Day 3.046: Two-year-old emergency!

After work today I was at a second birthday party.  Not for one of E5N1's little friends, but for a blog.  It was a great party - full of interesting local people - writers and readers, fashionistas and foodies.  It took a little while to get going for me - partly because getting out of work and driving into the city and parking took a while, and partly down to my social insecurities. 

After a while I got going and had lots of nice conversations including with all these people as well as some without their own internet locations.

 The birthday blog was All Over Albany - which in its two years has not only kept up with generating excellent content every day but has developed a really nice little community - as I saw first hand today.   I had a delightful chat with Mary - one of the editors - who asked me how I found them.  Unfortunately I don't remember how or when I discovered AOA for the first time, but I know I was reading and commenting a year and half ago and I know that Exile #2 and I were already advertising it by a couple of weeks later because we mentioned it during this conversation.  More recently, they have been kind enough to link to some of my posts in their weekly round up of local blogs.

I spoke to several people who claimed to be there because they were promised cupcakes.  They were present as you can see and were very good indeed.

This is AOA Mary doing her little birthday speech.

And there was very nice non-cake food too!

As I was leaving I remembered that Albany is in the middle of a 'snow emergency' which means that parking is only allowed on one side of the street (odd or even numbered) at certain times of the day. I hadn't given it a moment's thought when I parked. I was relieved to find the car where I left it and un-ticketed. I was even more relieved when I saw the snow plows out as I drove round the block and yet more relieved when I saw cars being towed a little further along.

So, thanks to AOA for a great party and to Albany's snow clearance teams for not turning the snow emergency into...well...an emergency (for me).