I have so much information swirling in my head from the past week that there’s no hope of writing about it all at this time.

Instead, I present you with my favorite unexpected moments – in no particular order – from Test Coach Camp and CAST 2012:

• My first conference talk! (Video in case you missed it live)
• Bizarre kinetic airport sculptures
• Putting faces to so many Twitter handles
• the MRS BOND hummer
• Wade Wachs coaching me on juggling
• Brian Lawrence teaching me to make gigantic bubbles
• Late night brainstorming of tester pick up lines
• Paul Holland‘s interpretive dance
• Sustainable (fake) grass on Stanford campus
• Playing Set with lots of testers in the evenings
• Quiet drinks around the outdoor fire (see image above)
• Tridentine mass
• Congenial heckling with the BBQ restaurant waiter
• Nerdy T-shirts, especially those about testing – and expanding my collection!
• Comparing family trees (mind maps?)
• A very merry unbirthday to me! dinner
• Discussing trees with my sister
• Finding the facilitated discussion cards that were special (e.g. 42, pi, tau, NaN)
• Sharing testing war stories, as is tradition
• Foodie time: unagi pizza, yuzu ceviche, monkfish liver, beef tongue, mead tasting, fresh made tortillas from a street farmers’ market, The Growler, real ramen, potato grenade, “wolf turds”
• Brushing up on my Dutch
• Unique identifying elephants (for better automation!)
• Drive-by sightings of offices of many big names in software
• Finishing my zombie cross-stitch
• Marine fog attack
• Random wheeled office chair in the parking deck
• Blissful exhaustion poolside
• Bachelorette party en route to Vegas
• My first AST board meeting
• Bird perched on a sculpture inside the airport