Just a funny story...

I live in Lynn, Mass, about 10 miles north of Boston, in a 1905 Colonial about a mile from the ocean. It's a quiet, residential neighborhood of mostly older folks...not that many kids on the street, although there's a lot more on weekends when the grandkids come to vist their grandparents. (Jesse's made friends with many of them.)

In Lynn, I'm pretty much known as Jesse's mom, Jim's wife, and the woman who does websites. I've worked as the Executive Administrator for a non-profit (the Friends of Lynn Woods), and I've helped out at the Lynn Museum. Chamber of Commerce members know me because Jim takes care of the Chamber computers. We host several city websites.

Some people know what I do ("something with computers, right?"), fewer still know that I'm a tech writer (or even what a tech writer is). Some of my neighbors know that I'm an author. Just about everyone knows that I'm either home all day every day, or I'm travelling somewhere again. ("Where were you last week? London! Nice...")

Today, Jesse and I went to Lynn Woods to take part in Dungeon Rock Day put on by the Friends of Lynn Woods and the park ranger. When I helped the FLW board, I participated in Dungeon Rock Day for many years, which has been greatly enhanced...it originally started as a walk to Dungeon Rock and back (somewhere between 1 and 2 miles through the woods), but now includes skits by pirates. (You can read about Dungeon Rock, which explains why there are pirates. Unfortunately, the credit seems to have disappeared...the text is from an article written a hundred years ago, and accompanied the picture.) The kids love it. (Two years ago, I accompanied some of the tours, dressed as a pirate's wench.)

So we're walking along with the group, and Jesse's having fun with the different pirates. As we went to leave the last group, one of the pirates asks me how I'm doing...he and I used to work together on the old FLW website.

Another pirate then says, "Do you belong to STC?" I was, to say the least, shocked. I didn't even know there was another tech writer in Lynn, much less one who knew about STC ;-) It seems that he used to be a member and he recognized my name, but he's working for the government now and not doing much writing. But he's been thinking about getting back into it...and back into STC. We had a nice chat while Jesse went ahead with the group to the dungeon. (I caught up with our group before they went inside.)

Meanwhile...my worlds just collided ;-)