This festivus party is a big deal for me. I spend months telling people they are welcome. Then I spend days getting together a nice spread of food and stuff like that, doing a Facebook event to invite people to, getting the room, and all the other little jobs that I need to do for a good party. By the time it happened I was very nervous but ready to enjoy the evening. Then once it starts I'm doing my best to enjoy it. Turns out that part is usually easy. I didn't take any pictures until someone inspired me.

     

Can't remember her name, but she said she was the President of her school's Green club. I hadn't met her before. Glad she came to my party!

Purple shooter! First time I've seen her in a while. After I took her picture she said "the problem with your pictures is that you're not in them." So she did a selfie with me. After that I put away my camera and did host type stuff for quite a while.

Then it was time for the airing of the grievances. It took a while to get everyone into something approximating a circle. Then it took me a while to remember that I wanted pictures of this.

They made me start the grievances with my own. I said that I hate it when bike party loses a great activist in an accident or something like that. We're all volunteers doing our own thing, but it hurts to lose a good one. I know because I've seen it happen many times. Changes that would make it happen less would be streets that don't grab my friends wheels to throw them down and lights that work for bicycles so people aren't so tempted to run red lights. Thinking back on it now, I'm wishing I'd said something like "we need more activists to step forward and replace the ones we've lost."

Adina's grievance is that Caltrain doesn't have enough seats for the loads of people that want to ride it nowadays. Renee had a whole list of grievances, but they ended with "VOTE FOR BERNIE!"

Barry said he'd fired the Chinese factory he had grievances about last year. Then he was trying to get them to manufacture his headlights. Now he's doing that work locally in Mountain View. Then he told us about the time a photon walked into a bar. The bartender asked what he wanted. The photon said "Nothing. I'm traveling light."

Raistlin said something like "I've been riding with bike party for more than a year now and it's great."

Megan's grievance was that too many people are being left behind by this go-go economy that's swirling around us. She is grateful that Mountain View voted to raise the minimum wage, but she thinks it's going to take a lot more than that to really change things.

Another memorable one came from Mike Kasperzak, who said he's running for State Assembly in the 24th District. Wish I'd taken a picture of that, but I had to pull it out of him. He was more interested in hiding behind being "Mike". Later he posted a link to his campaign website to the facebook event page. Click here to visit that.

     

Fred's coat has an amazing variety of buttons from campaigns he's worked on. I urge you to look it over and ask him about it if you get the chance.

As some people left others showed up. It was good to see Santiago again. I hadn't seen him since he got in the ambulance after getting knocked off his bike by that black sandbag on on Dry Creek Road's dark curvy part in or near Campbell. Glad to see his smile is working again!

     

Karen had a cooking injury. She put a mustache and eyes on the bandage for fun. Cami (talking to Pearl in the background) brought this AWESOME savory macaroni and cheese. Yumm...  Later she told me "I should have aired my grievance over Mandolin slicers. My boys have forbidden me from handling sharp objects in 2016. Also, I'm not allowed to climb on toilet seats." I think she muttered something else about a back story to, but I forget what.

Melanie brought a guy that really did a good job on cleaning wine stains off the furniture. Thanks guy!

I originally had a plan for ice, but that fell through. Bex was nice enough to realize the problem and go get ice. Thanks Bex!

     

James was like "Thanks to you for putting everything together and hosting. The social time with everyone was excellent and a great bookend to my 2015."

Raistlin, Justin, and Jonathan did the Festivus feats of strength by going to and from the event on bicycles. There were others, but I didn't get a good group shot of them. Sorry about that, Lloyd, Townie, et. al.

Somewhere in there I accidentally got way too stoned, so I spent some of the evening sitting on the couch relaxing. It was nice to fade in and out hearing laughter and chatting in the background. Usually I only smoke stuff that came directly off a plant, but there must have been something more than that in some bowl that was going around. Ooops. Oh well, I feel fine now.

     

Lots of people had a good time.

  

Around 12:30 we gathered for a group shot. They wanted me in it, so I just got this as the crowd was assembling.

        

A smaller crew stayed behind to help clean up. When all was said and done I had these items left over to find the owners of. It's a much better situation than last year when someone was complaining that their cell phone had disappeared. I posted this row of pictures to Facebook and have found takers for all of them. Hope to have them out of my hair within another week.

Cleaning house a week later I realized again that I now have way too many paper plates. What happened was I started the party with the mistaken impression that I had a stack of paper plates somewhere. Ooops. No paper plates. On the facebook event page somebody posted a message "bring paper plates!" Several people did that before Dora posted "We have plenty of paper plates!" So now we probably have enough paper plates for several years of good festivus parties. Hope I remember they are on the bottom wire shelf under the window when I'm setting up next year.