Last weekend was the belated birthday party for my oldest niece. I drove down Saturday morning, they rode with my sister and the girls back northwards to pick up one of their friends for the party and a sleep over.
The party was spy themed – at my niece’s request – and my sister had an adventure planned. We started off by getting our passports, picking our spy names, and getting fingerprinted. Then going through a “laser avoidance challenge” of red yard strung across a hallway.
Naturally, I was all-in and had a disguise ready to go – a fake black beard, dark sunglasses, and my trusty fedora.
After we were officially spies, we found out that the party favors had been stolen – but there were clues to help find them. The kids eagerly raced around the house, figuring out the puzzles and ciphers left and right. The coolest part was when they got into the right “mode” and were thinking about not just how to solve the cipher – but how to solve the larger puzzle. It was neat also when one of them would get a burst of inspiration and lead the rest of the kids towards the solution – with very little guidance from the adults.
The final puzzle had a locked bag with the party favors in it. The clue was “In the end, the littlest one is the key,” My younger niece pulled out her necklace with a key on it and said – right on cue – “Maybe this will help,”
She was in on it and adorable.
From there it was pizza and cupcakes – and a late night for everyone involved.
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One evening this past week was a get together for Current and Former UA Employees. It was something that was started when the computer center was decimated by staffing cuts. So, while this event was called something pretty general, it was pretty much a nerd fest.
And I can nerd along with the best of them, but somehow the conversation drifted – as it does – to server configuration and large scale software deployment using multi layers of scripting.
Naturally.
I listened along, then said to the person sitting next to me, “I think this is how I sound when I talk to my mom,”
It was good to get caught up a little and the buffalo chicken sandwich was a amazing, but I eventually had to call it a night.