V, A, A et D family blog

The fitness room on the ground floor of our residence is in bad shape. Every cardio machine is wobbling on its last legs and the treadmill is a safety hazard in the making. The last time I tried to run on the treadmill, the belt spun and rattled boisterously, sped up and then shut off on its own. I got off before I ended up on some goofy accident video on YouTube, flying off the treadmill and bumping my head on the free weights. I don’t find those web videos of freak accidents funny; I don’t enjoy watching them and I sure don’t want to end up inadvertently starring in any of them.

I decided to work out on the recumbent exercise bike and watch CNN on the rickety analog TV dangling haphazardly from the ceiling. But the TV remote won’t work from any angle so I tap it gently against the handle bars. A clear liquid oozes out from under the remote control buttons. I’d like to think that some of the Lysol cleaning product seeped in when someone hosed down the machine after using it but I’m pretty sure it’s sweat. I just gave up on changing the channels and sit on the bike listening to silly “yo mama” jokes on an animated series on BET. I have heard all these jokes before: Yo mama’s so stupid, she thinks a quarterback is a refund; Yo mama so old her social security number is 1.

I have to renew my gym membership.

The second best thing you can pour out of a champagne bottle – after Perrier-Jouët

At a friend’s dinner party this evening, I met a woman whose native language is Malayalam, the native language of Kerala. It is also one of India’s 15 official languages, including Hindi and Bengali. The word is also a palindrome, at least in English.

I miss getting great deals on airfares and flying to Europe or cross country for a few hundred dollars roundtrip. Over the past few years, airlines have been steadily increasing the cost of airfare, either because the economy is strong and they can get away with it, or because the economy is weak and they can’t do otherwise. And what gets me is that ticket prices and surcharges don’t seem to come down when conditions stabilize. For instance, they don’t seem to remove the gas surcharges when gas prices come down. As a result, I have been steadily paying more to fly in the same economy seats offering fewer frills.

I just booked the tickets for our trip to France this summer and they weren’t cheap. Granted, we will be flying during the peak travel months of July and August, and we needed lots of accommodation. But you’d think that researching and booking more than two months in advance would have gotten me a better deal. 

At least we’ll be flying direct to Paris and the dates and times are convenient for us. And since we we are going to have our hands full on this trip, it just wasn’t worth the inconvenience to settle for a flight leaving Sea-Tac at 4 a.m. with a 12-hour layover in  Johannesburg just to save a couple of dollars. What’s more, Air France issued us a small travel voucher to offset the big inconvenience of the pilot strike last November. And as small as it was, the voucher amount would still help soften the blow of the final ticket prices, with all the taxes and charges thrown in. 

Applying the travel voucher, however, proved to be nearly as painful an ordeal as the predicament that got us the voucher. I searched on and off for airline tickets for about a month so when I reserved online, I knew I wasn’t going to do any better for the travel dates. I called an agent immediately to apply the voucher and pay. It seemed simple enough, I thought, expecting nothing more inconvenient than being put on hold and listening to that annoying recording about my call being very important. 

But there was lots worse, as I discovered. None of the numbers on our paper vouchers meant anything to the customer service reps we spoke to. David spent more than an hour on the phone arguing with different intermediaries before giving up. It’s as if we were deliberately issued useless paper vouchers and the automatons on the other end of the line were all instructed to be as unhelpful and as unaccommodating as possible. I can just see them going over their scripts: “if the customer insists the vouchers are valid, just throw in an uncomfortable silent pause. Then ask him to repeat the numbers 10 times and put him on hold. Then offer to transfer him to somebody who has no idea what he’s babbling about.”

None of the numbers on the voucher, which looked like a stack of standard paper airline tickets and receipts stapled together, seemed to work. And even worse, none of the service reps could give D any guidance. You have been issued paper tickets and not electronic tickets, one agent confirmed, and different rules apply to each. Our only option would be to mail the vouchers to some Florida processing center within 24 hours to have them taken into account. If the vouchers didn’t get there on time, they would not be applied to the final amount and we would have wasted our time, plus the roughly $20 it would cost to cover express delivery and confirmation charges.

There has to be an alternative, I heard D yelling into his smart phone. This is 2009. What major airline still needs to operate so inefficiently with paper vouchers? He was on the way to Sea-Tac Airport that afternoon, he explained to the rep on the other end of the receiver. It would be an inconvenience but surely he could drop them off at a ticketing counter at the airport. But that wasn’t an option, he was told. We’d have to mail the vouchers to Florida and hope they got to the processing facility before the reservation expired. Those were the rules. Eventually he gave up and we decided to go with another airline.

I couldn’t let them get away with the bad service and I wasn’t about to let the voucher go to waste, so I continued the battle hours after David had boarded his flight to Los Angeles.

“I’m not sure what to say,” one agent explained to me in defeat, “none of those numbers are showing up on the computer.” In other words, the conversation was over. So that’s it? His job was done? He wasn’t even going to try to help? Since when do customer service specialists get to have defeatist attitudes and to give up on customers? Sure enough, he offered no more assistance and I found myself coming up with suggestions on how to validate the vouchers.

At least he wasn’t rude like the first guy I spoke to that afternoon, the one who pretty much accused me of printing bogus paper vouchers in my basement with the help of an ink jet printer and some construction paper. He kept pronouncing the word voucher as if he were making air quotes each time he said it.

I asked to speak to a supervisor but none was available to take my call. After a second attempt, the customer service person returned to the phone with instructions that a busy manager had apparently dictated to him. Make a photocopy of the vouchers, she instructed, and fax them to the office before the end of the day. The tickets couldn’t be scanned and emailed; they had to be faxed. And how I got to a fax machine on a Sunday afternoon was my problem. At the time, I was sitting in my living room on a Sunday afternoon, multi-tasking while Tiggy napped in his room. When he woke up, we walked to the library to make a photocopy, then trekked to the grocery store to pay $1 per page to have the vouchers faxed.

But it would have been too simple if a simple fax solved my problem. “No, I don’t see a fax,” explained yet another uninterested representative on the other end of the line, making no effort delve further. “Is your machine working? Is there another fax number I can use? Is there something else I can do? I need to pay for my tickets before the end of the day.” She transferred me so that I could be somebody else’s problem and not hers.

I got a verbal lashing from the new intermediary about her not making the rules regarding paper vouchers and my needing to respect them. This only set me off even more so I let her know what I thought of the service we had been getting. And now that we were even, she proceeded to help me. You can take the voucher to the ticketing counter at the airport right now, she suggested, or mail them to Florida. I had more things to do on a Sunday afternoon than drive 40 minutes to the airport to look for a ticketing counter which would probably be closed by the time I got there. This would infuriate me, considering that David, who was on his way to the airport this afternoon, asked whether he could drop the voucher off before he boarded his flight and was told that was not an option.

I was just about to give up. But when I read the voucher numbers to this woman, they showed up on her computer! I don’t know why the same numbers weren’t registering for some 10 previous representatives but at that point, I didn’t care. I gave a credit card number then prepared to spend some $20 to mail the vouchers to Florida using Express Mail.

The lengths I’ll go to save a dollar.

These days, I am really into a French game show called "Des Chiffres et des Lettres" ("Numbers and Letters"), which airs on the cable channel, TV5 Monde.

The show has probably been televised in France for some 20-30 years and is refreshingly dull. Candidates often appear comatose, compared to the guests on American-style game shows, and the audience is quiet. There’s nobody whistling with joy about the prospects of a contestant winning money.

During the numbers, or calcul mental parts, a computer comes up with a random number and contestants have to perform a series of mathematical operations (addition, subtraction, etc.) to arrive at that number. I usually just skip over those questions. But I love the Letters challenges. Candidates have to create the longest possible word out of a set of randomly-selected letters.

There’s no talking during the time allotted to the contestants to come up with their answers. There’s just music that plays for about 15 seconds and stops when time is up, somewhat like in Final Jeopardy. What’s more, contestants compete for the mental challenge and for the love of the game, and not big, fat monetary. They go home with reference books, vacation packages and modest monetary prizes.

This is quite a refreshing change from the more fast-paced, game shows we watch absent-mindedly, in which you see contestants in tears, hopping around a stage because they are so ecstatic about winning money.

Bad Air Day in L.A.

One thing that struck David when he visited Los Angeles last week was the thick haze of pollution that hovered over the city. It’s hard to believe the air wasn’t noxious but D said he felt just fine. His eyes weren’t itchy and he didn’t have any breathing problems.

Pacific Beach

Washington Coast, somewhere near Pacific Beach. Less crowed and more picturesque than Ocean Shores

Windy day in Ocean Shores

I had read somewhere that people can actually drive on beaches in Gray’s Harbor County. Our guide book confirmed that the stretch of beaches in Ocean Shores is designated as a highway. Driving on the sand was fun, for about five minutes. The salt and sand couldn’t be that great for the car. And the vacationers on the beach, zipping round recklessly on rented scooters made it scary. 

The town of Ocean Shores is as uninteresting as beach is pleasant. It’s flat, overdeveloped, compared to the other beach towns along the strip of coastline south of the Quinault Indian Reservation, and crowded with buildings that looked like they were plopped down haphazardly on whatever space was available.

1. Spend a night at the Lake Quinault Lodge. Lounge by the lake. Swim in the heated indoor pool. Have a drink on the deck overlooking the lawn and lake. Curl up by the fireplace. Keep your shoes on though; other guests don’t need to see your feet or worn-out socks. And stay awake. Nobody wants to see you sliding off the couch with your mouth open.

2. Take a cheesy photo at the base of the world’s largest Sitka Spruce tree, which measures some 19 inches across and is 191 feet tall. The tree is about a mile from the Lake Quinault Lodge.

3. Hike one of the trails. Tour the Quinault Valley.

4. Take a scenic drive through the rain forest. Look out for waterfalls and moss-covered trees. Just turn back when the road turns to gravel.

5. Drive to the coast from Moclips (quaint beach town) to Ocean Shores (cheesy beach town).

Lake Quinault

Lake Quinault Lodge

We came so close to staying in Ocean Shores, Wash. I planned on reserving a beach cabin in the south and spending our long weekend exploring the beaches along the northern and southern shores. I was pleased with my itinerary, but I wasn’t getting great feedback on Ocean Shores from my friends in Washington who were regular visitors to the Olympic Peninsula. The beach is fine, my friend Madge mentioned, but the town is sooooo tacky. What’s more, it’s hard to find a decent place to eat.

Yet the hotel prices in Ocean Shores were among the most expensive along that stretch of Washington coastline. Who wants to pay a premium to stay in a tacky place with what my friends described as dreadful, overpriced dining options? I can do tacky. But I can’t do tacky at high-end prices, especially not when we had better and more economical options nearby. And who wants to spend a fortune on awful food at a greasy spoon? I have certainly spent enough time circling touristy places for dinner, only to end up wasting a small fortune on food unforgettably-bad food.

We decided at the last minute to stay at the Lake Quinault Lodge, which sits on the south shore of Lake Quinault, rather than on the Pacific Ocean. This meant changing our itinerary around a bit, but the north shore was just a short drive away. We were still able to drive to Ocean Shores and some of the more charming beach towns along the coast.

The lodge turned out to be a great place to stay, and far more charming than any of the other hotel options I was considering along the coast. It has a charming, rustic feel to it, with brawny furniture, and noisy pipes and radiators cranking away like the pipes in my apartment in New York. The lodge restaurant serves breakfast, lunch and dinner in an elegant dining room overlooking the lawn and the pristine lake. Dining options in the area are limited so we were glad to have somewhere on the premises with a selection of decent culinary choices. Menu items aren’t cheap, though, and the prices add up quickly.

Our room did not have a television but we didn’t miss that. We brought our PC and watched a DVD at the end of the first night to wind down. Some rooms have fireplaces. It sounds cozy but we didn’t see ourselves lighting a fire in the room with Tiggy. The lodge also offers lots of rainy-day options, including a spacious lounge with a fireplace, a heated indoor pool and sauna, and puzzles and games. I’m not sure whose idea it was to make a piano available to guests in the lounge, which was right below our room.

    Olympic National Rain Forest – Quinault

Aujourd’hui marque nos 10 ans de mariage. Ce n’est qu’un debut…

Seabrook is a little beach town built atop a bluff that overlooks a small stretch of the Washington coastline between Ocean Shores and Moclips. We drove through the planned community on our way to Lake Quinault last Saturday. Everything about the town seemed so contrived – from the aligned white cottages to the kid-friendly spaces – it felt like a Disney village or the little town in The Truman Show. This is in stark contrast to the rustic feel of neighboring beach communities like Moclips and Pacific Beach, with their scatterings of little houses built on or near the beach.

Seabrook is about a three-hour drive from where we live.

Hier, rien. Mais pendant la nuit, les bourgeons ont perce, at aujourd’hui le printemps a vraiment commence.

My husband became the latest casualty in the war against Roquefort cheese. He had a craving for the creamy French cheese with green mold but sadly, Roquefort was nowhere to be found in our Eastside neighborhood.

While scouring the collection of blue cheeses at the fromagerie in our local QFC, I remembered an article I read on a friend’s blog about the US imposing some outrageous tariff on Roquefort cheese in retaliation against the EU ban on imports of US beef containing hormones. I guess the US means business.

We’ll have to wait until July to satisfy that Roquefort craving.

We’re scaling back this year. Instead of driving ourselves to Sea-Tac Airport this summer and leavingour car at an off-site parking lot, we’ll be taking public transportation.

The trip is pretty straightforward: we’ll catch the 545 in front of the Redmond Library and get off at Westlake Center in Downtown Seattle. From the Westlake Center Transit Tunnel, we’ll catch either the 194 or 174 to Sea-Tac.

Our biggest challenge will be to scale back on our luggage so we can make those transfers.

Is $32 too much to pay to watch a movie? I suppose it depends on whether we feel we’re getting your money’s worth for the experience. For instance, $4 may not be a lot to pay to watch a movie. But if you are watching the film on the two-inch screen of a smart phone with tin-can sound, then $4 may be overpriced for the quality of the viewing experience.

Last Saturday we had a rare evening to ourselves and decided to check out the Village Roadshow Gold Class Cinema in Redmond. The upscale movie theater/bar/restaurant replaced the Loews Cinema on the upper level of the the Redmond Town Center last fall. We were curious about what makes a movie theater upscale and wanted to experience first-hand what makes the experience so chic and unique.

The cinema features small viewing rooms and a lounge that looks like what a trendy nightclub lounge might look like, with lighting and colors that are either slightly retro or ultra modern. I can’t tell the difference. There’s also a bar and a concierge’s desk. $32 gets you a ticket to see the movie of your choice in a screening room with reclining seats and all-you-can-drink soda. An extra $10 or so gets you a movie ticket plus lunch or dinner from a menu featuring culinary delights such as pizza and sandwiches. Diners can also order a la carte from the wine and food menus.

Our verdict was no. We weren’t convinced that this would be anything more than an average viewing and mediocre dining experience for a high price. The recliners are probably a nice touch but if I am engaged in a film, I’d rather be sitting up. If I don’t think a movie will be engaging, I’d rather watch it at home on DVD. I also don’t want to be waited on “hand and foot” as the concierge described the wait service, when I am trying to enjoy a film.

How would this be any different from a $10 cinema experience? We’d simply be exchanging those annoying theatergoers munching on popcorn and answering cell phones with viewers munching on sandwiches and getting up to go to the bathroom to make more room for all-you-can-drink soda. What’s more, eating hand-held food in the dark while watching a movie in a recliner is not a fine dining experience. It’s what you do for convenience and to save time. We don’t do that at home for free, except, of course when under duress.

I am sorry that sales are sluggish these days but please don’t follow me around the store asking me whether I am finding everything okay or whether I am aware of this week’s specials. And I don’t need this information repeated to me by all of your fellow sales associates on the floor. I know that the store managers are on your case about greeting customers and the need to sell, sell, sell, but honestly, this conversation is as painful for you as it is for me.

I do my research and I know from the ads on your website and the giant window display that all chinos are 30 percent off this week. But I didn’t come in to buy chinos and no amount of convincing will sway me. I don’t need them and won’t wear them. The shirt I want to buy is hanging on the back wall. Once I retrieve my size, I’ll look at other markdowns, pay and then leave. I did most of my browsing online already so I am familiar with what’s new and what’s on sale. How much help could I possibly need digging for bargains on a sale rack?

And please don’t try to convince me to sign up for your store credit card when I check out. You do this every time I try to pay for something and it is off-putting. The last thing I need is more consumer credit and a measly 20 percent off today’s $35 purchase in exchange for more debt is hardly a good deal. You know that. Besides, isn’t this partly what got us into this mess in the first place?