Monday, July 9, 2012

Monday, Monday...

The men have returned for good. DH will be back to work today and Sonshine turns into Marching Band Boy tomorrow morning.

The three/four week break was great. I had fun. I met online fan friends face-to-face. I caught up with other fan friends. I cleaned my house really well. I finished some small projects.

I didn't lose any more weight though I exercised like crazy the first two weeks. I wrote and revised little last week--though I did get a bunch done this weekend. I didn't finish some of my small household projects.

Now it's time to look forward, get back to work, both day job and writing wise, and set & meet some new goals.

A week or so ago I mentioned my intention to be more interactive with my family. I'm terrible about staying in contact and this is my family--*my family*. I get so involved in everything going on in my life right here in North Texas that I forget about them because they're not right here. And it's really sad. Granted, they could contact me too. But someone has to go first right? And that someone is going to be me.

So one of my new goals is to be in contact with various members of my family on a semi-weekly basis. So in every two-week period, I pledge to be in contact with every member of my family. That's about seven people/families: my mother, my grandmother, my step-mother, my two brothers (individually), and my two sisters (also individually). (Time to add a page to my spreadsheet.)

This is so not what I expected to write about today, but sometimes these things just happen. Though I really do know how I got here. :)

Last weekend, as you may recall, I invited four women I'd only known online to my house for the first US BBC Robin Hood fan meetup (hence all the cleaning and projects). The weekend was a blast and now I'm going to share pics. Not of the ladies because I don't have permission to put their lovely faces on the 'Net, but some other things, like:

This is the lovely gift they all chipped in to get me for opening my home to them:



It's just a black lacquer finish box with a tile (I guess) with the Outlaws mark on it. It was a surprise and very thoughtful of them.

These are things I bought/made for them, because no fan meetup is complete without fandom related goodies.



So we have a travel mug with a unique insert--we each liked a different character, so there's a different character image in each one; an inexpensive photo album with a picture of Robin's gang in the front photo insert and inside is a card with the meetup info. Then we can all print of pictures from the weekend to put in there and preserve our memories, there's a small squirrel (an inside joke from the show); a button that says "jigger off" (a show-related expression); and an outlaw tag (made by my own DD).

The ladies were most pleased with their goodies, too.

And this last picture is of my Robin Hood action figure standing next to a bottle of Huntingdon wine--in several versions of the legend, Robin is considered the Earl of Huntingdon, so...


And there you have it!

Have any of you met new friends online and then subsequently met them in person? What was the common event, hobby, or thing that brought you together?

4 comments:

Regina Richards said...

I've met friends online, but never subsequently in person. Most of the friends I've made online have travel budgets similar to my own - in other words puny - and live too far away to make meeting up doable.

Glad you had a great break, Jen. And I think the pledge to keep up with family is a terrific one. My #2 brother made a similar pledge more than a year ago. He's not a big talker and is a many birds with one stone type, so what he does is hold a text meeting with the whole family every Wednesday night like clockwork. He suggests a topic (most interesting thing you did this week, your most boring moment this week, brag on the kids or grandkids, your best memory of a camping trip, etc.) and we all text in and joke around for a few minutes. Its nice.

Jen FitzGerald said...

Great idea, Regina! Thanks for sharing that. I may have to do that via e-mail since not all parties have reliable cell phones. And I will have to write letters to my grandmother in Denmark. She's not on email.

Regina Richards said...

Having a grandmother in Denmark must be wonderful and difficult at once. I'm guessing visiting Denmark to see her would be wonderful. Not being able to do so as often as you would like would be the difficult part.

Char Newcomb said...

I had so much fun at our RH meet-up. It definitely rivals the many Star Wars cons I've been to. My SW online friends began an annual meet up back in 1996 after getting to know each other in AOL chat rooms & IRC. We are going strong 17 years later & keep in touch via email, Facebook, LiveJournal and more. Only a few our group are fanfic writers; we've had a couple of folks publish original fic. We've been through births, illness, and many sad times over the years and it's brought me so many good memories. I'm hoping our RH group goes on and on and on...