Photos
Dinner after the BNI Conference
Esystems spent about two weeks preparing in full for the Business Networking International (BNI) Conference here in Indianapolis. It was a solid turnout, and the speakers were great. Five in total, the speakers topics ranged from spotting personality types to introverts vs. extroverts and the advantages in networking for an introvert.
It was an awakening for me. I had worked a 16.5 hour day prior to the event, and got five hours of sleep. So I felt a little off my game for my first major networking event since I stopped regularly networking just over a year ago when I got my job at Esystems.
After the conference we went up to the Blue Lake Lagoon restaurant up on the northside of the city. We met three other people there, seated from left to right in this photo; Glenn Antoine, Jill Bode from Designed Write Public Relations firm, Chris Antoine, Dawn Lyons (Keynote speaker for the event), and Hazel Walker who runs the Indiana extension of BNI.
It was a fun night, and those three women are a riot. Hazel and Jill are hilarious, and Dawn is very intelligent. She spoke about personality types at the conference, using broad terms to label the different types into categories of gemstones, etc. from pearl to ruby. Regardless of whether her content was groundbreaking or not, She is a great speaker. We met her the night before at a BNI networking prelim meet and greet at the Life Center on Washington. She is entertaining and captivating, and I didn’t once find myself having a hard time understanding what her points were.
Dinner at Christine’s with David
David Wray stopped by at Christine’s on Tuesday night. He is flying out to Orlando on Wednesday, and thought this would be a good time to get together.
We had a great dinner of mexican food and ice cream, and then watched a lot of funny comedy central cartoons until we couldn’t stay awake anymore. From what I understand, Christine said that after we left she and David looked at some photos for quite awhile into the morning. Hard to believe that we met him just four months ago, because he has become a good friend really quick.
Adobe vs. Macromedia Stutz Building Indianapolis
Here are some more photos from this past Thursday night. The top two are the inside restaurant at Fountain Square, and then a building outside in the surrounding area.
The third photo is Print Resources in the Stutz Gallery downstairs where the AIGA gathering was held. Then the bottom two, are kind of unconnected. But right across the hallway from the stairwell we take to the office, they knocked out two walls, and are going to remove what we found out is an old “bailer” to make a new, small, car gallery area like there is on the second floor. We always see Stutz vehicles in this general area, and well as mercedes and other nice vehicles, and since this is kind of one of those spots you see when you first walk in, I think it is a cool idea.
It is just weird to think about them knocking out whole structure walls in the middle of the building, and that they are over a hundred years old.
Adobe Creative Suite Tour at Fountain Square Theater
Like I said, Fountain Square is a great old historical building with Duck Pin bowling upstairs, and downstairs had an old time cafe with all the old murals, illustrations, and Coke / Pepsi signs on the walls. Great place for some photography because you feel like you have stepped back in time.
Valentines Day
I got Sarah some Godiva chocolate strawberries tonight for the commercial holiday. She has been wanting them since our wedding, so I figured it would be a nice surprise to indulge her.
Mardi Gras themed get together with Buissons
John Buisson emailed me about three weeks ago about getting together for Mardi Gras, and they promised us a King Cake with a little baby in it. I said, “John I am not sure if that is an invitation, or a cry for help, but I am there, baby cake away!”
We had a hard time working out a weekend because of our rash of popularity for a couple of weekends now. But we did work it out only four days after Fat Tuesday.
We played Scene It as I mentioned and just talked about stuff.
Visit David Wray in Cincinnati
Christine and David arranged this trip, which we were more than happy to be invited on, to visit him and take a tour of some things of interest in Cincinnati. For me, a trip to any big city never needs an excuse.
We met David just at the city and then we immediately went to lunch. On the way we saw the interesting and extremely humorous sign that you see in the last photo, so we knew it was going to be a fun day.
At lunch we played geeky Marvel trivia, which I stunk at, no surprise. I get whooped all the time at Simpson’s trivia by Christine’s daughters. From lunch we then traveled downtown to go to a really sweet Toy Mall.
This mall is a consignment store where they are just booths of toys. I found one with transformers that I stared at for just about the whole time I was there. But was so cool to see everything from old He-man toys to Muscle men and some things that I used to have. It brought back some great childhood memories. I especially couldn’t allow myself to buy back any of that stuff at such a price now, but I almost did add a new Dinobot to my collection.
Then we hopped across the street to a great comic book store. We picked up some things there for…
Christine’ birthday! We were trying to plot things to do for her, but then this weekend trip happened on her birthday, Jan. 29th, so we decided to just do this instead. And some comic book graphic novels of course.
We went with David to go meet Kevin, who was also at the Ohio Comic Con. He is a great framer and he set Christine up with a frame for one of her pieces for a great price. Then we headed off to dinner.
David is more type A then Christine and me combined. He actually called the chamber of commerce in Greensburg IN, where we went to dinner, to find out the best place to eat. What a novel idea. And it turned out great.
We went to this Mexican restaurant that had amazingly low prices for their food, great big plates, and great service. We had a ton of fun, and I laughed myself to tears at one point in the night. Kevin can be a pretty funny guy. We continued with a few more birthday present for Christine, as you see with the Sponge Bob bag above, which she loved too. David got her the Marvel trivia game.
We finished the night out messing around, looking at toys, in Walmart. There were some derelict kids in there, on dates, like it was the place to hang out. It probably was all they had to do in this little bumpkin town. We met up there for dinner because it was half way btw. Indy and Cincinnati.
Fun night. We made plans for this summer and going to Charlotte. But sooner than that David comes to Indy at the end of Feb. to fly out to Florida for the Orlando Comic Con.
Oh, and that photo of me. I swear, it wasn’t my idea. But there was this cactus see, and it had an interesting shape to it. All I needed was a little nudge.
