San Francisco/Bay Area Meetup August 9

~ JenniferP

From Brooks in the Bay Area:

Hi! I’m arranging a meetup in the San Francisco Bay Area this weekend,
specifically in the peninsula / south bay.

Date: Sunday, August 9th, 2015
Time: 1:00 p.m.
Place: Pioneer Memorial Park (between City Hall and the library) in
Mountain View.

If you’re coming via public transit, the easiest way is probably going
to be to get to Caltrain via whatever makes sense in your area (BART to
Millbrae, Muni to 4th and King in San Francisco, VTA Light Rail in San
Jose, etc.) and then go to the Mountain View Caltrain station. It’s
five blocks from the station to the park; there are busses, but it’s
also a nice walk through downtown with lots of shops.

The park has several benches and nice tiny grass hills for putting
picnic blankets on, and lots of shade trees. I will bring my lunch and
some picnic blankets; feel free to eat before you get there, pack a
lunch if you’d like, stop by the Mountain View Farmers Market (9am –
1pm, at the train station parking lot) and get something from one of the
many vendors that sell tasty ready-to-eat things, or get something from
one of the many downtown restaurants.

The public restrooms at the library are unfortunately closed on Sundays,
but there is a cafe on the same block that is open, and all the downtown
restaurants have restrooms. I believe all the sidewalks in the park are
accessible for wheelchairs and the like.

I’m not sure exactly where in the park I’ll be sitting, but it’s a small
park and I’ll be somewhere visible from the central circle. I’m a
medium-height guy with shoulder-length brown hair, and I have a
patchwork pink/purple/orange/blue/yellow shirt that … well, I’m still
not at all sure what I think of it, but it’s certainly distinctive, so I
shall plan to wear that.

Feel free to email me at brooks dot moses at dpdx dot net if you have
questions.

Have a great time.

11 thoughts on “San Francisco/Bay Area Meetup August 9”

  1. Well, darn. I would love to attend a Bay Area meetup, but I will be out of town this weekend.

    1. Darn, indeed! If you’d like, email me your contact info, and I’ll put you on a list of people to ping when I’m thinking of scheduling another one.

  2. I would also love to attend! But I have plans at that same time this Sunday. Can we do another soon?

    1. I hope so! I’m thinking either this will go well and I’ll want to do it again, or almost nobody will show up and I’ll want to try again on a different day to see if it works better. (Or it will go horribly and be a disaster, but that seems extremely unlikely.)

      As I said to Saturngrl, feel free to email me, and I’ll put you on a list of people to ping when I’m thinking of scheduling another one.

  3. Yay, I was hoping someone would organize a South Bay meetup! Will be there if I can. It’s a lovely little park.

  5. So, update: We did, indeed, have a great time! About a dozen people showed up, and we talked about a great many things including the feels of working on a dissertation in an environment where everyone performs okayness, the ways in which kids books (esp. ones by Roald Dahl) can be fine when one is eight and then deeply disturbing when one is fourteen and notices some more implications, and a brief bit about how the process of organizing the meetup was for me (and for the person who organized the previous Bay Area meetup).

    Since the last of those topics is of broader interest, here are some datapoints from the meetup itself and from that discussion:

    I picked a place that was basically a random park eight blocks from my house, simply because it was convenient. I felt a bit selfish about that, but I think that’s silly — it’s going to be convenient for some people and inconvenient for others, so it might as well be convenient for at least one person who’s definitely coming. And this meant that I already knew the place and could suggest where to meet and such without having to go visit, which was useful.

    Picking a relatively small park meant that people could easily find us without having to roam or worry if they were at the wrong end of the park.

    Someone brought a box of Crayola “Model Magic” modeling clay (which they’d picked up from a “please take” table somewhere). This was an excellent thing, as it gave people something to do with their hands and a way to focus outside of the conversation for a moment without feeling awkward about it, as well as a repeated source of small topics of conversation. I much recommend it!

    We had about a dozen people show up. A couple showed up right about at 1:00, when I got there, and the rest showed up between then and 2:00. A few people left around 3:00, and we dwindled back down to about five people talking until 4:45ish.

    Bay Area public transit is a bit more convenient on Saturdays than Sundays.

    When the sun moves so that the formerly-shady spot becomes sunny and it starts getting unpleasantly warm, ask if people would like to move to a new shady spot. It turns out that most everyone else is also getting unpleasantly warm and just hasn’t gotten to the point of asking yet. (And, yes, this does mean that a couple of people will take the “everyone is getting up anyway” opportunity to say their goodbyes. That’s okay!)

    I still don’t know what I think of this shirt. Except that it’s recognizable.

    I really enjoyed talking with the group of people that came. Thank you all for coming! And for those of you that couldn’t make it this time, I shall definitely be scheduling more of these.

    1. Hi Brooks and many thanks for organizing the meetup! I really appreciate that you did set this up, and yes – I’d be glad to share contact information in a private format.

      Thanks again!

  6. Looks like my larger report fell in the spam trap; I presume it will get freed soon. Anyway, I meant to add: If any of you who were there would like to share your contact info with the other people who were there but don’t want to post it in public, send it to me at the email address in the announcement, and I’ll share it with the other people who contact me. 🙂

  7. Thanks for organizing this Brooks. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to join this time, but will email you to be added to the list of people to ping. Glad you had a fun time!

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