Tuesday Sept 30 - Breathing

Today is only half over and I've spent a lot of it killing time. All of my meetings have been spaced out perfectly today so that I've gotten nothing done. So I've watched a lot of youtube. And the amazing Hannah Hart reminded me once again to take a deep breathe.

And I seriously need to do this. I have been seriously stressed about finding a new job. I want one SO badly that I'm pretty sure I'm sending out bad vibes into the universe. I need to just relax. I'm still technically in school (even though this last class is a complete joke and giving m senior-itis a really big time). I need to acknowledge in the last 24 hours I've made meatballs and mashed potatoes, guacamole, and pizza dough from scratch (go me and my kitchen skillzzz). I need to stop thinking about sending out resumes and start thinking about what I can change about my resume (since it's obviously not working). I need to stop and be excited that I found a place that makes amazing biscuit sandwiches and some weird and delicious concoction called a "Chai Cider" - seriously, I need to stockpile that shit.

Mon Sept 29th

So we finally figured out what's wrong with Jeff. After a week of him not sleeping well, sleeping all day, back hurting, etc, we finally put it together that Jeff is having a mini crisis. So now Jeff is getting full care-giver treatment.

For dinner I made something amazing. Turkey Apple Swedish Meatballs with Pioneer Woman Mashed Potatoes. It was so good. And totally worth the two hours it took to make it. And we have a bunch of leftovers so lunch time tomorrow will be extra good.

My first Seattle dance class

This weekend I went to my first Seattle dance class. I chose a tap only studio because a) I found one and b) I thought it would be better because tap is the red headed step child at most dance studios. And it was a totally different experience.

• It was a one room studio
• Everyone in the class was an adult
• I paid a drop-in class fee (I'm in love with this structure and can't wait to try out other places)
• The guy who owns the studio and teaches was very theatre oriented rather than competition oriented like the studio in Spokane
• We danced for the entire hour

All in all I like it and I'm going to go back and try it again. This afternoon I spent time looking for places to go for some modern dance and found a few options for that too so I'm hoping to have either two or three nights with a class for some good workout sessions.

Bed update

Jeff and I have now had our sleep number bed for two weeks. And we really weren't loving it. But we had a feeling it was because we, after spending 45 minutes deliberating over the pillow top or the foam top, impulsively decided to go with the memory foam. So today, after spending an hour on the side of a soccer field with Sue and Miles as Sean's team kicked some butt, we drove back to the mall to lay on the foam one. And instantly agreed that was the problem. So we are calling in tomorrow to swap it out. And the good news is the foam one is way cheaper than the memory foam, so we'll also get some money back. 

Making Seattle home update

We still haven't made any friends. But I have started venturing out everyday to a different coffee shop or cafe to work for a few hours to get the lay of the land. I love taking the bus. Leah and Reed came over for dinner the other day and that was fun. And we have a few outings planned in the upcoming weeks. The real obstacle in our way the fact that neither of us go out to work. We aren't forced to interact with other people through a daily activity. Jeff is trying to find us a new bowling league (and the cool thing is the bowling alleys here do short 1-2 month long leagues rather than a full year sanctioned league) so hopefully we can make friends that way. We know we haven't been here that long but it's still dragging on the happy to only have each other to stare at day after day.

The worst combo evar

I am sick. And on my period.

But the good news is we finally got internet yesterday, so I've spent the last two days watching tv just because I could. Also, first world problem: because we didn't have cable in Spokane, I'm not at all caught up on any new shows which means I can't use my fancy new DVR to watch them.

Tableau week!!!

Sunday

After moving furniture and eating burgers, Ken, Jeff, and I went down to the convention center to check in. We thought since we got there pretty early in the registration time we wouldn't have to stand in line for long. We were wrong. We were so wrong that I sent Jeff to Macy's to look at pots and pans (because we still didn't have any).

So Ken and I stood in line and talked to someone who works for Pepsi about Tableau and talked to a Tableau employee who was schmoozing the line about the game in the app. We finally got to the front of the line and got our badges and our fancy backpack (seriously, it's a really nice backpack) and water bottle. And then I stood in another line to see if I could get into the 8 hour beginner class on Monday, which was all filled up. As much as I know I would have learned a ton in the class, I was ok with not getting in because I knew I would be able to do a ton of work and school so I could just enjoy Tableau on Tuesday, Wed, and Thursday.

Monday

After a day of working, I headed down to the convention center for the evening "mixer," which every time I said that made me giggle like I was back in 8th grade bc that's what it reminded me of. I met a bunch of people (fun fact: Wells Fargo sent about 100 people to the conference), ate some really good food, and met some Tableau people, who told me to email them about jobs :]

Tuesday

*sidenote - I actually took notes at all of the sessions I went to and learned a bunch of boring things

Breakfast - yummy

Keynote - learned a ton about Tableau and new features

allrecipes.com - learned about how they first established and then built up their BI department and then they showed us a case study from last holiday season when they teamed up with Ghiradelli chocolates and bumped sales up 20% using a marketing campaign that they were able to track using Tableau. Sidenote: did you know that allrecipes.com is one of the top ten social sites on the internet, but no one knows that bc they dont consider it a "social" site.

Drive - a session about how Tableau is learning from their clients. They have taken multiple case studies of how clients have moved Tableau into an enterprise wide tool and created a template for implementing it. A side awesome part of this was that it was led by one of the keynote speakers (the only woman to speak) and I was able to chat with her at Data Night Out later about it. This was also the first time I got a card from someone telling me to email them if I wanted to discuss jobs. I learned very quickly that by just being at something like the Tableau conference moved you from the robots who read resumes to humans who read resumes instantly.

Lunch - really yummy (pretty much at every meal I ran out of plate before I ran out of line)

Scott Simon - the only session besides the keynotes that Ken and I went together. Really interesting to hear him talk about telling stories and how he thinks to tell a good one. I would tell you what they are, but he made us put all our electronics away and just listen.

Ancestry.com - this was my only bust session. They've only been using Tableau for a year and so they didn't have really anything awesome to talk about.

Break time - I quickly went home, dropped off my bag, and immediately headed to the City Center.

Data Night Out - this was insane! I have no idea how much it cost, but they literally roped off the EMP, Space Needle, the Chihuly Glass Garden, and all the space in between. There was food (I figured out after I was full that there was different food in different places), booze (they were pouring them very strong so I only had about 1.5 drinks the entire time), and music (Sir Mix-a-Lot anyone?) everywhere. I spent a lot of the evening with two ladies who work in sales at Tableau but was super stupid and didn't get anything other their last names bc I didnt write them down. I talked to the Ellie, the keynote and Drive lady, about her talks and being a woman at Tableau and told her how much I wanted to work there. I met up with Ken as it was winding down and we wandered around a little together and then left right as everything was breaking up. Also it was interesting talking to people about Seattle who don't live in Seattle.

Wednesday

Breakfast - yummy and I sat with a bunch of people I didnt know. Go me!

Neil deGrasse Tyson - SO GOOD!! He was hilarious and exceptionally talented at talking about really complex concepts at normal people level. My favorite line: "We didn't lose a planet when Pluto was demoted, we gained an entire new area of space" (I will continue to wear my collection of Poor Pluto shirts anyway). His main theme of his talk was about how science is changing all the time and the amount of data we're collecting helps that.


Wired guy - Cliff Kuang works at Wired as a creative director/design writer and his talk was super interesting. His theme - how is our interaction with technology going to continue to change. Super deep and thinking about things I didnt even know to think about. And at the end, I stood up and asked a question.

Zillow - this session was packed. The lady who gave the talk works in the Marketing department side of the BI unit and creates all the graphs and maps and interactions about all the data on their website that they supply to the public on their website. The most interesting thing about this was she said that before Tableau, she made one very rudimentary graph for certain areas, but now with Tableau she's able to create very interesting and interactive maps that not only drives up user numbers but their info gets used in all sorts of things.

Lunch - not as good as the day before. Again, sat with new people.

Michael Lewis keynote - at this point everyone was tired. You could feel it in the audience. I knew that what Michael was saying would have been interesting and engaging any other day, but at that moment in time, all I was doing was trying to keep my eyes open. But I ended up buying The Blind Side and have since read it and found it very interesting. Also funny story: at both keynotes on Wed, Ken and I found each other in the crowd by sheer magic and so were able to sit together.

Agile Tableau - This talk was super interesting. It was all about how the BI department at Intuit (Quickbooks, TurboTax) figured out it was better if they integrated themselves into teams rather than just process requests, so they turned their entire department Agile. I asked about which pieces of Agile they threw out immediately because I always think that's interesting. Also these guys are hiring and I would love to apply to work for them, but they're in San Fran :[

Social Media - this one was half a bust. The first half was a sales pitch for an aggregation system that aggregates a ton of social media into actual info that you can then put into Tableau. But then he showed us what you can do with that data in Tableau and it was super fascinating. Anyone not leveraging their social media, especially in the retail business, is dumb.

Then I went home and went to bed pretty much immediately. By the way, this entire time I was off learning until my head was about to explode, Jeff was at home sitting amongst boxes without internet trying to work with no real food in the house.

Thursday

Breakfast - yummy (they were getting breakfast really right)

John Medina - this guy was awesome. I really wasn't excited about this one, but he got me excited about it in about 30 seconds. He talked about a mile a minute (I could never be a student in one of his classes at UW bc he was literally talking too fast to take notes) and his talk was all about sleep and how we sleep and why sleep is important. I basically learned why Jeff has horrible sleep patterns and how it's effecting every aspect of his life. Lessons learned: take a nap, don't pull all-nighters, and being overtired is just as bad as being drunk (he's got the studies to prove it).

Tableau for the first time - so I took the plunge. I sacrificed two session times for a hands on training session. And boy am I glad I did. Because he showed me tips and tricks at just the beginning level that I never would have figured out myself. I build my first dashboard (which I showed off very proudly to Ken, who was a good sport and smiled and told me I did awesome even though I was doing such basic stuff it was laughable)

Tableau store - Ken and I stopped by the store to pick up some souvenirs. I told Ken I wanted to buy him a shirt as a thank you. But he decided he didnt want a tshirt and so we bought other stuff. I of course got a funky mug and a tshirt.

Hans Rosling - this was the final keynote and he did awesome. This guy owns a non-profit that analyzes data from all over the world and finds patterns. His theme for the talk: how data can show people that what society thinks about the world is actually not true in regard to things like health care and poverty and industrialization. He was also a hilarious old man. Notice in the picture his "analog mouse."

Final Thoughts

This was an amazing experience. I now want to go to many more conferences and continue to learn and grow and meet people. On Monday I was super freaked out. I was crazy nervous and had no idea how I was going to do good networking (which in all honesty was the main reason I was there). And it ended up being so easy. I was just myself and started conversations with people about the food, sessions, and what ever else was on hand to chat about. I ended up with way more cards than I thought was ever possible.

Also Ken warned me that this conference was going to spoil all other conferences and he was right. The venue was awesome, the food really good, the speaker list crazy awesome, and the atmosphere one of excitement, camaraderie, and fun. And the "bar chart" opened at noon everyday.

I have to give a huge mushy thank you to Ken, who not only got me into the conference at literally the last possible second (we found out once we got there that I really shouldn't have been allowed in but Ken's account manager had signed up so many people that the conference people were giving her whatever she wanted), but for seriously taking me under his wing. He introduced me to people, talked me up, and kept calling me his "2nd generation Tableau user." He guided me in the beginning but I was soon running on my own. And I hope he was getting a kick out me being a total newbie (I had the sticker to prove it!) and getting excited about all the little stuff. I couldn't have asked for a better conference guide.

Schedule link: http://tcc14.tableauconference.com/schedule

Officially moving

Ok, it's been so long because I've literally going a million miles an hour for the past three weeks. Last I left off, I was still doing a serious happy dance every twenty minutes when my brain would remind me that I was going to the Tableau conference. But I couldn't really focus on that because that was four days away and I had a lot to do between now and then.

So Thursday Jeff and I flew back Spokane. We were not excited to be back at an airport. Not only were we back in an airport, but we were starting to feel the effects of being slightly homeless (even though we had had the keys to our place since Sunday, we didn't have anything except our suitcases and a new tv we got a Costco a few days before, so we weren't staying in it). So we fly to Spokane really late at night. We stay at Ken and Julie's - in the actual guest room, which was weird. It was very strange flying into Spokane knowing we didn't live there anymore. We will most likely always need someone to lend us a bed when we're in Spokane.

Friday Jeff works and I run around collecting the random things that were being stored at Nani's, my mom's, and Sue's. Jeff and I were very clear when we told everyone we were coming back only to get our stuff. A week ago we had said goodbye to everyone expecting it to be a year until we saw them all, so we weren't doing big family time. The only exception to this was having dinner with Larry and Richelle that evening and that was nice. Larry gave us a lecture of love and told us to be more adventurous and move to New York or somewhere far far away. We told him our brains were still reeling.

So bright and early Saturday morning, we got the truck, loaded it up with the help of Ken and Kenny, and hit the road at 1pm. Jeff got a head start in the truck while I went and picked up the inevitably forgotten thing at Kenny and Andrea's. And I literally didn't catch up with him until North Bend, when he stopped and waited for me. This is due to a few things: I wasn't actually driving at normal Heather speed, I had to stop in Ritzville and fill up the tires because the gauge started freaking out, and I didn't just power through and stopped in Ellensburg and got Taco Bell.

We arrived at the apartment around 5 and Jeff was on a mission. He wanted to unload the entire thing right then and there. I however did not. First we said "ok, only the boxes" and then we got all the boxes in and Jeff said "ok. lets do all the little furniture" and I said *sigh* "fine." Then the only things left were the big pieces. And Jeff really wanted to do it. He wanted everything out of there. And I was DONE. I was exhausted and in serious bitch mode and basically walked off the truck.

The next morning we drove to IKEA and picked up a couch. We had a serious furniture moment when we went into a going-out-of-business nice furniture store and after seeing that the going-out-of-business prices were still $2500 for a couch, we agreed that if we didn't absolutely love something, we weren't spending that kind of money. I was also having a problem because I was looking at this couch as a moment to be crazy. Now that we no longer had the big sectional and knowing we would end up with a very similar sectional when we got a house and kids, I really wanted to go out on a crazy limb with this couch. If I saw a purple couch that I loved, I was going to talk Jeff into it.

But we didn't see anything like that. And so we ended up at IKEA. And since we had the truck, we wanted to get it then. We had gone on a scope-out trip to IKEA before so we knew which one we wanted - and then changed our mind at the last minute and bought a different one. We ended up with this one and now that we've had it for a little while I like it. It's a definite change from having a huge sectional made for multiple people to take naps on it simultaneously, and Jeff and I have our eyes very open for a nice side chair with ottoman.

A few hours later, we went and picked Ken up from the airport in exchange for helping us unload the last few pieces of furniture out of the truck. And then we ate burgers. And then Tableau week started, which will be a totally different post. And no, I didn't even have time to think about the fact that we officially lived in Seattle. I had to focus on Tableau.

The Universe is Speaking Loud and Clear

I'M GOING TO THE TABLEAU CONFERENCE!!! *happy dance*

So Tableau is a company is that takes databases of information and makes gorgeous infographics with them. Ever since Jeff's dad showed me their software, I have wanted to work there.

They do an annual conference, which because I was suppose to be in London, I didn't register for and was just planning on going next year. But bc of the change of plans I was able to go. Only to be bummed 20 minutes later when I checked the website and saw that is was sold out. So Jeff was talking to his dad about it and Ken said he would check.

So yesterday I'm sitting waiting for the plane to take us to Spokane, when Ken calls me. "Do you still want to go to the conference?" Happy dance ensued. Like serious happy dancing. For multiple minutes.

I'm super excited to not only learn a ton but also to hopefully meet a bunch of people (note to self - get a tiny pad of paper to write peoples names down since I suck at remembering just someone's name. Tell me a funny anecdote about yourself and I'll remember you forever) that will come in handy later. I really hate networking but it's a necessary evil.

The real kicker will be doing this while I'm still working and going to school. I might not sleep a lot next week....

Tableau conference link

Not Wasting Any Time

Subtitle: And Labor Day makes it so everyone has mega deals on things

We have an apartment. Which still seems crazy that all this is happening in such a short period of time, but after the universe told us we weren't suppose to be in England, the universe is now pointing us in the Seattle direction hardcore.

So after sleeping for 12 hours straight, Jeff and I cracked our computers and started looking at apartments. And craigslist had a perfect one, so I made Jeff get up and we went and looked at it and it was disgustingly perfect.

Our checklist for an apartment is usually pretty short (and doesn't revolve around paint or counters or things like that), and this time was no exception:

Wants

• Ballard area - check
• flexible renting time - check (Jeff really wanted six months - we ended up with ten bc ten was cheaper than six for unknown reasons)
• 2 bedrooms (we really needed this since we both work from home) - check
• can see the tv from the kitchen (Jeff and I firmly believe in open concept because it sucks to be the one cooking or cleaning and not be a part of the group) - check
• dishwasher - check
• off street parking - check (and because of Labor Day, running a deal on it)
• close to bus lines - check (there are four running past here)

Perks

• washer/dryer - check (so freaking excited about this!)
• see-through drawers in the fridge (this doesn't seem like a big deal, but after living multiple places, I hate non-see-through drawers and I get overly excited if they are see-through and it's usually the first thing I notice about someone else's fridge) - check
• fancy kitchen faucet  - check (built-in sprayer!!)

Perks this place comes with that we didnt even know we wanted until this place had it

• ceiling fan - check (and it's not butt ugly)
• Basic Comcast package included - check (and we can easily bundle stuff on top of it)
• because of Labor Day, only a $99 deposit - check

Now we aren't going to lie, our Spokane brains had a little bit of heart attack when we signed papers for an apartment that costs 4 times as much as our last one, but the part of our brain that is moving towards being Seattle brains understands that's what it costs for what we want. We especially knew it was going to be spendy because of the need for a second bedroom, but we know that Jeff needs his work space and without it he'll never get anything done. We've also discovered that both of us trying to have two different meetings in the same room is horrible.

Check out that sexy faucet

So now we also have plane tickets home for this weekend and a rental truck all lined up. But here's the big kicker. We are missing key pieces of furniture (Sidenote: it was really funny looking at an apartment trying to decide if it'll fit our stuff when we don't have a couch or a bed). So Jeff and I are hitting the stores today for some last minute Labor Day sales to see if we can get something awesome.

Sidenote: Go the Fed! (i.e. Roger Federer)