TGIF

Brittn & Lindsay
Originally uploaded by cheryl_lynn425.

Friday was an excellent day. Work went pretty well.

After work I went with our VP of Development & Brand (ie my boss's boss), Kathleen, to the United Way Day of Caring celebration at La Zona Rosa. This was exciting for a lot of reasons.

1) La Zona Rosa is sung about in a Little Texas song, "Amy's Back in Austin" that I've been singing for years. Now I've been. Cool.
2) Kathleen invited me to go with her and it was some great bonding with the boss lady time. We also discussed my desire to work in fundraising and how she can help make that happen a little. Super cool.
3) Free drinks!
4) Great networking. Met Jeff from TateAustin, an awesome PR firm in town that I harrassed for a job for months. No dice but turns out Jeff is friends with Avery, one of the gals at the GS office b/c Avery's hubby works at TateAustin. Very good to know.
5) Got me downtown for the next set of adventures.

Around 6 I meandered off to Cru, a wine bar at Second and Colorado to meet the old FH gang to celebrate Lindsay's new gig at FH as a full time staffer. Yay Lindsay! I also ran into Rick, Ross's best bud, on the walk over so stopped to have a chat with him. I like Rick. Good guy. We had a nice little chat, just catching up on life.

Drinks with the folks at Cru. Got to see Katie, Eric and Jodi, some of my favs from my time there. All in all not so bad.

Ross picked me up, we grabbed a bite to eat at his place and I got to see Nikki. The Alfred Angelo she works at was right near the Chili's we ended up going to. Very good to see her, even for just a moment.

After that, yes there's more!, we went downtown with Ryan and Suzanna who are among my favorite of Ross's friends. Really I suppose there aren't any I don't like but Ryan, Suzanna and Rick are among the best of the gang. Any day where we hang out with all three of them is a good day.

Ross has the friends here that I had in Boston, different than my friends here. Like my BU friends, his friends are all friends with each other. They all hang out together but it's not just one person that connects them. I love my Austin friends but I don't have that "group" per se. That's really what AJ, Joe, Val, Kristin, Ben, Bob and Anna were for me - my group. So I enjoy going out with Ross's friends because its a very comfortable group. They are all laid back and there's very little of that meeting for the first time type conversation. Even I have hung out with them enough now to be beyond that. It's swell.