Our Foo is Stronger

Headed to Boston for #Healthfoo was how the FB post read.
"Dang, I guess I wasn't invited this year," I thought to myself "again."
And this time there was nobody there to lobby for me to attend as happened last year.
Because by the time it started, they were already talking about canceling it.  And by Friday afternoon it was cancelled, because Boston was either "locked down" or "sheltering in place" depending on whose spin you want to put on it.

But the next FB post I saw said something different: "Need help planning unconference."

So, I responded Friday night, and found out Saturday morning that Regina, Ted, David, Fred and many others were planning things out over breakfast a few hours from when I read the post.  I dropped my daughter off at her horse-back riding, did the weeks shopping ultra-fast.  Ran home and off-loaded it, and then bundled the rest of my family (who all wanted to at least meet Regina) into the car, where we then went back to pick up my eldest daughter from her horseback riding lesson, and threw clean clothes at her.

And we trucked on through Boston Saturday morning to meet up with the Health Foo crowd.  It was a bit odd, see a caravan of eight police cars and military HUMVEE convoying from Huntington Avenue to Mass ave with sirens blaring ("Prisoner transport?" I thought to myself), or to see a second hummer sitting on Mass Ave at Boylston Street with a gun mount atop it.

We got to the breakfast venue only to see that the group was splitting, given the lack of space and quiet in venue #1.  I left my eldest in the charge of Regina and the rest of the family joined the remaining crowd to plan things out.  Discovering that the event had been cancelled actually made it possible for my eldest daughter and I to attend it.  We could only spend Saturday (Sunday being the day we were to celebrate my youngest's 11th birthday).  My wife and youngest daughter headed home after breakfast.

After our "second breakfast" (at least for my eldest and I who had already been up since 6), we met up for coffee again at a nearby hotel, and then headed over to MIT to hold the un-foo, or as it was later to be called, the foo-foo.   We spent about 6 hours unconferencing in MIT space (made available by @littledevices), before the two of us headed home on the Red Line.

For more on what happened, see posts by Ted and David, and especially check out Ted's photo-stream.

On our way home, my daughter and I stopped to pay homage at the shrine that sprung up on campus for the MIT policeman who was shot and killed in the craziness on Friday.

As others have said, and I simply repeat: Our Foo is strong.