I Actually Have Friends!

LOL. Well, it’s not as dire as the title makes it sound, but sometimes I forget there are cool people here in the Bay Area.

A friend of a friend (his name is Anatole; welcome to my blog, Anatole!) works at Adobe here in SJ, and he emailed me a few weeks ago and asked if I wanted to buy Photoshop CS for $40 (employee price.) Um, YES!? Anyway, all this crap in my life happened, and I totally forgot about it. Last night, I was digging through my email inbox, and I found a note from him asking when I wanted to come pick it up. I emailed him back, saying, “Crap, do you still have it?” Fortunately, he did, and he invited me to a pizza party tonight to come pick it up.

I showed up at Chuck E. Cheese (apparently the organizer wanted to relive his childhood!), which is actually like 2 blocks from my house, tonight. I felt a bit like I was crashing the party, but it was soon apparent that random people were showing up from all over the place. Anatole was there with his fiancee, and there were about 15 other people there as well. Most of the circle of friends belongs to a hiking club, and most of them are not originally from California (I know absolutely no one who is actually from the Bay Area here anyway, so I get that.) I had a lot of fun, and I ate a ton of pizza and played a bunch of games. I also saw a guy I used to work with at Cobalt, who was there unrelated to this gathering — unbelievably, he survived the layoffs and is still working at Sun!

Anyway, I emailed Tim, the organizer of this whole shebang, and asked him to put me on his email list for future outings. When I got home, I found an “evite” for an after-Thanksgiving dinner and girls’ night out in my inbox from some people from IBI. Does this mean I actually have (gasp) a social life?! I am shocked! Shocked! But I’m having fun. 😀