TRAVEL TALK: THE PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING

So, by the time I had unpacked my box from Hello Fresh, they were already way behind the Blue Apron Experience.  However, we’d changed services for the benefit of my hubby.  Did things get any better?

Time to Cook

In spite of all my little disappointments, the proof is in the pudding – not the packaging.  If I could have a happy husband, I could live without the Blue Apron knick knacks bag.  Only cooking wasn’t quite as much fun either.

At first glance, the recipe cards for Blue Apron and Hello Fresh are very similar.  One is formatted in Portrait and the other in Landscape, but that is irrelevant to the outcome of the meal.  For the most part, both cards contain the same information, but Hello Fresh completely missed the opportunity to tell me how delicious the recipe was going to be and what delightful ingredients I had received.  Aesthetically Blue Apron is more attractive to me.  Every item in every picture is upscale and pristine, just as you would expect in a gourmet kitchen.  Hello Fresh has more mundane accouterments in their photographs, including a stained cooking sheet.  Bad form Hello Fresh.  Points to Blue Apron.

Then I started cooking and the points went to Blue Apron – AGAIN.  The instructions are so much easier to follow on Blue Apron.  For one thing, Blue Apron has you prep all the items before you start cooking, so everything is ready before you actually start the tricky stuff.  Hello Fresh intersperses the prep work in with the cooking, so you have to stop all the way along to prep something else.  On my third meal, I went through the recipe and underlined all the prep work and did it before I started the rest of it, but that was a hassle.

Also, Blue Apron is virtually foolproof.  It gave simple instructions and then told you how long to do whatever it was you were supposed to do to the food – roast for 10 minutes, turning over halfway; cook over medium high heat for 3 minutes, stirring constantly – that sort of thing.  With Hello Fresh there was a whole lot more do-this-until-that-happens, which leaves a whole lot up to chance. Yep, points to Blue Apron.

With Blue Apron, all you add from your own kitchen is olive oil, salt and pepper.  Hello Fresh also asks for butter and sugar in addition.  Points to Blue Apron.

Hello Fresh also sent more stuff than you needed – which defeated part of the reason I wanted a meal kit in the first place.  Like sending a can of tomato paste, when I only needed a tablespoon.  They pretend it’s a bonus, but the last thing I want at the end of a meal is a partial can of something.  Points to Blue Apron again.

Hello Fresh and Blue Apron also handle calorie counts differently and as you might guess, I liked Blue Apron’s methodology better.  Blue Apron packs a small pamphlet in their knick knack sack with the calories and all the nutritional information.  I never saw any meal with more than 800 calories and it was usually much lower, averaging in the mid-600’s to the mid-700’s.  Hello Fresh puts all the nutritional information for the whole week on one card – which includes all those meals I didn’t order.  It’s my job to keep up with the card all week and I saw a meal with 950 calories.  Points to Blue Apron.

There was one thing Hello Fresh did that I really liked.  Every week Blue Apron sends you a head of garlic.  Almost every recipe has the peeling and chopping of garlic in it.  We never used an entire head, so I was giving out garlic to whoever would take it.  In addition, peeling garlic is not one of my favorite things to do.  So surprise, points to Hello Fresh.

Dinner on the Table

Visually, I thought Blue Apron meals looked more inviting than Hello Fresh and my husband would probably agree, but as soon as he started eating, he’d turn up his nose at something.  Hello Fresh’s Parmesan Crusted Fish came with potatoes so everything was pretty much the same color, except for a sprinkling of carrots.  Same with the Pork Chop and Sweet Potatoes – monochromatic, except for a few green beans.  Hello Fresh’s finished product just didn’t have the sizzle of a Blue Apron plate, so you know who got the points.

But was Hello Fresh delicious?  With the small exception of tasteless sweet potatoes, hubby gave the week an unqualified thumbs up.  He was ready to go for the second week.  Anything except Blue Apron for him, I guess.

I wasn’t as happy and it had to do with the quality of the food.  The Parmesan Crusted Fish?  Tilapia!  Something I never saw with Blue Apron.  The potatoes sent with the fish were common white potatoes, not the fingerlings and Yukon Golds Blue Apron had gotten me to fall in love with.  To me, the Hello Fresh meals were OK, but pretty much what I could accomplish on my own, so kind of a yawn.  The good news, I guess is that even though my cooking is sort of boring, my husband likes it.

Will we continue with Hello Fresh?  Well, I was bored.  So I used a coupon Bill had found for Sun Basket.  Come back next week and see how that went.

TRAVEL HERE: AND NOW FOR CONTESTANT NUMBER TWO

When your husband is not happy at the dinner table, it’s time to try out something different.  We both loved Blue Apron in the beginning, but as time went on, the level of satisfaction sank – especially for Mr. Bill.  Bill was tired of Blue Apron’s flavor of gourmet.  He wanted less adventure and more plain food.  I could feel his pain, but I didn’t want to go back to the days before delivered meal-kit came along.  So, a survey of the available services suggested Hello Fresh would solve my problems and give Bill a steady diet of good, but un-gourmet choices.

Choices and Ordering

When it came to the nuts and bolts of ordering meals, Hello Fresh seemed a lot like Blue Apron.  One new opportunity was the chance to upgrade one of your meals to a premium choice.  I just missed the lobster!  It had been available on the previous week.  I decided on my first order to stick with the regularly priced choices.

The selections were more like my mother used to make without the gourmet frills.  While that lowered the fun factor for me, a happy hubby was the goal, so I went with it.  We got an Italian Ciabatta Burger, Parmesan Crusted Fish and some Glazed Pork Chops.

Here Comes the Box

The box arrived as scheduled and from the outside it looked pretty much like the Blue Apron box, but with green as the primary color instead of blue.  When I opened the box, the story changed.

Inside the box were three huge grocery bags of food, each with a sticker announcing the meal they contained.  I’m not sure exactly what they thought I was supposed to do with that, because the sacks were too big for my frig.  It’s probably very convenient for them from a picking and packing standpoint, but I had to unpack the bags to get the items into the frig.  Blue Apron’s box came loaded with individually packaged items, not mystery grab bags.

As I unloaded the bags I sorted the ingredients into Ziplocks.  I discovered some of the items didn’t need refrigeration and some like the maple syrup would be better without it.  So each grocery bag of food was offloaded into one large Ziplock of refrigerated items and one small Ziplock of pantry items.  Points to Blue Apron!

Hello Fresh packaging wasn’t much fun either.  While unloading my Blue Apron box, there were elaborate packaging solutions, like individual cartons for eggs and plums, and I’m a sucker for great packaging.  There were other interesting items in Blue Apron, like unusual vegetables or breads or intriguing descriptions on labels, while there was nothing at all exciting in the Hello Fresh box.  The biggest thrill was some artwork on the bag of shredded mozzarella, but I do graphics and could have whipped it out myself in moments with a better vocabulary.  Points to Blue Apron.

The best part of unpacking Blue Apron was small brown bags of what they called “knick knacks.” It was like a present for every meal – spices, bottles of vinegar, sauces, crazy mushrooms, beautifully packaged rounds of butter and on and on and on.  I would load the small bags in the refrigerator and not open them until I cooked the meal.  Home-run for Blue Apron.  Nothing for Hello Fresh.

So, we hadn’t even started cooking yet and Blue Apron was way ahead.  Did Hello Fresh come from behind at mealtime?  Come back next week and find out!

TRAVEL HERE: WHY I LOVE BLUE APRON

Even though I knew immediately that I wanted to try out one of these meal services, it took me a while to convince my husband that he was interested in it, too.  When I finally convinced him a meal service would be the answer to all my prayers, I then had to prove the financial viability of it.  I found a consumer site comparing the available services and they said Blue Apron was the most cost effective.  Then we found a deal at Costco and that sealed it.  I really think he was just tired of hearing about it and he assumed that after a week or two I’d get tired of it.  Au contrare!

Heaven in a Box

I confess, I loved everything about Blue Apron.  It was easy to order.  I loved unpacking the box it came in.  It solved every problem I ever had with cooking.  It gave me easy-to-follow, step-by-step, illustrated instructions.  I did what they said and with only a very few exceptions, the results were amazing – at least to me.

I loved “shopping” on the website to pick my meals.  I loved getting ingredients I didn’t normally have access to.  I loved the way the items in the box were packaged.  I loved following the instructions.  I liked the quality of the meats.  I loved rating the food and making comments on the website.  I loved sharing my experience on Facebook.  I loved giving my friends a free week of food.  I loved how responsive their customer service team was.  I was having a grand time.

So, It Wasn’t Perfect

Really, my one and only complaint about Blue Apron was the limited selection.  I could have easily found what I wanted out of the six choices they offered, but as soon as I started making selections, things became unavailable.  By the time I got to my third choice, there was no choice.  I just had to take whatever was left.  I’m sure that had to do with food cost, but it was irritating.  Otherwise I was a happy camper.

Then They Improved the Selection Process

Then they improved things and that’s always dangerous.  We’d been on Blue Apron for about six weeks when they announced, not only were they expanding the number of choices available, they were also doing away with limiting selections as you made choices.  Sounded like all my dreams were coming true.

The switch coincided with our vacation.  I left all excited, because when I came home, the new process would be in place.  The selection process was great when I got home, but suddenly, the food was not as good.  It was small things.  Like there seemed to be more in the way of steaks, but the steaks were tough and gristly.  We were getting good vegetables, but the combinations seemed weird to my husband.  I was ready to trade my new options in on the way it used to be.

In the beginning, Bill had been as happy as a clam, but suddenly, his level of satisfaction was going down, down, down.  Now, I was not as dissatisfied as he was.  Those odd combinations were fine with me.  The steaks bothered me, but I could choose around the beef.  I’ll be honest with you.  I didn’t think the food was quite as good as it had been before the improvements, but it was good enough and it beat the heck out of going back to the pre-Blue Apron system.

Let’s Try Something Else

After some pretty tense conversations about it, because I loved the easiness of the program, we finally decided that we’d try out some other services.  Bill had offered to “help” if I’d go back to just doing it myself, but I didn’t need help with the cooking or cleaning up and he didn’t want to take over the planning.  So it was time to give Hello Fresh a try.  Come back next week and see how that went.

TRAVEL HERE: FOOD DELIVERED TO MY DOOR

Have you tried out the latest culinary trend?  You see them everywhere.  Some companies call them meal kits.  Others call them recipe services.  I call them wonderful.  From the moment I first heard of them, I knew I was their target customer and I couldn’t wait to sign up.  See if you have the same kinds of complaints about preparing meals.  You might be a candidate for meal kits, too.

Meal Planning is a Mess!

I love a good meal.  I enjoy cooking a good meal.  I don’t even mind cleaning up after a good meal.  What I hate is planning and shopping and managing ingredients.  Don’t get me wrong, I love browsing through a gorgeous cookbook and imagining making the dishes, but the fun stops as soon as I pick out a recipe.

There’s only two of us in this house and every recipe has that one ingredient.  It could be almost anything – a spice I don’t have in my collection and may never use again, a vegetable I have to buy that will ruin before we can finish it or a can of something I will only use a portion of and have to figure out what to do with the rest.

These are not insurmountable problems, but I get tired of dealing with them – especially when I live in the boondocks and Kroger  is the only place I have to shop.  Here’s why:

• I need three mushrooms and all there is available is that huge plastic-wrapped carton of them.
• The tomatoes are awful and the cucumbers all have soft ends.
• The recipe calls for X, but it’s not in season or they don’t carry it in Texas or whatever.  Of course, I find this out only after I have all the rest of the items for the recipe in the cart.
• After scouring through the produce department I ask the clerk if they have any shallots and they direct me to the seafood department.
• I want things to quit changing every time I go to the store.
  • Remember when the canned onion rings you needed for green bean casserole were made by Durkee’s.  Forget that.  Now you have to figure out who bought the company and how they are packaging them on any given week.  Will they still be in a can or will it be a bag this time and a box next time.
  • My favorite fish recipe ever was made with White Wine Worcestershire sauce.  Apparently I was the only person that liked it, because it is no longer available and the recipe just doesn’t work with regular Worcestershire sauce.
  • Once I could get brand-name green beans – DelMonte, Green Giant or S&W.  Not now.  Kroger is saving me money by only carrying their store brands – and I don’t like their store brands.

Cooking the Recipe

Let’s pretend that once, just once, I picked out a recipe and found everything I wanted at the grocery store with very little hassle.  Now, I have to keep it somewhat real, so nothing actually came in a package that fit the recipe, but just getting home with everything I wanted would give me a thrill.

The next thing one has to do is figure out what order to do stuff in so that everything will be ready at about the same time.  I have a few meals for which I have mastered this skill, but they are few and far between.  Most of the time I’m throwing things in the warming oven and then being mad because they dried out or getting to the table to face crunchy rice, too raw meat or any other number of fails.

Then there’s all the ambiguity of recipes: a pinch of this, a drizzle of that, add this until that happens, stir until it has this consistency, salt and pepper to taste.  Quit that stuff!!  Tell me exactly what to do and don’t leave it to interpretation.  If I had wanted to play a guessing game, I would not have used a recipe.

Oh yes, and every once in a while, something you have made five million four hundred thousand and thirty-seven times, turns out completely different from every other time you made it.  You didn’t change a thing – it just happened!

The Aftermath

When you’re all done the worst for me is not cleaning up the dishes.  I hate the rest of it.  Was my husband hungry when we were through, because it wasn’t enough food OR do I now have leftovers, because the recipe’s idea of a “serving” and reality are two different things?  There’s about half a can of chicken broth left and a half a head of cauliflower, both of which I have to store and figure out how to use – not to mention the thousands of mushrooms, because I couldn’t buy three.  If we liked the recipe, great.  If not, well then, should I keep that spice or throw it away?

When a meal is over, I want it to be over, but it seems it never is.  Six months from now I will still have that extra piece of meat in my freezer, but it will be frost bitten and I will have to throw it away.  I feel the same way about laundry.  You gather the clothes and sort them and wash them and dry them and fold them and put them away – but then you have a sock without a mate, a blouse that has a button missing and there’s always something that’s going to need to be pressed or taken to the dry cleaners or something.

So now you know why I was so excited about meal kits, recipe services or whatever you want to call them.  If you have any of the same feelings, then you might be interested in meal kits too.

TRAVEL HERE: NOW DABS HAS EVERYTHING

If I told you that someone had everything except the kitchen sink, then you’d assume they had pretty much everything you needed.  That’s certainly been the case at the Dallas Arboretum.  I will wax eloquent at the drop of a hat that no one should come to Dallas without visiting the garden, even if that’s the only thing you have time for.  If you live here, I will want to know why you aren’t a member.  If you visit several times a year, I will suggest reasons to go monthly and if I could figure out how to work it in, I’d be there constantly.  I envy those people who live close enough to stroll over there several times a week. In other words, I’m a fan.

A Tasteful Place

So now the Arboretum will have a kitchen sink.  Of course, with multiple restaurants, food kiosks and event spaces, they’ve always had kitchen sinks, but I see A Tasteful Place as the community’s kitchen sink.  It’s a place where we city dwellers can watch tomatoes bloom, smell herbs and wash freshly picked vegetables.  Dallas foodies feel free to rejoice.

I like potager gardens.  That’s the fancy name for kitchen gardens which have gotten a bit of an upgrade and these gardens are at the core of the design of A Tasteful Place.  Historic homes, palaces and castles are some of my favorite places in the world.  I am particularly enchanted when whoever is in charge continues to cultivate vegetables and herbs, in the same way they did when the edifice was someone’s home.

In a potager garden the vegetables and herbs are thoughtfully laid out with flowers and other plants to be as pleasing to the eye as they are to the tongue.  The non-edible plants are chosen, not only for their visual beauty, but also to entice pollinators to visit the area.  I’ve seen potager gardens laid out formally with boxwood hedges in fleur di lis shapes and animal topiaries, but that’s overdoing it a little for me.  Usually these exotic gardens only have token vegetables and you wouldn’t dare pick them for fear of ruining the effect.  I like it when a practical, useful garden has merely been prettied up a bit and I can imagine the chef sending a scullery maid out for a little extra rosemary… or the chef taking a quiet break there as the kitchen transfers from cleaning up from breakfast to the next meal of the day.

Elevating the Potager Garden

This being Dallas, the Arboretum is taking my pleasant little potager garden to the next level and it’s grand opening will coincide with the popular Autumn at the Arboretum event.   A Tasteful Place will not quite rise to the boxwood and topiary level, but it will be something quite fantastic.

I remember the very first day I saw the sign announcing the coming garden.  I imagined cooking classes and the fragrance of tomato plants in the hot summer sun, but A Tasteful Place is going to be so much more.  There will be a formal entry to the garden and visitors will first step onto a covered patio offering a scenic overview of the area – including White Rock Lake with Downtown Dallas in the background.  Flanking the patio will be water features and a promenade leading down into the four potager garden plots.  The promenade will host quarterly garden-to-table dinners.  To the left side will be a glass pavilion where cooking classes, both demonstration and participation events, will be held.  And all you foodie-brides-to-be, yes there will be an open air event space where you can host your culinary-themed wedding. 

Perhaps the most brilliant part of the whole scheme is that they’ve got a plan for disguising the nasty parts of horticulture.  The Arboretum will be raising their vegetables and herbs from seed, just as any foodie purist would, but to keep A Tasteful Place wedding portrait perfect, all the early stages of a plant’s life will happen in a greenhouse and they will be lovingly transplanted to the potager garden when they are ripe and ready for harvest.  Every month of the year will have a new crop ready for the kitchen.  For instance, according to a list provided by the Arboretum, February will have beets, broccoli, brussel sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, celery, cilantro, collards, garlic, kale, leeks, lettuce, mustards, onion, pak choi and swiss chard.

The practical among us are now wondering what will be done with all this produce.  Well, there are those quarterly garden-to-table dinners and cooking classes, of course, but there will also be daily tastings in the garden.  What’s not used for these purposes will be sold to visitors.  Imagine spending a few hours with your family at the Arboretum and then coming home to cook the zucchini you purchased during your visit.

Recently, the Arboretum invited me for a hard hat inspection of the progress.  I’ll leave you with some pictures I took.  I hope you’ll plan a visit to the new garden this fall.  I have merely mentioned a few highlights.  There will be orchards, lagoons and so much more when it’s all done.  And speaking of more,come by on Wednesday and enjoy a blog about breakfast at the Heliopolis Fairmont on a special wedding day.

TRAVEL HERE:  BON JOUR EDITH!

I’ve been holding out on you.  In our pre-occupation with kicking off Spot On Images, I haven’t been as faithful as I once was with sharing the delights Bill and I discover as we wander about the Metroplex.  In my defense, we haven’t been quite as adventurous in recent months, because we’ve been focused on kicking off our new venture.  We got a little lazy, returning frequently to old favorites and depending on those ubiquitous chain restaurants.  Recently, we ran into something that was so good I couldn’t keep it to myself.  

My Turn to Choose, As Usual

“Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know.  Where do you want to go?”

Sound familiar?  We say the same thing and more often than not we answer it geographically.  If we’re up north, we’ll go to Watter’s Creek.  If we’re sticking close to home we’ll go to the Rockwall Square.  If we’re in a more central location, like downtown Dallas, Mockingbird Station is a favorite.  Once at one of these areas we wander around a bit until something grabs us.

For this trip we went to Mockingbird Station.  An interesting rotation of restaurants cycles through and we’ve found several favorites there.  Unfortunately many of them have been short-lived flashes in the pan, but we keep trying, because we usually find something good.  It is our sincere hope that this new restaurant will beat the odds.  We love it and we’re sure if you try it, you will too.  So give it a spin and let us know what you think.

This time, when the usual question came up, I chose Edith’s French Bistro.  The name featured three words I love.  “Bistro” suggests an easy-going casual restaurant.  “French” is one of my favorite cuisines.  And Edith?  Well, those who know me well know it was the name of my favorite aunt, certainly a fortuitous omen.  Right on all counts.

While we were in the mood for an adventure, we weren’t in the mood to break the bank.  Since French restaurants can often come with a high price tag, we tentatively wandered in the door and took a look around.  We immediately noticed the decor wasn’t all that Frenchy.  Tasteful and inviting most certainly, but in a contemporary, fresh sort of way, rather than white tablecloths and intimidating waiters.

Even as we breathed a sigh of relief, the pastry counter caught our eyes and lured us to gaze longingly at the treasures waiting there.  We were greeted by a handsome young fellow who seemed glad to see us.  We’d arrived much too late for lunch and quite early for dinner, so there weren’t many other patrons to distract him.  He told us of drink specials and raved about the food.  It all sounded good, but in truth, we quite liked him and he was the primary reason we stayed.  Well, that and the pastry counter.

Tyler sat us in his section and we perused the menu.  Edith’s was hitting all the marks.  Inviting decor, pristine housekeeping, charming waitstaff and a great selection of food.  I liked that the menu wasn’t one of those exhaustive tomes with a million choices and nothing I really wanted.  Instead, there was a two-sided card.  I could have easily pointed at random and ended up with something I would have loved.

Bill opted for the French Dip Sandwich, but I needed some guidance.  As tempting as they sounded, I stayed away from the breakfast options which were available all day and the crepes.  Even though I was excited by the Frenchness of it all, I found myself lost between two not-so-French options.  They had something called a Ghost Burger which sounded heavenly.  Well, maybe heavenly isn’t the exact right word, because Tyler warned me it was spicy, but just thinking about the description makes me hungry all over again.

I landed on the Shrimp Mac & Cheese which Tyler assured me was his favorite dish.  For now, it’s my favorite dish also, but I intend to visit the restaurant frequently and challenge that opinion.  We quizzed Tyler about the restaurant, wanting to know how long it had been there and if there really was an Edith.  I am proud to announce there is an Edith.  She arrives very early every morning to make the magnificent pastries in the refrigerated case.  They not only look remarkable, they taste that way, too.  I know.  I had one of the eclairs and to my delight it was filled with chocolate.  I’m sure it would have been just as delicious filled with vanilla cream, but if you know me you can imagine how the chocolate thrilled me.

When the bill came we were reminded of the friendly prices.  Certainly visit during happy hour (before 7, I believe), because wine by the bottle is half price, but don’t be afraid to go at other times, because the prices are very affordable all the time.  In fact go frequently, because we need to keep this gem around.  As we grilled Tyler about the restaurant and its Edith, we discovered that her husband has a restaurant right across from her, but as much as I’d love to check it out, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to be that close to Edith’s and not eat there.

Come back here on Wednesday, because we’ll be visiting the bride’s home in Cairo on the day before the wedding – one of my favorite events during my entire visit to Egypt!   I wouldn’t want you to miss it.

(BTW – these delicious pictures were taken with a phone.  Imagine what they’d look like if Bill had his “good” camera with him.)

TRAVEL HERE: DO WHAT YOU LOVE AND IT WON’T FEEL LIKE WORKING

I’ve been telling you about Bill’s gleeful return to the real estate industry and how he dragged me along with him.  To my own surprise,  it didn’t take much dragging.  I’ve discovered that it’s not that I don’t like real estate.  Come to find out, I just didn’t like being a real estate agent.  I’d rather write about a house than sell it, so once I got over my initial resistance to the idea, Spot On Images was born.

Text and Images: A Marriage Made in Heaven

One of the reasons our marriage works so well is that Bill and I have complimentary skill sets.  While neither one of us is particularly fond of cleaning toilets, we’ve parceled out the various duties of our joined lives in a way that suits both of us.  He does his stuff and I do mine.  Thankfully, each of us enjoys most of the items which are on our lists.

It just so happens that his passion for photography and my penchant for words are also a good match professionally.  Each of us has a specialty that works in unison to accomplish something very important in a person’s mind – especially a home-buyer’s mind.

While you can find all kinds of statistics to support the idea that our brains naturally seek images, but we don’t really need scientists to tell us this one, just visit your Facebook feed.  The cat video will get you every time.  As soon as gif’s became available for comments we all forgot how to talk.  People like pictures.

However, our brains also like words with our images, both spoken and written.  There’s a oft-quoted article by 3M that tells us our brains process pictures 60,000 times faster than text, but that article and many others will tell you our brains also like words.  While a picture can anchor a thought in our minds, if there’s no text, there’s no way to know what idea the image may anchor.  There’s also research to support that the processing of these words can help us to better remember the images, because the easier a font is to read the more quickly we forget what it said.

A picture may actually be worth a thousand words, but it’s important for advertisers, educators and many others to be sure their images convey the right message.  Without a little text, the same cat video may say two completely different things, depending on the audience.  While the video may charm one viewer into a trip to the local shelter to adopt another feline, it could convince another viewer to never add a cat to their household.  Without a little text, no viewer will ever figure out the video is actually promoting a new cat toy!  Nor will they know where to get one for their own cat.

The article by 3M discusses how important images and text are in presentations, while a post on Fast Company touts infographics.  The bottom line is that if you have a message to convey, the best way to do it is with both images and text.  That’s exactly what we’re offering to our real estate clients.

Spot On Images:  Images and Text

Bill takes amazing photos and videos, whether he’s using his tripod or his drone.  I’ve been in marketing all of my professional life.  I’m saavy in social media.  My degree is in Creative Writing.  I have the words to go along with his images.

Some real estate agents just need pictures for their listings.  Others just need web copy or the right words for a brochure.  We’re happy to provide either one or both, but when we combine our skills in a narrated video tour or a website – lookout!  The benefits of images with the right text can multiply in geometric proportions and I’m glad to be in the business of helping real estate agents market their lisitings.

Check out our website.  We’d love to help you out with your images and text.

TRAVEL HERE: HOW SPOT ON IMAGES CAME TO BE

So last week I told you about our days as residential real estate agents in California, but I still haven’t told you how that led to us start Spot On Images.  Here’s the rest of the story.

When the Bubble Burst

We enjoyed the good old days in real estate, but they ended when the bubble burst.  I’ll share a secret with you, I was sort of glad to be out of it.  We made a lot of money, but I really didn’t like most of the tasks that went along with selling homes – with one exception, I loved creating those brochures and writing the descriptions for the MLS.

Bill loved real estate and he never understood why I didn’t.  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he did most of his work behind the scenes and I was the one out there showing houses and writing contracts.  Bill loves it so much that even though our licences expired, he’s kept his fingers in it.  We have rent houses and we’ve sold our own homes.  While most folks can’t wait to hire an agent or they begrudgingly put the FSBO sign out in the yard, Bill is totally energized by the whole process.  He’s taking pictures, creating a website for the home and guiding me through every step of the process with alacrity.  OK, so I’ll go ahead and confess, I really do enjoy creating the brochures and writing the web content.

Real Estate is Back

So back to our real estate photographer friend who was leaving town.  He was entirely too nice to take our money, when we offered to buy his business.  Instead, he showed Bill the ropes and encouraged him to start his own business.  For almost all of our marriage, even when we were selling real estate, Bill’s primary occupation has been investing, so I assumed his interest in real estate photography was just a bit of nostalgia.  Boy, was I ever wrong!

While he’d never completely abandon his investing, he’s automated it to the point that he has time for his other passions.  When the real estate photography bug bit him, he started buying camera equipment of all sorts.  He spent his days getting a feel for his new toys and getting up to speed on all the latest technology.  There was no question of his expertise.  He’d started taking photography lessons in his twenties and it’s been one of his passions ever since.  Most of the great travel photography on this blog comes from him.  As far as his photographic abilities are concerned, he could have hung out his shingle the day he decided to do this, but that’s not how he does things.  He dots his i’s and crosses his t’s.

As he exercised his photography muscle he also started working on me.  He praised my marketing expertise and reminded me of all those people who said they bought my listings because of the words I had written.  In the guise of sharing with me what he’d been learning in his research for his new business, he pointed out how important the internet and social media were to the success of real estate agents.  He was being nice about it, but here’s the bottom line, I was about to be back in real estate, too.

So what did I think about getting back into a business I’d been happy to get out of.  Come back next week and find out!

TRAVEL HERE: WHAT’S NEW WITH US!

I’ve got exciting news to share.  Bill and I have been nurturing a secret for several months, but now we’re ready to spill the beans.  Read all about Spot On Images and spread the news.

A Little of This and That

So what happens when you take a husband with an entrepreneurial streak, an MBA in business and a passion for photography and you match him with a wife with three decades of marketing experience and a degree in Creative Writing, who’s heavily into blogging and social media.  Well, if the two shared a successful real estate business for several years before the bubble, you might end up with Spot On Images.

If you’ve ever wondered, “What am I doing here,” but in the next moment realized you’ve been training for this opportunity all your life, then you know how we feel right now.  If I were to try to tell you where it all started, I have no idea where I’d begin.  It would be sometime after we were born on separate continents, but the story would have to start long before we ran into each other one day at the Dallas Museum of Art.

So, let’s start with the day we learned a real estate photographer friend was moving out of the area.  While most people would discuss the details of departure dates and moving vans, Bill wanted to know if they would be interested in selling their business.

Real Estate in the Days Before Smart Phones

OK, I know my husband is a great real estate photographer, but his question took me by surprise.  Back in the days before the bubble, when all this online real estate shopping was brand new, you were lucky if a listing had a picture on it.  If a For Sale sign had a brochure box, chances are it was a printout from the MLS.  That’s not how we sold houses.  Mr. Bill would go out with our new-fangled digital camera and take pictures.  We’d upload as many as we could to the MLS  (I think you could only post 11), along with descriptions that went far beyond “3/2/2 in desirable neighborhood with ocean view” which seemed to be the norm.

We weren’t the only ones there on California’s Central Coast who appreciated the advantages the internet offered to real estate agents, but we were unique enough for our listings to really stand out and I took it a step further.  I created a unique brochure for every home.  No MLS printouts and no sticking the pictures in a pre-formulated brochure and filling in the blanks.  Each brochure was an individualized masterpiece.  I’d labor over matching the right font with my carefully crafted words and mix the text with Bill’s pictures.  We’d even print the brochures in color on coverstock, an expense most agents thought was a complete waste of money.

Nowadays, that just sounds like business as usual, but back then, we were mavericks.  What’s more, it worked.People contacted me to show my listings and then as we wrote the offer, they’d say things like, “I knew the minute I read the brochure I wanted to live here,” or “When we saw the pictures and read the description on the internet we knew it was our house.”  Meanwhile, most real estate agents were still doing it the way they always had – working the desk at the broker office, sending out postcards to their “farm”, lowering their commission and then spending most of it on advertising.

Unfortunately for our career, the real estate bubble burst.  Our lives brought us back to Texas and that was a good thing.  However, the real estate bug had gotten into Bill’s bloodstream.  Come back next week and I’ll tell you about it.

TRAVEL HERE: PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN

My country is changing.  I am a child of the Fifties.  In spite of all the turmoil Americans are putting themselves through,  I cling to those days of starched petticoats and moon shots, when it was good to be an American.

It’s Good to Be an American

I still believe it’s good to be an American.  I have traveled to many wonderful places and hope to visit many more, but there’s no place else I’d rather call home.  Yes, things are changing, but I can still smell freedom in the air and I think there are enough of us who still believe in liberty to defend it, if that becomes necessary.

We’re not as free as we used to be and that worries me.  Most of my freedoms have been taken away in the name of protecting me.  It’s a small thing, but I hate putting on my seat belt each time I get in the car.  It might be the wise thing to do, but I remember the first car my family had with seat belts.  It was a baby blue Pontiac Bonneville.  The seat belts were an accessory.  I know how many lives they say seat belts have saved and I’m glad for that.  I just wish it wasn’t a law.

I also miss cold beer in my cup holder.  I know all the statistics on that one, too, but I’m telling you, road trips just aren’t the same.  Many of my favorite date nights were long rambles throughout the surrounding countryside sharing a six pack.  I fell in love with this form of entertainment back in Nacogdoches, when I was attending Stephen F. Austin State University.  I was a member of BCK (broke college kids).  We’d pool our resources, pick up a six-pack or two at Jimmy Bob’s and head out to explore some country road.  This was in the days before GPS, so finding your way home eventually was all part of the fun.  Driving around dusty roads with the windows down, radio on, singing along with all your favorite songs and  wetting your whistle with a semi-cold beer…those really were the days.

These days I’m exhausted by my Facebook page.  So many people angry about so many things and everybody else righteous about something else.  Heck, I grew up during the days of Jim Crow vs. Civil Rights and folks managed to be nicer to each other than we are today.  I have no idea how being politically correct became more important than being polite, but a little tact and courtesy goes a much longer way than using the PC word du jour.  We don’t say the N word anymore.  It has been replaced by the R word.  How is that better?

I liked the pre-Walmart days when I shopped for my school wardrobe at Colbert-Volk and had lunch at S&S Tearoom.  I liked it when Neiman-Marcus was owned by Mr. Neiman and Mr. Marcus, rather than some conglomerate which also owns Target.  How does that make any sense?  My department stores were Titche-Goettinger and Sanger-Harris.  Unlike the Macy’s around the corner, you could just look at at the tag and know what the price would be.  You didn’t have to find the scanner and dig through your pockets for Star rewards.  There were no low price guarantees, because service, quality and “made in America” were worth paying for.  The clothes we wore were about our own taste, instead of a monogram or logo.  Besides, if you knew clothes, you didn’t need a giant CD to tell you who the designer was.  They also didn’t ask me to donate to XYZ charity every time I checked out.

Yep, those were the days, but now these are the days.  I think the American pendulum has reached the peak of globalization, political correctness and green thinking – at least I hope so.  We’re at that moment of hesitation when the pendulum sits at the top of its arc and we wonder if it’s stuck.  There are forces trying to hold the pendulum in place, but I’m hoping the force of gravity will win.  If we ever get back to the days where our shoes matches our purses or gloves and hats are de rigueur on Sunday mornings, then you’ll know I’ve reached nirvana.

I hope you do have a happy 4th.  I hope my stroll down memory lane has reminded you of the things you used to love best about America.  May God bless you each and every one – and may God bless the USA.