order to earn more money so that he could quit one of his jobs, he wouldn’t have it. He enjoyed providing and working hard so that I could get my business off the ground.

He cooks, he cleans, without being asked. WITHOUT BEING ASKED. And he’s GOOD at it. Like, better than I am in a lot of cases. He is more detailed than I am, which makes him better at following recipes and cleaning meticulous things. He also has an incredible ability to focus, and follows things through until they are perfect. He plans meals and writes grocery lists, the whole nine yards. He calls me “the daily chef” and himself “the special-guest chef”, which is cute. I can’t tell you how many time I’ve come home from an errand or work, and he has cleaned the house. I honestly don’t know where he finds the time to do it. Yes, I still clean and cook of course, but we also clean and cook TOGETHER.

He challenges me to become a better woman, just by being himself. By being the man that works, goes to school, cooks, and cleans, he encourages me to be better. I honestly can’t imagine a marriage that didn’t include us encouraging each other to improve in multiple areas of life, because I’ve never experienced anything different. We strive onward, always. Always to improve, never to decline or stay the same. In health, in habits, in our spiritual lives. Through and through, down to his core, he just wants peace and for everyone to be truthful and loving. He hates gossip and slander, and loves his friends deeply. He is extremely loyal and faithful. He calms my nerves, he helps guide my decisions, and he has true wisdom.

And that’s just the beginning.

So here’s to all of the wonderful and incredible things about Jacob Boyd! Here’s to the many more years we have in store! And here’s to striving onward toward strengthening our relationship, building depth in our friendships, and working to create a life of value and romance. Lots and lots of romance.

Jacob, you are truly the love of my life and the closest friend I have ever and will ever have. I find you stunning.

Today we’ve been working on a web revision for Amanda Boyd Art & Design. A new hub for the professional me and the nonsensical me to collide, with tidbits of artistic deliciousness sprinkled on top.

Watch out for updates concerning the launch in a matter of days (or weeks).

Hope everyone had a fun time swinging from the rafters on New Years Eve, popping corks, and throwing streamers or whatever it is we Americans do. Jacob and I enjoyed the visit of some of our family, ate and ate and ate, and then we crashed a party and ate all of their food, and so on.

Resolutions. People are always talking about resolutions, which I tend to think is complete bollocks. A resolution is a goal that will die in 30 days. Or less. Poor resolutions never even have a chance at a good life.

I’m relatively goal-oriented. My issue lies in the fact that I have a floppy memory. I set a goal, then I boldly run after it, until I’m like – oh look, something shiny! – and my attention gets distracted. Then, ALWAYS, (and hilariously for my husband I suppose, (or maybe annoyingly)) I rediscover a NEW goal, and it is born, but it just so happens to be the exact goal that I had previously set and forgotten about. And repeat.

This year, my goal, rather than resolution is twofold.

Onefold: continue to pursue multiple streams of income. This is something I’m already endeavoring toward, and am attaining with marginal success. But what else can I do? Can I illustrate an ebook? Yes. Can I advertise on my blog? Perchance. Can I blog more frequently and drive traffic to my website? I dunno, maybe. I keep reading things about Lifestyle Design. What the crap is that?

Secondfold: Minimalistic living. This tends to already be a theme in our household of two, but we’re expanding it, enhancing it… going further. This week we intentionally kept the television turned off. Our productivity, creativity, and communication has increased exponentially. We’re also downsizing our book and dvd collection, and on a whim decided to list some of the more interesting titles on Amazon to see if they would sell. We’ve sold $200 worth of books and movies in 24 hours. That’s 200 bones in our pocket that we didn’t have before. Just from downsizing. What else can we let go of?

I find that these two things: minimalistic living and multiple income streams go hand in hand. In fact, upon researching minimalism, I stumbled across blog after blog about lifestyle design, being your own boss, etc. These two goals are aimed at one higher goal: freedom for my husband and myself. The freedom to not be dependent upon any human being apart from each other, and to not be psychologically dependent on our possessions. To not be stuck in a full-time job that sucks away our time in the name of acquiring a paycheck and benefits, which will buy us more things that we want, want, want. This is us, and may not be you. And that’s fine with us.

So here’s to the new year, and the possibilities it brings!

This is me bein’ all like: “Happy New Yearzzz!” And Jacob is like, “There is no ‘z’ in New Year”.

Some of my favorite sites & blog posts on Minimalistic Living and/or Lifestyle Design:

Becoming Minimalist

Money, Money, Money (and Lifestyle Inflation)

Rowdy Kittens

47 Lifestyle Design Resources

There are more, but this is a start.

I love working alongside FTL because they create work that matters. Run by CEO Joshua Read, the company focuses on generating profits for people and groups that have little.

The top is the selected color scheme, and below are my other renditions. Check out the single!

Thought I’d share a bit of artwork I created for Body Boutique. This is the background alone. Lots of ads/details/etcetera go on top.

Colors.

Happy New Year!