My Alltel friends that I reunited with last year sometimes have trouble committing to meet ups, so its been about a year since the last one and the latest one I tried to schedule but some forgot and were out of the country, so its been about a year since the last time we all saw each other. A few more gray hairs and another year closer to retirement, we met at a nice restaurant. I had to leave a little early since Jaime was making some steaks for dinner.
I guess Frank couldn’t make it.
Opening day for the Ren Festival and we decided to go. We thought it would be nuts like it normally is, but surprisingly the traffic was low on our way in and we had a really great day.
We got there about 30-45 minutes before our friends showed up, and got to see all the things! Once our friends got there, we saw some shows, bought some stuff, ate some turkey, and just had a great time wandering. We of course ran into Loki and had to say hi to him. Always good to see Twig. I had to tell her how she doesn’t age and that my little boy who took photos with her many years ago is all grown up now, while she is still so young.
Our first cosplay of the year and we did our Cinderella bit. It was fun, we had a lot of photos of us done, and we entered the competition… and one! So that’s pretty awesome. We really thought our friend Amberlyn was going to win because she handmade everything and also had her cute kids with her… so when we won, we were just amazed!
Afterwards, we all went out to eat for Jonathan and Allysen’s birthday.
2024 was a really good year for us. We did quite a few noteworthy things.
the End of the Year meeting was kind of nerdy and fun! We watched some Dr Horrible and we also got our calendars for 2025 all synced up.
For actual Christmas, our fourth and final Christmas, Jaime’s family came over, minus dad. We had a great time with food and presents! Had a few calls with family too!
We had our friends come over for a friends’ Christmas with white elephant. It was pretty fun to have everyone over and we also had a friend from long ago come over, Delia! That was pretty cool to just all get together and have a good time. Some of the gifts were awesome, some were pretty silly!
Damien is going to be skipping Christmas with us during the traditional time, so that he can spend this Christmas with his girlfriend in Illinois. So we had some time with them both, had dinner then came over to our house for presents.
We went to the Phoenix Symphony next to the Phoenix Convention Center with our friends to see the Nutcracker. We saw it at the Orpheum last year, and it was cute, but this one has a live Symphony! It was really cool! We also got to see one of our Ukulele friends and her mom!
We went on our early December trip to Michigan to celebrate early Christmas with our family. This is our first Christmas of the year! We have several planned!
It was about 14°F when we got there, a little cold! We mostly stayed indoors.
My brother got us matching tattoos for Christmas!
We sure appreciated the love and hospitality that our Michigan family gives us.
My homies and I went to the Cybersecurity Summit and then went over to see Damien at his work. It was a great day! The crew came over for a bit so that I could finally introduce Jaime to them.
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