I had the opportunity to visit my sister this past weekend. Worlds collided, and I was able to attend a SQL Saturday event in Austin Texas, which is where she lives. I brought Christy with me and we flew out on a Friday midday, arriving in Texas around 6pm. There was a speaker dinner for the event at 6pm that we attended. By we, I mean myself, Christy along with Nisa and her 3 kids, whom came to pick us up at the airport, braving traffic on a Friday night to retrieve us. The kids loved seeing the planes, I fear more than seeing us. But we made them fall in love with us by the end of the trip. After they met us at the airport, we went into downtown, near the college campus, mere blocks from where the event was scheduled to occur, to a BBQ joint and had us some dinner. The host of the speaker dinner were nice enough to allow me to bring all my visitors along.
I always love these events and especially the networking that goes on. There is something exciting about walking into a room of strangers and striking up a conversation with them. Even more exciting to keep it going, changing, evolving. What is fascinating to me is the nervousness I feel that is wrapped with a confidence that allows me to push the conversation. Others struggle, while yet others seem to perform this task easily. I fall somewhere in that gap, more on the less struggle side. Not that it's easy, but it just happens. My good wife will accompany while I perform this feat, even though she may or may not enjoy it. But I was fascinated that my sister would simply slip into a conversation with a bunch of SQL geeks as if she lived in that world already. It must be a genetic thing to be able to join in a conversation, easily, efficiently, and flow with whatever is occurring already, organically. I was impressed.
After the dinner, we went back to Nisa's home and simply hung out with the family and talked, chatted, played, goofed, and so on. Until way too late. Way too late. When we finally got to bed, it was after 2am. This normally wouldn't be a problem, except that I had a 7am start to the day, with a 30 minute commute, and little idea how to get from point A to point B.
The morning came way too quickly. As it usually does. But this morning, it was way too quick. Once awake and showered, I left the house I barely had seen the night before, crawled into a vehicle I wasn't sure had a color or not, and drove north, to an area I had seen only 12 hours previously. Along the way I decided to take a scenic route, adding 15 minutes onto my commute and a bit of back tracking. Once on the correct path, I was able to find the event location and park the car and leave it unlocked. Doh. I didn't realize this until the end of the day as I returned to the vehicle (remember I wasn't sure what color the car was? that made finding it in the parking lot quite fun. I shoulda paid more attention to it). The SQL Saturday event was great. I had volunteered to help out with sessions and as luck would have it, I had one of the first sessions. I attended a session each hour and learned quite a bit. At lunch time I practiced a technique I later blogged about on my professional blog for talking to strangers at events. At 2pm it was time for my session. There were 20+ people in my session that created a great interactive event that let us all learn from each other, with me simply directing the conversation. Once completed, and depleted of energy, I struggled thru the next sessions. Its always so draining to perform thusly, but I wouldn't give it up, its energizing as well as depleting.
When the event was completed, I reluctantly left my cohorts and wondered a parking lot until I was able to locate Brett's vehicle, and returned south to where this house was that I forgot to look at when I left closely. 98% of the return trip was completely controlled and directed well. Once I reached their neighborhood though, I realized that I wasn't quite sure how to get to their home or even once there, which one was theirs. It happened, all by myself I was able to find it, ultimately. But not quickly. Once back at their home, only the boys were left, as the girls had all left to go shopping for cowgirl boots. I rested a bit, and even fell asleep (remember the 4 hours of sleep the prior night, yeah). As soon as I did fall asleep though, the girls returned, awaking me to their excitement and stories. Soon, we all took off, with a friend of Christy's that happened to lives nearby, to dinner. A great little TexMex food locale called Chuy's was our watering hole for the night. All 10 of us talked, played, ate, and enjoyed each others company.
The next day found us sleeping in, hanging out, watching LDS conference, hanging out, jumping on the trampoline, killing flies, getting tickled, wrestling, and simply enjoying each others company. We had a flight out of Austin to Salt Lake City at 7pm, which allowed us a large portion of the day to simply 'be' together. We took advantage of it. We forged bonds and rekindled friendships. Check out our photos over on Facebook that we took of the kids and us, mainly at the end of the last day, as we traveled back to the airport.
All in all it was a lot more fun than I thought it would be. That's not to say that I was expecting a disaster or an awful time. Its just that you can look forward to something, make plans, and when it actually happens, it happens better than you could have planned. That's what happened. Fun was had. I learned tons and shared tons of my passion with SQL Server. We had a great weekend.
