NERDS!

Saturday night Gwynyth spent the night at a friend's house and Shana and I attended the annual IS Social for work at a hotel downtown.
I had no idea there were so many people in IS here. I'm also not entirely sure what "IS" stands for, though I suspect it is "Information Services".
Whatever IS is, the theme was "A Cosmic Event" and the hotel ballroom was filled with hundreds of nerds -- Quite a few of them dressed in science fiction costumes.
Shana and I participated. Though I'm pretty sure I mentioned it prior to our arrival, Shana seemed surprised when we showed up and she noticed that business casual was an option.
Our Firefly costumes probably need a couple of extra weeks of prep, so we were unable to put that together in time. Fortunately, it isn't like we don't have other science fiction costumes.
My team was lightly represented, so we didn't actually win the costume competition which was judged solely based on crowd noise. The cash bar numbed the pain of loss nicely. An "R2-D2", at $5.25, is made of Diet Coke and one of those adorable mini bottles of rum.
There were casino tables set up and fake cash for betting, though we didn't actually make use of any of that.
I think the most popular costume choice of the evening was a reflection of our uncertain financial times. A red shirt and black pants is not only inexpensive, it works well with a sign on the back reading "expendable".
Depressing? A bit.
But my manager had an ample supply of liquor in his room so my concern level was pretty offensively low.
"You wanna play with my lightsaber?" was the question of the evening, though it generally is at most social gatherings involving co-workers.
I've made a game of avoiding this kind of event for about the past ten years. However, there hasn't been a time in the past decade when the dress code specifically allowed for Jedi robes.
Most awesomely, ours was not the only gathering at that hotel on Saturday night.
While a few hundred nerds were wearing glowing antennae and greeting one another with the traditional Vulcan wave, a conference of high school cheerleaders spent the evening being freaked out about the whole thing.
It had been a long time since I horrified a high school cheerleader with nerdiness and I didn't even realize how much I'd missed it.
Live long and prosper, Tiffany.