Search Results for: Work from Home Diary

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Work from Home Diary 3: Upcoming Travel Plans (Cancel Now or Wait it Out?)

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Good afternoon everyone, happy Friday.  I started sharing my thoughts regarding working from home in a series of Work from Home Diary posts.  Feel free to share your work from home feelings in the comments section below.  For today’s update, I wanted to discuss upcoming travel plans and my plans for those trips.  As of today, I have 4 trips on the books.  These trips are not set in stone and could be cancelled by myself or the airlines before departure depending upon how things are going in the world.  We are taking things slowly and focusing on 1 day at a time.

Trip 1 – Mother’s Day Weekend

My next trip is in mid-May for Mother’s Day Weekend.  I was planning on flying down from San Francisco (SFO) to Orange County (SNA) to visit my parents and grandparents.  I have flown down for Mother’s Day weekend for the last few years and enjoy seeing my family.  This trip was booked with Citi Thank You Points for basic economy travel on Alaska Airlines.  If the situation in California remains the same (all Californias are told to stay home to prevent the spread of coronavirus), I will probably cancel my trip and hold onto travel funds for a future trip.

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Work from Home Diary 2: Afternoon Walks & Restaurant Gift Cards

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Good morning everyone, happy Friday.  I started sharing my thoughts regarding working from home in a series of Work from Home Diary posts.  Feel free to share your work from home feelings in the comments section below.  For today’s update, I will share what it’s been like to work from home this week.  As I mentioned yesterday, this is Laura’s spring break week.  Instead of spending time driving around Ireland or suntanning in Kauai, we are both spending most of our time inside our home.  My work from home set up is upstairs in our guest room / home office and Laura’s work from home set up is downstairs on our den table.  It’s nice that we have our own spaces to work (and listen to music or watch TV).

As an assistant principal, Laura is used to waking up early and leaving early for work.  Now that we are both working from home, we can sleep in a little later, eat breakfast together, and watch morning news before starting our work.  I’m used to eating lunch around 11:30-12pm, so we both take a break, make lunch (or reheat leftovers) and relax for a few minutes.  In the early afternoon, if the weather is nice/decent, we try to go for a 2-3 mile walk around our city to stretch our legs and talk about work and life.  There are not many people outside, but we do see a few others walking and riding bikes.

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Work from Home Diary 1: Cancelling My Ireland & Kauai Trips

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Good morning everyone, I hope your week is going well.  These are very uncertain times and I have difficulty finding motivation to write about anything travel related.  Therefore, I decided to share my feelings in a series of Work from Home Diary posts.  Feel free to share your work from home feelings in the comments section below.

First of all, I am very fortunate that I work for a company where we have the ability to work from home.  My heart goes out to everyone affected in the retail industry, travel/hospitality industry, restaurant/bar industry and many other industries that are affected by the coronavirus.

Last week, my company gave us the option to work from home or go into the office. I decided to work from home the entire week.  I’m used to working from home a few days a week, but working from home 5 days in a row takes a toll (both mentally and physically).  In my next diary post, I will share how I am doing in week 2.

Laura and I were supposed to fly to Ireland last Friday (March 13) for a week for her spring break (she is an assistant principal).  On Wednesday evening (March 11), the Europe travel ban was announced and we decided to cancel our Ireland trip.  I cancelled our Aer Lingus flights booked with British Airways Avios, hotel awards booked at Hyatt and Radisson Blu, Hertz rental car, and a few Expedia activities.  Canceling everything online only took a few minutes and thankfully everything resulted in a full refund, with the exception of the $55 cancellation fees per person charged by British Airways (I called to see if they could be waived, but it was not possible).

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Travel with Grant Turns 10 Years Old + 10 x $10 Amazon Gift Card Giveaway

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Good afternoon everyone, I hope your week is going well.  Travel with Grant just turned 10 years old!  Yup, I started this blog on May 1, 2013 and I can’t believe I’ve had a travel blog for 10 years (I really can’t believe I have done anything for 10 years, let alone blogging). To celebrate this special occasion, I wanted to give away 10 x $10 Amazon Gift Cards to my readers.

To enter the giveaway…

Leave a comment on this post by 11:59pm PT on May 3 telling me about your favorite article / topic covered on Travel with Grant.  I will select 10 winners by Friday, May 5 and email them a $10 Amazon Gift Card.

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Google Analytics: What Blog Posts Are People Reading? (Year to Date vs. Last 2 Weeks)

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Good morning everyone, I hope your week is going well.  I just read Frequent Miler’s post this morning (How Frequent Miler (the business) will survive COVID-19) and thought it would be interesting to see what Travel with Grant blog posts people read year to date (January 1 – March 31) vs. what blog posts people read during the last 2 weeks (March 18 – March 31).  I listed the top 10 posts for each period of time and their corresponding pageviews during that time.  Red text represents blog posts on both lists.  At the end of this post, I will also provide some analysis of the results below.