We decided not to use paper invitations.  This was partly for environmental purposes, but largely for convenience. It’s also been a unique way for us to express ourselves.  A recent experience reinforced this decision.  We were at a friend’s house and saw two wedding invitations on her fridge.  They were exactly the same design, but slightly different colors and papers.  One of the brides was there as well, and it was kind of sad to watch her compare the two invitations (perhaps wondering whether she had selected the right colors, if she should have splurged for the raised fonts).  We knew for sure at that point that we wanted to create something that was totally us.

Our invitation process was:

1) A save the date video.  The combo of a Flip and iMovie makes it easy.  And we had a lot of fun working together to map out and film the scenes. We got really great feedback from our guests - for some of them, it was the first time they had really “seen” us together.  You can check it out here.

2)  Electronic RSVPs.  For wedding invitations, we focused our efforts on custom designing our website.  One big deviation from tradition: we created an electronic RSVP form on the homepage of our website. It’s been great.  We get instant gratification - the responses started coming in immediately after we sent out an email.  And, we’ve simplified our own RSVP tracking.  We also think it made things easier for our friends by allowing them to use communication mechanisms they normally use (the mailbox can feel really far away sometimes).  As our friend Tanya says, “death to the paper invite!”

3) College facebook-style guest list - This is a fun way for our guests to see who’s coming to the wedding.  We’ve got pictures of confirmed guests, and you can filter the lists to see which of our guests are family, Wellesley, MIT, Stanford, etc.  We hope that it’s fun for our single friends in particular :).  Toby built this off of a Google spreadsheet.  He promises to make it open for others to use soon - when he does, he’ll reference it on his blog.

We’ve been having fun experimenting with ways to incorporate technology into our wedding. If you have more ideas, please share!

Surf-Kayaking
Not to be confused with sea-kayaking, surf-kayaking is done in very small incredibly unstable kayaks. While sea-kayaks are intended as transportation and people are mostly taught to come in behind the waves, a surf-kayak is designed to catch waves.

We took a surf-kayaking lesson at Half-moon Bay last year, and had a really amazing time. The instructor had us paddle from inside the harbor, so that we got some practice on the boats before dealing with any waves. This turned out to be very important. Two people in the group (Toby was one of them) fell out of their boats, and had to practice getting back in without tipping the boat over. Because we were coming from the harbor, we came in behind the waves and were able to have the experience of catching one without having the paddle out over the top of them. The boats are incredibly buoyant — they float almost entirely above the water, so the feeling is far more like flying than any of the sports we’d later try.

The tough part, it turns out, is getting out far enough to catch a wave. Paddling over “the soup” in such an unstable vessel is incredibly challenging, and we both spent more than half the time in the water. We were with a great group, which made the experience really fun, and falling out just increased our determination. Catching a wave is so thrilling, it made the effort worthwhile.

After doing this for 4 hours, we were so exhausted that we actually went to bed at 7pm and slept the entire night.

Bodyboarding
In June, we went to Hawaii for a few days to take bodyboarding (aka “boogie boarding”) lessons. Many people asked us why we would need to take lessons for this - after all, this is something that kids do all the time, no lessons required. It turns out that bodyboarding is a serious sport as we learned on a hike in Marin - we passed through Rodeo beach, where there were several surfers and a lone bodyboarder. The bodyboarder looked like he was having a phenomenal time - didn’t have to wait “in line” for waves, had flippers to help him catch waves, and was doing some pretty nifty tricks. YouTube has many examples of professional bodyboarders. We decided that this could be a good sport for us - limited and relatively inexpensive equipment (the board can fit in the trunk of a car), and we’d both had fun boogie boarding as kids.

While bodyboarding is pretty rare in San Francisco, it’s quite popular in Hawaii. Walking around, it’s fairly common to see kids and adults with boards and fins. Our instructor took us to Makapu’u beach for the first two days (we later read in our guide book and on other web sites that Makapu’u is a popular bodyboarding location but can be quite dangerous for novices). By the end of day 2, Brooke felt that bodyboarding was not the board sport for her, at least not in Hawaii - a rather scary nosedive confirmed this. Toby, on the other hand, was a natural. On day three, Toby went to Ala Moana, which required a 20 minute swim out but had long, beautiful waves.

Surfing
We visited Jacksonville to visit Brooke’s mother a couple of weeks back, and rented a beach house. There was a surfing school right near us, so we thought we’d try it out. We had very large surfboards, about 9ft long — larger boards are easier for beginners because they don’t tip or rock as much. Our instructor was great, very relaxed, and he made sure that we got a good start on our first couple of runs by pushing us at just the right moment — because of this we were both able to get to our feet on our second try, which was incredibly encouraging.

Toby continued to practice after the lesson. We both began to understand why people become so addicted to surfing, with many of them constructing their whole lives around being able to surf as much as possible. The feeling of catching a wave is fantastic, and the feeling of missing it only leads to wanting to do better next time (”I almost had it!”).

Stand-up paddle surfing
SUPS is an increasingly popular board sport - it was all over Hawaii and seems to be taking hold in Jacksonville. Pierce Brosnan recently shared his love for stand-up paddle surfing on The Daily Show.  Imagine standing on an enormous surf board and paddling as if in a canoe. You can catch waves or have a great time in flat water. Brooke really enjoyed being in flat water - you’re pretty far away from shore (you feel like you’re in the middle of the ocean) and there’s a nice balance between being very focused on the small (keeping your balance, noticing changes in the water as the tide comes in) and the large (you feel like a speck of dust in the middle of the ocean). She also saw some cool wildlife - e.g., a swordfish leaping in the water. You don’t have to surf waves to have fun on a stand-up paddle board, but it’s relatively easy to do so given how big the board is.

We felt like all of these board sports were great physical activity and enabled to get out in the ocean and have fun in the water. When we get back to San Francisco, we’re going to both try SUPs, renting from Boardsports School. Toby also plans to venture out to Pacifica to practice surfing.

We don’t think that this challenge is unique to us - it’s probably fairly common for a dual-income professional couple with no kids. We’ve started experimenting with amortization in order to address this issue. This is an accounting concept used by companies to inform capital expenditures (in other words, big one-time purchases) — companies will allocate the cost of a capital expenditure over the expected life of a product and consider it as a monthly cost instead of a one-time expense. For example, if new computer equipment costs $12,000 and is expected to be used for 2 years, this would count as spending $500/month for the following 24 months.

This helps companies have a better understanding of what a purchases costs relative to the income it generates. When sitting in accounting class, this concept might put some people to sleep - it’s not all that complicated, and it is a bit dull. We’ve found, however, that amortization is a fun and useful technique for understanding personal expenses.

A recent example is the Sony Playstation 3. Many people think that it’s pretty expensive - and at $400, they’re not wrong. But, a Playstation is actually has a lot of useful features - a Blu-Ray player, media streaming (so we can view online content that we’ve downloaded), and of course the ability to play games. Brooke bought a Playstation for Toby for his birthday (a fast way to a man’s heart).

We believe that we’ll use the Playstation for 2 years - that translates into about $16 per month. All of the sudden, it didn’t seem so expensive - especially given that many people (including ourselves) don’t blink an eye at paying $100 per month for cable. We actually have found that the Playstation is better than cable for us - we rent TV shows and Blu-Ray movies via mail through Blockbuster ($20 per month), download free content, and play games. Just ask Brooke about her favorite game, Ratchet and Clank - the Pixar of video games. She plays the game more than Toby does.

We decided to cancel cable - we essentially traded cable bills of $100 per month for a Sony Playstation for $36 per month ($16 per month for the equipment and $20 per month for a Blockbuster subscription). Of course, if these large upfront purchases are made with a credit card and not paid off in full immediately, the purchase price increases significantly.

Ever sense we’ve started thinking about amortization, that’s the first thing we consider when talking about big purchases. We’ve both noticed our credit card bills declining over the last couple of months - a good sign that it’s working.

Toby: This is my story of the process of choosing an engagement ring. Like many people out there, I was uncomfortable with the idea of going and buying a diamond for a few reasons:

• The history of human-rights abuses around diamond mining
• The strange competitive culture of “who has the biggest rock”
• The impersonal nature of getting the same thing as everyone else

I do, however, think that symbols can be very important and although I knew that Brooke would say “yes” whatever I gave her, I wanted to find something that she could keep forever, that would mean something to both of us and that would reflect our personalities.

Caveat: This is a personal story, based on decisions I made that I thought were right. I certainly don’t mean to judge anyone else, everyone’s beliefs are different.

“Conflict-free” diamonds
Those of you who watched Blood Diamond all the way to the end recognize that it wasn’t a condemnation of diamond buying as much as it was an endorsement for the Kimberley Process, which is supposed to certify that diamonds are conflict-free. After some investigation (pretty easy to do), I decided that the process was not trustworthy enough for my tastes. I also felt that I wanted something a little different from a standard white diamond.

Moissanite
I was somewhat fascinated by moissanite (silicon carbide). This is a mineral that looks a lot like diamond but sparkles a lot more due to it’s higher refractive index. It’s also almost as hard as diamond and has replaced it in many scientific applications. I thought it was particularly cool because it was originally discovered in a meteor, then later synthezied by scientists. Brooke and I were curious about it in general, so we went to a jewelry store that sold moissanite.

The stones look fantastic and seem indistinguishable from diamonds to a casual observer. We were immediately struck by how awful the marketing is — while there’s probably an opportunity to talk up the interesting aspects of it (more sparkle than diamond, totally ethical, from space!), the message is very clearly “hey, you can’t afford a diamond, buy this, it’ll last longer than a CZ”. In the end, I decided I wanted something that looked a little different, not something that was designed to be a simulant.

Blue/Pink Sapphire
I almost went with sapphire. It matched a lot of what I was looking for — it’s hard enough to not wear out, it can be made synthetically, and it looks different. There are a wide range of colors: pink, blue, yellow and red (which is usually referred to as Ruby). This is what I would have chosen, had I not found the option I eventually went with…

Man-made Yellow Diamond
A few years ago, I read an article in Wired about companies that had come up with industrial processes to create diamonds in a lab. These are the exact same material as diamond and are distinguishable from mined diamonds only because they tend to be so regular and flawless. I was totally fascinated by the idea of machines that create diamonds, so I started researching what options there were.

In the end, I picked a “Fancy Intense Yellow” diamond, pictured above. It was exactly what I wanted. It fit the criteria of being beautiful, unusual, interesting to look at, completely ethical and the most high-tech stone possible. I really liked the idea that it would remind us of the time that we got engaged by being very tied to the particular era when this was first possible.

Kretchmer Tension Setting
The first time I saw a tension setting, I knew that it was what I had to get. These are rings that don’t have the traditional mounting to hold the diamond in place, it’s held there by the shape of the ring itself. I liked the very clean, simple feel that this created.

I also thought it was incredibly cool that Steve Kretchmer had to invent a special platinum alloy in order to provide the 50,000psi of pressure required to guarantee the diamond would never fall out. I was pleased with myself for finding a technologically advanced setting to match the diamond I had chosen.

The setting I chose is shown here. I loved it immediately, but had to run it by a couple of female friends before actually committing I was also unsure if it made sense to spend more on the setting than the diamond, but people assured me that this was often the case with unusual or interesting settings.

In the end I was very very happy with my choices — I had managed to create a very high-tech ring, which is fantastic because we’re both obsessed with technology, Brooke absolutely loves it and everyone comments on how unique it is. The fact that the diamond is suspended without a setting makes it really fascinating to look at. The depth of the yellow changes depending on the lighting –in sunlight it appears very dark yellow and under incandescents it almost looks completely colorless.

B&T: We’re planning on a very tech-savvy wedding also. Stay tuned…

One of our goals in Tokyo was to get our hands on some miracle fruit - basically, a berry that makes everything taste sweet - so lemons actually taste like lemonade. It’s pretty hard to come by in the U.S. but we had heard that it was readily available in Tokyo, where it’s marketed as one of many weight control innovations. Our quest for miracle fruit brought us to Namjatown - an amusement park of sorts on the outskirts of the city (note: we’re using the amusement park term lightly here - it’s definitely not a Disneyworld or Six Flags equivalent). Namjatown was reported to have its own miracle fruit cafe - so one sunny day, we embarked on our journey, not entirely sure what to expect but knowing that an adventure was in store. This is one of the experiences that made us decide that Lost in Translation, while an amazing movie, hardly captured how different Tokyo is from every other world city.

When we debarked the subway, I think we somewhat expected to be put out into a relatively open part of Tokyo - after all, it was the last subway stop on the line. Instead, the neighborhood was chock full of people and had even fewer tourists than in the center of town. We eventually found our way to an indoor mall where we were told that Namjatown was located.

Upon entering Namjatown, we were struck by how confused we were. Even though this amusement park was aimed at children, we had such a lack of cultural understanding that we couldn’t figure out what the games the children were playing were about. It was somewhat like a large arcade, but people were walking around with handheld machines and shooting at things on the wall.

We eventually made our way to Gyoza Stadium, a part of the park that was dedicated to those wonderful dumplings. Some of the “best chefs” of Tokyo had supposedly been asked to create their own gyoza - the result was about 15-20 little restaurants that served up gyoza and beer. We couldn’t resist. We ended up going on our own private gyoza pub crawl. We got a bit tipsy - incongruous with the families around us - and after several rounds we had to call it quits. We didn’t even come close to making it to every restaurant.

Afterwards, we made our way up to the miracle fruit cafe. For a few dollars, we each got a couple of miracle fruit berries and a plate of fruit (lemons, oranges, blueberries). We weren’t entirely sure how to proceed, but the waitress provided a helpful demonstration. After sucking the miracle fruit for a couple minutes, we went straight for the lemons. And it worked! These lemons tasted pretty sweet. We learned an important lesson though - there’s a reason that lemons taste really sour - if you eat too many of them, the sides of your mouth get really sore from all the acid. In the end, we enjoyed the miracle fruit - it was definitely a fun experience - but it wasn’t as mind blowing as we expected. We felt like the effects wore off pretty quickly.

We continued our eating frenzy in the dessert area - similar to Gyoza Stadium but with all kinds of desserts. We hesitated to try the ice cream, afraid that it might be too sweet after the miracle fruit - but we gave in and got some. The ice cream was incredible. Whether that was because of the miracle fruit or not, we’ll never know.

This ended up being one of our favorite days in Tokyo. This affirmed our tendency to try to go “off the grid” and eschew traditional tourist activities (we didn’t spend any time in temples during this trip). This day enabled us to experience a uniquely Tokyo place, and it was really energizing.

When we started this blog, our first life experiment was to see if we could use offshore labor to create a unique design for us. We’ve both worked in and around the software industry for long enough to hear a number of horror stories — most commonly these center around communication issues and a perceived lack of creativity and skill, which drives people back to hiring local talent again.

Besides being forced to search through a few uninspiring bids, both from sellers on RentACoder and companies that we mistakenly emailed directly, we essentially had no missteps. The bid we received from Claudia really stood out, since it included a well-done and fairly original portfolio, her company, Cricava, had many glowing reviews from on RentACoder, and her email style immediately gave the impression that she would be pleasant to work with.

We weren’t looking for something incredibly slick or particularly Web 2.0, we were mostly interested in having a unique and playful look that was still relatively uncluttered. We asked Claudia to come up with an WordPress theme design based on tinkertoys and gave her no other instructions besides that. She first produced Photoshop mockups, which we talked about in this post, and was very quick to incorporate our feedback.

After we had agreed on a design, she implemented all the WordPress theme files, had me upload them, and did a lot of testing and refinement. After that, she did cross-browser compatibility testing for us and fixed a few remaining issues. Even after we had told RentACoder that the job was complete and the money was released to her from escrow, she continued to follow up and point out design flaws that we both had missed earlier such as small text alignment issues, and fixed those too.

In the end we asked her how many hours she had spent on the project — she estimated it at between 40 and 50 hours, for which she was paid $300, minus whatever cut is taken by RentACoder.

So, in the end we got an original design, full implementation and testing for about $6-$7/hour. Further, Claudia was an absolute joy to work with and has offered to show us around when we visit Argentina.

Toby: Later on, my friend Jeff pointed out that my homepage, kiwitobes.com, looked terrible and that a lot of people would be visiting it after the publication of my book. So I had Claudia redo that too. The minimum she could charge due to fees was $110, but for that I got 3 completely different design mockups to choose from — remarkably she had read our blog and attempted to build themes that would “match my personality”. The new kiwitobes.com is now up and I’m very happy with it.

Brooke asked Sahnaz to make a simple purchase - a gift membership to the Tate museum for some newlywed friends. On day 1, Sahnaz told Brooke that the task had been successfully performed (yay!). On day 2, Sahnaz emailed Brooke to say that she had called the Tate to confirm that the purchase had gone through (a thoughtful gesture), and that by coincidence our friend had also purchased a membership the day prior as well. Now, we’re all about strange coincidences - but this just seemed highly unlikely. So Brooke emailed our friends to find out if this was true (it wasn’t). In the meantime, she checked her bank account to find that two memberships had been charged to her. What followed were many back-and-forth emails. The issue was ultimately resolved - but it definitely would have taken less time and hassle for Brooke to have made this purchase herself. Additionally, the surprise of the present wouldn’t have been ruined.

There are two big issues that emerge from this:

1) Sahnaz didn’t identify the possibility that she had accidentally purchased two memberships - instead she simply responded to things she was told (without questioning the accuracy or logic of them)

2) An online purchase is a pretty straightforward task - if this can’t be successfully accomplished on a regular basis, it seems as though the value that offshore assistants (or at least Get Friday) can create is limited

This example, and a few others, have really caused us to identify some fundamental challenges with personal offshore assistants - we don’t believe these challenges are insurmountable, but we do think that until they are resolved the use of offshore assistants will be quite limited:

The internet makes it so easy to do things yourself, do you really need any help at all? - I could have made the Tate purchase on my own in about 10 minutes (only a couple minutes more than what it took me to instruct Sahnaz). Clicking “purchase” can often be easier than telling somebody what to do

So maybe offshore assistants are best used for researching purchasing decisions (versus making the purchases) - that may very well be true. However, offshore assistants lack the local knowledge often needed to get the full scoop. Some readers may remember the turducken - we ultimately purchased a turducken from a place in San Francisco that a friend knew about rather than one of the non-local companies Sahnaz found for us. Yes, websites like Yelp can help - but this doesn’t eliminate the need to develop a clear research question for an offshore assistant to answer. For example, I wouldn’t feel confident in sending Sahnaz a description of my brother and asking her to think about birthday presents for him. I would need to first develop a pretty good idea of what exactly I was looking for, and then have her research it. I think there’s a lot of possibility here for offshore assistants - but it’s important not to underestimate the importance of local knowledge when doing this kind of research

Limited hours means that you often don’t get an immediate response. We don’t count on Sahnaz to respond to a request immediately - we generally give her up to a day to respond. This means that we can’t really use her for emergency situations. Part of this is because Sahnaz has other clients (we don’t have enough work for her to work full time only for us) - but regardless of reason, this poses a limitation

Not physically in the same place. We hear this one a lot. People would like assistants - but they want assistants that can also pick up their dry cleaning. Obviously, this can’t be done from afar. But it does make us wonder if there isn’t a model whereby there are local personal assistants use offshore assistants in order to expand their capacity and drive down costs (thereby broadening the type of client they can serve). This could achieve the “best of both worlds” - cheap research but the option of getting you dry cleaning picked up

Not actually all that cheap. Get Friday isn’t dirt cheap - it’s ~$9 per hour for us (and possibly more for new customers), with a 10-hour per month commitment. That’s about the same as the minimum wage in California. Granted, this rate includes all overhead, recruiting (we don’t have to find talent), some data security, and some protection against fraud (though through Indian law, so we’re not sure how much that holds), etc. - it’s our “all in” cost. That being said, we believe that there are a lot of workers in the U.S. making the minimum wage who are similarly or perhaps more qualified than the people at Get Friday. Additionally, $9 began to sound like a lot to us when we realized that Claudia, our Argentinian web designer, charges a much lower hourly rate for much higher skilled work

At this point, we feel like we’re ready to take on some other personal outsourcing experiments in order to help develop our thinking in this area. For example, might we be able to find an assistant in Argentina - perhaps even through Claudia? What about trying out Brooke’s sister, Cassidy?

We welcome any suggestions or ideas - after all, this blog is about experiments. And we think that we have enough data about the Get Friday experience to be able to speak about it in an informed way. We’re ready for a new experiment!

We both enjoy eating meat — we’ve been trying to avoid any beef that isn’t grass-fed after Brooke began reading the Omnivore’s Dilemma and decided to try to eliminate corn from her diet (this seems to be a common reaction to the book). Though we eat meat, neither of us have never had to be responsible for raising, catching, or killing our own food. We do think it’s important to be comfortable with the idea of killing our own meat — by eating meat we’re part of the reason that animals are killed and we felt that we should be able to experience this directly or not eat meat at all.

By the time we arrived at Frances and Victor’s, a 4-month-old rooster had already been caught for us (if we had had to run around catching the chicken ourselves, we might still be there running around in circles). A rooster had been selected because roosters are less valuable to their farm - the hens are kept for eggs (Victor told us that roosters have absolutely no market value). Toby had the honor of wielding the axe to cut off the rooster’s head, and then we both plucked the rooster after dunking it in boiling water to loosen the feathers.

Lessons Learned:

• Killing and plucking a chicken takes a lot of time - we now have a much deeper appreciation for the work of farmers (and farm machinery). The prices we pay for free range chicken don’t seem so high after all
• Farm raised chickens are much, much smaller than the chickens you buy at a grocery store
• Chickens really do run around after their head has been cut off
• All farm animals know when a chicken is being taken to slaughter - our chicken was squawking loudly and it definitely seemed to affect the other chickens and cows

We found this experience to be quite thought provoking — it definitely made us think hard about our relationship to our food. We are still eating meat — we didn’t find the experience to be as difficult as expected, and we both agreed that we would do it again if need be.

The Turducken: An Awesome Culinary Experience

We had always wanted to try a Turducken. When we decided to host Thanksgiving dinner for about 12 of our friends and we figured this was a great time to try one. Making our own Turducken was going to be a bit too much of an experiment - we didn’t have a full day to dedicate to deboning, nor did we really know what to do. We had heard that you could just order a turducken online, which is what we decided to do. We had Sahnaz, our current offshore assistant, do some research on Turducken vendors. In the meantime, our friend Kirby mentioned that the Golden Gate Meat Company in San Francisco would make turduckens. So we had Sahnaz find out the details about that option as well. This was a case where having local knowledge was really important - a Google search (which is how Sahnaz works) didn’t turn up this company.

End result: It made much more sense to purchase from the Golden Gate Meat Company due to shipping costs - and we had the benefit of getting an organic turducken (we do, after all, live in San Francisco).

The Turducken was a totally awesome experience. This was a 25-pound hunk of meat - no bones. Turns out it was mostly turkey, and we could have used some extra stuffing. Based on Sahnaz’s research, if we had ordered a small Turducken, the ratio of turkey to duck to chicken would have been more event - but we had a large enough group where going large made sense. Cooking the Turducken was incredibly easy - we just stuck it in the oven and it cooked. The only mishap was that the really nice turkey pan we had bought to appease Brooke’s mom’s exacting ways was too big for our oven. So we ended up with a supermarket foil one. As far as we can tell, it made no difference (too bad we can’t return the $100 Sur la Table pan….).

The Christmas Tree

Toby: Brooke mentioned in November that it would be nice to get a real Christmas tree for our apartment at some point in the future. We’ll be away for a couple of weeks, so she wasn’t really sure this was the year to do it, but I decided to surprise her while she was in Seattle for work.

Since I don’t exactly have a car right now (this is another life experiment that we can explore later), I couldn’t just go to a farm and get one. I talked to a couple of friends about whether they thought Christmas trees could be delivered — they both said that they had never heard of such a thing, and also thought it was a bad idea since it’s really necessary to go and pick out a good one yourself. I was unconvinced, I figured that it would be possible to pay someone to bring me a tree even if the farm itself didn’t offer delivery service.

So I had Sahnaz investigate for me. I was actually walking around Boston at the time when I thought of it, so I sent her a one-line email from my Blackberry, essentially “See if you can find a way to get a Christmas tree delivered to my house in San Francisco”. Two days later I got an email with an attached Word document (she likes the MS Office documents), listing a series of ways that I could theoretically get a tree delivered. She had obviously done some Googling and filtered and formatted the results for me. Many of them were shipping options from far away farms, but one was in Marin county and said that they did delivery.

I had Sahnaz call the Marin based farm and she sent me an email explaining that she had called them and been told to call a different place, which she had diligently done and gotten quotes on a few trees, along with delivery charges, and found out that they could indeed deliver while Brooke was away. I called them, choosing to go with the classic Douglas Fir rather than the “fuller and heavier” Grand Fir. The fullest, nicest tree I’ve ever had was delivered a couple of days later at a delivery charge of $10 (I tipped the driver another $10).

Result: Brooke was so stunned when she saw the tree that she almost cried. Now that we’re on vacation in New Zealand we have friends staying in the apartment and they’re also very excited to have a Christmas tree.

B&T: Lessons learned from outsourcing the holidays:

• Once again, we found that a great use for an offshore assistant is making a series of standardized phone calls
• Don’t buy a giant turkey pan if you live in an apartment and haven’t checked the size of your oven
• Don’t be afraid of Turduckens, they’re really easy to cook if you order them pre-made
• If you get a Turducken, make extra stuffing. There may not be enough and people LOVE stuffing
• Getting a tree delivered is not only possible, at $10 delivery + $10 tip, it’s a great deal compared to the hassle of getting one yourself
• Surprising one’s girlfriend with a Christmas tree is a great idea

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