I got up later than expected on Saturday morning after a meaningful and hilarious Friday night. My plans changed at the last minute on Friday night and I wound up heading to Evanston for Shabbat dinner with my new friend Richard of the Israeli Wine Blog. Richard’s wife and I have a lot in common, but with three awesome kids running around, we didn’t get to talk much. My friend Micah (from ROI120 2008) and his colleague Adam, both from Digital Criterion, also came along and we all enjoyed a great shabbat dinner.
After dinner, we headed back into town and went to a couple bars-Cocktail and Roscoe’s. Not my usual scene, but Micah and Adam kept me laughing and I tried to stay out of the flow of traffic.
All of this lead to sleeping in on Saturday morning and missing the kick-off of Social Dev Camp Chicago by a few hours. I caught a couple sessions and chatted with a few people. For me the hallway conversations were more important than the sessions. That had more to do with my strange timing than the quality of the sessions. I probably should have plopped myself in the technical track all day and gotten schooled, but that didn’t happen.
I’ll go ahead and celebrate the rules of Open Space Technology. The people who were there were the right people and the conversations that you had were the right conversations. Of course, if I accept that, then I also have to be okay with having a certain local technology character yell at me and others. Harrumph.
After I left Social Dev Camp Chicago, I hopped back on the Green Line and headed to Wicker Park for DaveCago 3. It was my first DaveCago and the first time I’ve meet Dave from Blogography. We all met up at Piece for pizza and beer, then headed to The Voilet Hour for a cocktail and then to Salud for Tequila based awesome over ice.
In no particular order, I got to meet Gary, Kapgar and his lovely wife, Lynne and Kosh, Mocha Momma, Run Jen Run, RW and Mrs. RW, Radioactive Tori who brought us all brownies, and I’m certain that I’m missing a link or three… searching google and looking for the names I missed.
It was great to meet all these folks in person and finally meet Dave. I didn’t realize it, but Dave’s been reading me for as long (if not longer) than I’ve been reading him. I assume that people don’t read my blog, so to learn that a blogger I hold in such high blogging regard reads me… well, I was tickled. I almost s
aid, “Squeee!”
Suzanne, Jen and I shared a cab back to the north side from the wilds of Wicker Park. Our cabbie had us in stiches, telling us he knew something was going on because we all had name tags on. After Jen got out of the cab, my cabbie turned up Broadway and almost immediately got pulled over.
By the cops.
Half a dozen blocks away from my house and I’m sitting in the back of a car with blue flashing lights behind me, waiting to see if the cops are going to issue my cabbie a citation. Indeed, he got a ticket for failure to use a turn signal. He said, “If I’m gonna get a ticket, make it count, not for this mundane shit.”
I thought about getting out of the cab and walking home. Then I thought about how not good it would be if I got shot by the police for getting out of a car that had been pulled over. I decided that I’d behave instead of risking things. Somebody had a gun and a bullet proof vest and, for the record, it wasn’t me.
A few minutes of blue-flashing lights later, the cabbie had his citation and had debated the definition of “several days” with the cop. Um… Cabbie? How about not debating with the cops over semantics, eh? Eh?
When I got home, I had another one of Tori’s amazing brownies and crashed. I dreamed of bloggers, presentations and brownies. Seriously people, these brownies… b r o w n i e s . . .
(and Robin… I missed Robin. D’oh!)
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