SQL Saturday #160 – Kalamazoo

I hadn’t seen this at night before, and thought it looked cool – even if it DID mean we were heading through later than we expected.

OK… better late than never!  A couple weeks ago, we road-tripped to Kalamazoo, MI for a SQL Saturday. We ended up only leaving about an hour later than we planned, but with LOTS of construction through most of WI, and hitting Friday afternoon rush hour in Chicago, we ended up getting into town MUCH later than we expected! We were bummed, because we had been looking forward to hanging out with a couple friends of ours that live an hour north of K’zoo. Their baby was about to turn 1, and we hadn’t gotten to meet her yet. Since it would have been after 10 pm when we got to their house, we decided to wait until the next day to see them. We stopped at the speaker dinner at Tim Ford‘s house for a brief time, then headed to the hotel to get a decent night’s sleep.

Saturday morning, we were up bright and early. We had breakfast at the hotel, then headed over to Kalamazoo Valley Community College to set up the Community Zone (PASS table) at SQL Saturday. I spent most of the day helping Jason Strate (@StrateSQL|blog) at the Community Zone (CZ).

Aside:  Sometimes people ask me what I do when I’m at the CZ. I’m not a SQL person, so what could I possibly have to offer? Well, I have been to a lot of SQL Saturdays (11 at last count), I have been officially on the planning committee of one in MN, and unofficially helped behind the scenes at another in MN. I am also working with a great team to help plan the first SQL Saturday in Fargo, ND next year. I attended last year’s PASS Summit, where I volunteered as an ambassador and helped at one of the booths in the vendor hall (I can’t believe I never blogged about this). I am on the First Timers Committee for this year’s PASS Summit, and I’m helping with a few other things there too. I have also had the privilege of working at the CZ with PASS Community Evengelist, Karla Landrum (@karlakay22|blog) in Atlanta, and Jason in Colorado Springs. I apparently have gotten so comfortable talking to people about local user groups and PASS sponsored events, that more than one person at the MN SQL Saturday asked me if I worked for PASS. HAHAHA! My answer has become, “Yes, yes I do (just not for pay).” I tell them my side job is as a professional PASS volunteer.

One of the awesome things about hanging out at the Community Zone all day was being visited by so many awesome people! Some of our friends hung out the majority of the day with us. I may or may not have been involved in a prank that was played on Jason. It involved some snarky remarks on his Speaker Eval sheets…

One of the times I was not at the table, was when I went into the Women in Technology panel discussion. I will write a separate post about that so it doesn’t get too long.

The day overall was great. I can’t say there was any one favorite thing about the day. Everything seemed to run smooth, despite a few hiccups the week before that almost gave organizer Josh Fennessy (@joshuafennesy) a heart attack. It was great to see so many of our friends; even the SQLUnicorn made an appearance! The unicorn tried to eat the left over lettuce from the taco bar, but other than that, he was fairly tame…

The after party was at the Kalamazoo Beer Exchange. We had our friends Greg and Tasha meet us there for dinner. Unfortunately, with a one year old, we didn’t get to spend as much time as we’d have liked with them, but it was great to see them while it lasted! After dinner, we went to Kinko’s to pick up the game Cards Against Humanity that we had printed. We brought it back over to Tim’s house for a crazy good time! If you don’t know what that game is, it’s a very inappropriate card game that resembles Apples to Apples. We laughed so hard, I’m surprised I didn’t pee my pants! My abs did hurt from all the laughing for about 2 days though.

Once again, another SQL Saturday in the books. Once again, we had a great time!

Tammy’s round up