Catching Up with Ben and Allison
Left work a little early to make it out to Ben and Allison’s, to catch up a bit with them. While I’ve had some brief visits with family, I haven’t really had any kind of extended social gathering.
Left work a little early to make it out to Ben and Allison’s, to catch up a bit with them. While I’ve had some brief visits with family, I haven’t really had any kind of extended social gathering.
Spent some time tonight doing a video thing with Chris and Ben. We were going to play some games together, but ended up spending the first part of our call catching up and just talking about the state of our lives.
Earlier in the week, Allison texted a bunch of folks about an idea she had for a website. After some back and forth, the concept turned into a “let’s talk about this in person” get-together for the weekend. And next thing you know, it was a party.
Everyone has moved further away, families and responsibilities have grown, job situations have changed. Coordinating a gathering is harder, but a recurring “come if you can” type of gather seems like it makes that process easier. We’ve only pulled it off once, a few months ago. But tonight, we got together again in Bridgeport (an area I really don’t know at all).
Funny thing about this place – it was very nice, and on the fancier side. Definitely nothing like Shamrock at all. I joked to Chris that had we come here 15 years ago, my reaction likely would have been “I can’t afford this place.”
A few weeks back, we set up a brunch date to hang out with Ben and Allison at their house.
It’s hard to believe that little car has lasted all these years. And it’s a little crazy to me to realize I have photos of it still in the box, from nearly 13 years ago!
Ben ended up arriving about 5 minutes after me, and luckily for us… we had no problems at all with registration. Aside from our name tags being missing. All that rushing made for a really stressful start to the day.
On Saturday, Liz and I headed over to Ben and Allison’s to meet up with many folks gathering to celebrate Ben’s 40th Birthday. It was a great chance to celebrate, and to meet up with many friendly faces I haven’t seen in a super long while.
Headed over to Ben and Allison’s this morning with Liz, to stop in and visit baby Ingrid.
I learned today from Justin S that an old photograph that Ben took of me in my “Free Robot Hugs” costume showed up in his Twitter timeline!
On Saturday, we had plans to hang out with Ben and Allison for a noon lunch. To our surprise, Chris was also over there when we arrived (he had swung by to play some pinball, as two of his machines are stored out in their garage).
For my talk, I answered the “Where Are We” question by looking up all the various Felix Jungs I could find on Facebook. I noted where we all are as I found a total of 82 other Felix Jungs. We’re all over the map, in places like Burma and Costa Rica but there’s about 45 Felix Jungs in Germany.
I’m delighted to announce that I’m participating once more in 20×2 Chicago, a fun event where 20 people are asked to answer the same question in two minutes. Our prompt this time is Where are we?, and to make things even better… Ben is going to be one of the participants as well!
Yesterday morning, Ben was walking around the Product Development team, handing out these mugs to me, Chris and Justin. I forget exactly what prompted this, but I remember Ben making a joke about how he should get these mugs for everyone. A few days ago, apparently… Ben turned a whim into a reality.