The world around us

As avid travelers, we make sure we do our research on our destination before we head out, so we are prepared for our trip. When we take family vacations, we make sure we find all the best local food joints as that is something all of us enjoy a lot, but when we go on vacations by ourselves, we scope out the nightlife such as all the details on say, Atlanta bars before we leave. It just makes sense to not waste time once we’re at the destination to figure out where we want to go.

Last summer we spent almost a month traveling along the east coast from Virginia to Maine and back for which we did a good amount of research before heading out, on places to stay, famous restaurants in the area, interesting spots to visit and also the best buffets in town. In the end, we had a really nice relaxing vacation, since all the planning was taken care of in the beginning itself and we did not have to worry about it later on at all. While not all our vacations are planned to the T, when one wants to pack in a lot of things, it’s best to do it this way. On the other hand our beach vacations, don’t have any plans made at all, except for arrival and departure information and a hotel reservation. Everything else is left to be decided as and when we feel like it.

Why is it that just because I work from home as a freelancer, that people automatically assume I have as much free time as I want? I get sick and tired explaining to people that I work all day, and usually keep longer than regular office hours. While I have now cut back on my working hours, earlier I used to work 14 hr days 6 days a week and usually 4-5 hours on Sunday’s as well.

Freelancing has lots of advantages, but one has to work extra when the jobs are pending and sometimes it’s just impossible to refuse offers, so I used to end up seriously overworked. Which was fine with me, but pretty crappy to have to continuously keep on explaining to others that yes, I do have a lot of work to do as well.

I wonder if this scenario will ever change. I’ve taken time off for all of July, August, October and the first week of November as well, so now I have a ton of stuff to catch up on, not only moving forward but also catching up with stuff from the previous week that I have to make up for this week itself. Lots of late nights ahead I guess!

Since we are making final plans on an apartment, which we are purchasing for investment purposes, I have started to look at all real estate information rather seriously. For example, I found a site that deals with Colorado information and spent some time there to research the value of properties there and how much they are likely to rise in the same time frame as an apartments value will rise here.

The apartment we are looking at is yet to be constructed and will only be ready in late 2009, so by then if we want to move in there ourselves, we can do so, or give it out for rent directly and pay off the housing loan with the monthly rentals. The prices here have been rising pretty quickly in the past few years, and are expected to continue and even escalate in the coming years, so investing in a property is definitely the right move to make.

All the while that I’ve been away, I have missed blogging about what’s going on in the world of retail. I subscribe to a lot of newsletters everyday and use them to search for information on what to blog about, things that are interesting, things that are offbeat and things that will make an impact on the way we shop. While I was on vacation, I did not bother to read my newsletters and now am spending a lot of time catching up with everything I have missed.

Some of the big news lately has been that Lowes will be entering the Indian retail market, Tesco finally opened in the US, both items that will have an impact on how we shop and where we shop. It’s just a question of time to see how these changes work out and how shoppers react to them. It’s definitely something that I will be watching.