By Jason
Halloween is kind of a big deal at Google. Almost everyone dresses up, with geek points awarded for elaborate costumes, internet in-jokes, and shameless puns. This was a particularly important Halloween, being Athena’s first. So we faced a challenge: to come up with clever costumes for the three of us without doing anything offensive enough to get me fired.
Given all the work I’ve been doing lately to warn people about internet scams, we decided to be a whole scam family:
Ann is the deposed Nigerian prince looking for a trustworthy American friend with a bank account number, Athena is Falcon the Balloon Boy, and I am the make-money-at-home Google money tree.
Here’s a better picture of Athena’s costume:
We ended up ditching the cardboard box portion of the costume while at Google, since she spent most of the time either eating it or trying to take it off. It turns out that all you really need to do is tie a silver ufo-style balloon to a little kid and just about everybody recognizes the balloon boy. She was a big hit. Athena loved the crowds and all the attention – she ran around in the grass, balloon trailing, as everyone doted on her.
I’m posting this photo only to note that you can see Larry wandering by in an airplane costume in the background. Athena’s first celebrity sighting.
Here’s a photo of some of my coworkers on the search quality team, with Shane, Nelson, Wysz, myself, Rowyn, Sandy, Alissa, Koklynn, in the back row and Reid, Sophia, Tom and Rahul in front. Both Nelson and Reid were dressed as Max from Where the Wild Things Are. The giant banana in Nelson’s arms is actually his dog, Henry. Wysz is dressed as a chef in one of our cafes, though he had a hard time coming up with a costume this year.
Here’s a photo of our vocational-gender-stereotype-busting support engineering team, including Merry (as a 1-up mushroom), Rowyn, Sandy and myself.
Halloween was fun. We didn’t do any trick-or-treating with Athena, our apartment building wasn’t doing it and we don’t really know anyone in the neighborhood to show her off to. Next year I’m sure we will – because by next year, she’ll have a child’s all-consuming desire to acquire candy.
As always, I’ve got more photos in Flickr.
Some other happenings we’ve missed in our blogging tardiness:
1. Rachel, one of my high-school era friends, came to the Bay Area for work and spent a couple days hanging out with us and playing with Athena.
2. Athena is walking incredibly long distances. She can now easily handle several blocks at a time – the only reason we have to hold her hand to to keep her from running into traffic. Here’s proof, taken on Castro Street in Mountain View:
3. We hung out with Ahan and Julie, who are moving to Oregon and having a baby soon. Here’s a pic of Athena helping to take apart Julie’s lego building:
4. Andy flew in for a Google Summer of Code mentor conference and we got to hang out a bit. He regaled us with tales of what happens when you collect a bunch of super nerdy computer scientists together. Let’s just say that if anyone ever starts a conversation with, “did I ever tell you about the programming language I invented…” you should run.
This photo didn’t turn out very well but I’m including it as proof that Andy was near a baby and neither burst into flame:
It’s hard to believe Andy and Michelle’s wedding was over a year ago, or that Athena is almost a year old. We’ll have more posts coming soon… I think Ann wants to write a bit about what we’re doing to get Athena to eat better, all the talking she’s doing, and we have a Thanksgiving trip coming up soon as well.