Whew. A New Project

I read an article today about a guy, Matt Kulesza, who decided he wanted to meet each of his facebook friends.  He's in Australia and has 1,088 friends so I'm not sure if he's going to make his goal of meeting everyone in 3 years, but I decided that sounded like a fun project.  I mentioned it and immediately had invitations from four people to get together for coffee.

So I designed a blog called Coffee F2F to report the experience and a photo of me with my FB friend, and already have two coffee dates set up for next week.   (Char and I are going to have our coffee date in Paris!)  I have no goals for completion.  I have 1,070 FB friends, scattered all over the place, so I can't possibly meet all (or even most) of them, but I'm willing to travel, if possible, from time to time.  There are several, for example in So. California that I could meet when we go to visit Santa Barbara. 

Should be easy to get several done quickly, since I have so many family FB friends!!  

I actually did the first F2F today, though it was kind of cheating, since a lunch date had been set up yesterday before I even thought of this idea. Jeri and Phil (the other Jeri and Phil) were in the area and asked about lunch.  I checked with Char and Mike, who were also free and Char checked with Rich and Pat, who weren't.

So the six of us met at Fentons Creamery in the old Nut Tree mall and had a wonderful time.  How can you not like a restaurant that offers more than one kind of crab sandwich?

(Made with Alaska snow crab)

I had Char take a picture of Jeri and me to start the new blog.

Fentons is famous for its ice cream.  In fact, it's in the top 10 ice creameries in the U.S., along with J.P.Licks, that we visited when we were with Jeri and Phil.  (When Char and Mike's son, Cam, got married, they had their reception at Fentons in Oakland.)  But by the time we finished our lunch, none of us had any room for ice cream of any kind.  I even brought half of my sandwich home for dinner.

The last time I was in Fenton's was for lunch with Char several months ago.  It was mid-week then and we were about the only people in the place.   Definitely not so today.  I think there was a waiting line outside and it was impossible to have a quiet conversation over all the noise, but we managed to get caught upon everyone's comings and goings.  And then, of course, before we left, we had to take group pictures.

Char, Phil, Walt, Jeri, Mike

We said our last goodbyes, again told Mike and Char we'd see them in Paris, and then headed off to our respective final destinations.

Walt and I got home in time to take brief naps before going to review Of Mice and Men tonight.

Before we left for Fentons, we discovered that if our house were burning down, none of our neighbors would notice.  I made cinnamon rolls this morning and butter dripped on the floor of the oven.  I recently made something else that had dripped too and was caked on the bottom of the oven. So after I got the rolls out of the oven, I decided to use the auto clean.  Within minutes it started burning off the stuff on the floor of the oven. Smoke was pouring out the top of the oven, and both smoke detectors (upstairs and downstairs) went off.  We opened all the windows and set up a fan to blow the smoke out but it was a good 15 minutes of smoke and detectors (neither detector would respond to the "off" button after setting it a couple of times) before things calmed down.  There wasn't even an inquiry from our neighbors.

I somehow feel less safe in this neighborhood now!