quote o' the day...

"at first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done, then it is done and the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago."

- frances hodgson burnett

after the bottle...

listening to some o' my fav bands...

mr. maker

whistle for the choir

and an oldie but a goodie...

rushholm ruffians

OUR FIRST CALL!

day eight in the desert, and although i typically hate using capital letters, WE MADE OUR FIRST CALLS TODAY!!!   AND ON THE THIRD CALL, WE MADE OUR FIRST SALE!!!   

HOLY FUCK!!!!!!!!

this is vicky, one of our first "experts." this is her making the first sale for expert planet.  good job vicky. 

tomorrow i fly back to nyc, where i'm sure it's 50 degrees colder.

tonight's dinner shall be steak and and a bottle of wine...

ugh...

day six in the desert, and it's been a tiring day at the learning lab.  no calls made yet, as we're still waiting for the client to get their act together and finalize products for us.  i'll stay in phoenix for another day or two, but i'm running out of clean underwear so i hope to go home soon. unfortunately it's freezing in nyc, and we're having record warmth in phoenix...  have to figure out why i live in nyc.  

do i stay in the warmth of phoenix with dirty underwear, or go to the freezing cold of nyc and have clean underwear. or i guess i could just have the hotel do a load of wash for me for what i imagine is $100 per pound...  interesting debate.

the other debate i'm having is what to order from the room service menu: burger or hacienda super nachos?  methinks it's a burger night.  

red rocks west...

day four in the desert, and i decided to take a day trip north to sedona.  li'l rachel recommended it, and it turned out to be a great day.  

woke up around 8am, had a nice breakfast (the same i've had the last four days: french toast, scrambled, bacon, fruit, coffee...  getting to be a bit of a chunker actually. anyway...), then drove the two hours to sedona.  before i got to the red rocks (which are beautiful), i saw about 40,000 Saguaro cacti, which i've never seen before (aside from Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons).  pretty amazing.  some were massive with what seemed like ten arms.  most only had one or two arms.  why do some have many, and the others have so few, i wonder?

once i got to sedona, i ate lunch (again, getting fat) and then hopped in the jeep.  the jeep was pink.  all the jeep's were pink.  the name of the tour company was Pink Jeep Tours.  a bit odd, but i jumped in anyway (there's a story behind the pinkness but i won't get into that here).  

two hours of jeeping (is that a word?) up the rocks.  we were literally driving up and on top of giant red rocks.  the scenery was amazing.  unfortunately i didn't have my camera, but i did have the meager 2 megapixel iPhone camera.  we'll see how they came out when i load them to FB.  

alan our jeep driver / tour guide knew a lot about cacti and various plants and bushes.   i learned the cacti that looks like mickey mouse ears is actually called prickly pear catci.  interesting.

a good day...  not missing freezing NYC a bit.

now i'm back in the hotel, thinking about checking out The Wrestler... 

off to belize...

well, in about three months.  very excited.  rachel and i just booked the trip for memorial day week.  should be good fun... snorkeling, scuba diving (maybe), and traipsing around mayan ruins.

as far as EP goes, we should be in good form by then.  can't imagine this li'l company can't survive a week without me, right?   

it will be almost a year to the day since my last official vacation (vegas, la jolla, san diego with dan and kevin). can't wait!  

maybe i'll touch the bottom of the big blue hole...

phoenix rising...

hmm, i've waited 38 years to visit phoenix, and i arrive at a hotel with 1/2 a roll of TP, a pen tha's been chewed on, and a front desk that has no travel tooth brushes.  lucky for me there's a wallgreen's a block away.

here doing a bit of training for the Expert Planet agents we've recruited...  we shall be making our first calls next week!  staying the weekend, and hope to play a little golf.  it's been a few months so i imagine my swing is a bit rusty.  oh well.  beats hanging in NYC in sub-zero weather.

  

attention gentlemen...

should grown men really have to read notices like this?  that people with whom I share office space need to be told to "refrain from putting anything on the wall" of the office bathroom is a little absurd. 

getting closer

the overwhelming majority of my time is spent sitting in a 200 square foot office in union square with my three colleagues, steve, matt and greg, developing this little company. after three months, we are now exactly fourteen days from launching (we hope) our first pilot.

we'll be heading to phoenix to meet our first sales agents. the first few of what we hope will eventually grow to be hundreds of sales agents... thousands? millions? let's not get ahead of ourselves. it should be exciting. nerve-wracking. tiring. fun.

for certain the four of us will don headsets and make calls as well... we've got a little bet for who will be the top seller amongst us. my vote is for steve, who could sell ice to eskimos. me thinks i'll come in a close second.

i hope to have pictures posted on this blog in a couple weeks of the four of us wearing our headsets, which hopefully won't muss our newly InStyler'd hair dos...

www.getinstyler.com

more posts...

although i'm certain no one reads this, i will try to write more often than every two months!  can my life be so boring that i have nothing to write about?

talk to you tomorrow (i hope!)...

no agua caliente...

you would think that a brand new building would have brand new plumbing.  not necessarily.  my condo building - which was just completed less than a year ago -has been without hot water for no less than ten times since i moved in.  after each instance, my condo board alerts fellow tenants that "the water pump failed again, but they came this evening and everything should be back to normal now."  

however, i woke up or this morning and not only was there no hot water, but the cold water felt even colder than it usually does.   i didn't shower today, so if anyone is reading this (no one) who plans on seeing me today, be warned my hair is oily and matted down, and i smell a bit rancid.