crschmidt | Great Gathering, Awesome People

Yesterday, we celebrated Jess's birthday with a slightly impromptu birthday celebration. ETA: Some pictures are up.

Sunday night, we established that we would go to Full Moon with Lynne for dinner. Full Moon is a lovely restaurant that I've written about before, and ideal for bribing a foodie to babysit for us. After a dinner there, we came back home and left Lynne to the vagaries of parenting Alicia through her homework.

Next stop was Finale, Cambridge. Upon arriving, we met

lulabellafp at the door. Due to two different networking events taking place, we tok a tabe outside on the patio.

For the next 20 minutes, people streamed in a couple at a time: Abby and Dan, who neither Jess nor I had met before in person, were first to join us, followed by

nostrademons,

gandalfgreyhame, Aaron (a coworker of mine from work), and later on,

elements and

camieal.

We had lovely deserts at Finale, and then moved onto drinks at Casa B's, a great bar off Brattle Street. They made me a lovely orangey thing in a martini glass, while Jon enjoyed a Shirley Temple and the other guys at the table drank scotch and tequila. At this point, it was about 11:30, so the people who had things to do in the morning said their goodbyes and dropped off the path with us.

With Aaron, Aerin, Jon, and Jess and I remaining, we moved onto Daedalus, which would have been much nicer had our waiter actually given a shit about us. Here I had a tasty Weissbeer of some sort, though I don't remember the name. (It was from Munich, though, the source of All Good Beer, as we know.)

Next, the plan was to finish out our evening at People's Republik, dropping down to the dive bar level. Sadly, People's Republik has last call at 1am on Monday nights, apparently (Boo!) so we were unable to drink there. Rather than seek out another bar, we went someplace we *knew* there would be alcohol: Home. (Also, the fact that our house no longer has a name kinda sucks. It used to be The Commune, but with that name gone, we need something else.)

Lynne -- still being at the house -- joined us for more booze and watching of Blues Brothers. Aaron and Aerin traded swigs of Banana flavored Tortuga Rum -- still left from the Caymans -- while I mixed myself a strong Fuzzy Navel. Andrew rescued Aerin's car, and took her home after about 45 minutes -- though to be honest, I have relatively little memory of time passing at this point.

The people who showed up were great. Some of them I haven't seen -- for any length of time, at least -- in months, years, or ever. The crowd was a great mix of tech and non-tech, and there were interesting conversations the whole night. A big thank you to all the people who made it out -- especially people like David, who made it all the way from Nashua. (I think he was the farthest, anyway...) It was great to meet new people. Also, our liquor bottles from the basement (we keep the majority of our party liquor down there, since we don't drink much on our own) literally had a thick coat of dust on them, which means one thing and one thing only. We need to get back to having parties.

I'm hoping everyone with us had as much fun as I did, and Jess seemed to. A great way to say Happy Birthday.