Party Time
Neither Kim nor I have ever thought of ourselves as party people. We both have stories from high school and college where we are less than enthusiastic participants in parties, less party poopers, but more just not into it the way others who live for partying are. It takes all kinds to make a world go around and both of us think of ourselves as upbeat and otherwise fun-loving people in a more general sense. But for some reason, we are also planners who always feel compelled to plan things like family and neighborhood gatherings. You notice that my non-partying manner causes me to call them gatherings rather than parties. Somehow everyone standing around with a drink in their hand chatting is a gathering to me rather than a party, and it seems more genuine and imbued with more gravitas. When some people say “Do you want to party?” it’s an invitation to do drugs. Sometimes when you see it in a movie it’s and invitation from a sex worker. Partying just seems sort of sketchy to me where gatherings do not. A few years ago as the new people in the neighborhood who arrived just before COVID locked us all down, we felt compelled by virtue of the impending departure of our neighbor, Mary, to give her a party and gather all the people in the neighborhood to give her that send off. It is not something that happens often in this or most neighborhoods, either because it’s too much bother or too uninteresting to folks.
Kim and I are very pleased with our community and it seems the same is the case for our good friends Mike & Melisa and Faraj & Yasuko. We are all very friendly with one another and the six of us have even taken to taking a big international vacation with one another the last few years (another one planned for 2025 to Patagonia via a Viking cruise). There is broader Hidden Meadows Women’s Group and a Hidden Meadows Garden Club (of which Kim and Melisa are co-presidents). But our little hilltop enclave is not really in Hidden Meadows, even though we are included in those clubs. We on this hilltop have our own private roads are are what is called a PRD (Permanent Road Division), so if I say we are “special” its true simply by San Diego County definition. There are eight streets with about sixty homes in the PRD, but for one reason or another we eliminate about ten of those because they are located in a separate downhill area. Of the remaining fifty, five of them are either recent or in-construction homes. There are also another ten or so unbuilt lots that will either eventually be built or are just “buffer” lots owned by various homeowners. We think of this as Avery desirable hilltop and the real estate market seems to agree.
Recently, It occurred to us that it has been three years since our last hilltop gathering and that we should organize another. We got buy-in from Mike & Melisa and Faraj & Yasuko, so since it was my idea and I have the PRD contact list, I drafted an email and sent it out to the forty or so households to gauge interest. People are funny. A handful responded right away with affirmations, but the majority of the recipients have just sat on their hands for a few days now. I know from prior experience that like when gathering assets in the investment business, people are inclined to inaction and need to be sold on giving their answers. Its less about selling them to attend, but clearly they prefer to keep their optionality whenever possible on such things.
That has caused me to “farm out” the answer gathering about the gathering to my team of co-conspirators. I’ve taken the easiest possible delegation algorithm by assigning the neighbors based on location. I’ve asked Faraj & Yasuko to address those on their street (Tall Oak). I’ve asked Mike & Melisa to address those on their street (Camino Elena). I’ve asked another neighbor (Jeff & Shannon) to chase down the five neighbors near them on High Vista. And I’ve asked Kim to follow-up with two near here with whom she is more friendly than I. In the mean time I have already started texting people. I caught one Scottish couple on the Isle of Mann (there to see the motorcycle races….he rebuilds antique European bikes as a hobby) and another in the Philippines (she and her mother are from there). The Nepalese couple next door have responded that they will attend. We are now up to 34 attendees and only two no’s, which is reasonably impressive attendance statistics,even if the answering statistics are not too impressive yet.
Being a long-time aficionado of spreadsheets, I naturally have put together a spreadsheet to capture and track the information about our efforts to invite and gather our hilltop. Rather than a normal alphabetical listing I have chosen to list the invitees based on the more relevant criteria to me as to where they stand in the invitation spectrum. I don’t really care about our hit rate since I know some people just don’t prefer to socialize with their neighbors. What I do care about is that we have connected with everyone and definitively determined that they made a conscious decision to attend or not. Therefore, my spreadsheet starts by listing and enumerating those who have RSVP’d in the affirmative. Then I list those I have assigned myself to chase, broken down by those I know well and am comfortable texting and those who I know less well and prefer to start following by email. Then there are the Faraj, Kim, Mike & Melisa and Shannon neighbors. I sent a screenshot of the spreadsheet (I know not everyone likes opening spreadsheets) to my team. I have always found that transparency and promoting accountability is the way to go. Melisa, who I suspect finds my spreadsheet a tad overdone for a party, responded to my group text by asking if I could please put the data into a pie chart. Obviously I knew she was having some fun with me. So, I very quickly had the spreadsheet generate not one but two pie charts for her. And here’s the thing, they are dynamic pie charts that change as I update the spreadsheet with acceptances and rejections. Party on.
When the pie chart back and forth was going on, Kim jumped in and said she thought pie might be a yummy dessert for our party. This will not be a fancy party, just a friendly neighborhood pot-luck affair. We haven’t figured out the menu yet, much less asked people to bring this or that. The one thing Kim and I have decided is to hire an ice cream scooping operation to come and serve up some specialty ice cream, just to have something different and memorable to offer the crowd. The ice cream company requires a minimum of 50 attendees, so I guess I am confident that I can increase our initial list by 50%. We might not be serving pie, but I am betting that my pie chart will prevail.