Celebration "At Home" party gathering?

You pick the time, I'm pretty flexible actually. To be on the safe side, why not 9pm or 10pm?

We will go with 9pm on a date to be determined when I have feedback from more than 2 people lol

How about this Thursday (29) or Friday (30) evening 9:00pm for about 30 min to 1 hour?

I should be able to make a 9:00pm thursday.

thurs i will be touring the hospital before the baby comes...fri i should be able to do it..but if i am the minority then have it without me and i will catch up later.

Friday should be ok.

Either Thursday or Friday at 9pm will be good for me. What will we use to chat? MSN, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, or some other client? I have all four.

If aol still has a chat function, then lets go with it. That way I avoid all of the porn invites with yahoo and the hacking attempts with icq lol

I sent you a PM with my AIM username.

Friday at 9pm via AOL. If you are interested in joining in the chat, please pm me your aol screen name. Only those that contact me through here will be added.

If you are unavailable for this chat but would like to participate, please contact me and I will send you the information from the chat.

Just a reminder that this chat is scheduled for tonight. Please bring (in your head) any ideas you have for this event, including locations and activities. We will start promptly at 9pm.

I have PMs from:
Underpaid_Soldier
StrangeWings
DERTHH_MAWLZ

There is still time to take part, just pm me your aol screen name before the chat.

No IM here unless it's google chat and that's not very group friendly. Have a great discussion guys, let us know what you decide!

Dang, it seems that it got kicked in gear while I was gone, so did the plan come together?

We are currently working on a survey to gage what level of interest we have from the other groups and what level of participation we can expect from them. We have about 7-8 questions and are going to meet online again near the end of the month before we finalize and send out the survey.

Our decisions:

Richmond Area (duh)
Indoors
most likely NOT a hotel
Potluck (possibly)
Costumes optional
tables for each chapter to display anything they like

So are we looking for a convention center or the like? The coliseum is most likely a little overkill

I believe we were thinking possibly renting a hotel meeting room, or perhaps some other place we can rent for a few hours or so.

Hotel Meeting Room (depending on Price and outside food rules--Joe, did you ever follow up with the Double Tree?), VFW hall (or some other group like that) or something else of that nature. The concern is the 1) cost of the rental, 2) can we bring food ourselves, 3) is it easy to find

Left a couple messages for the DoubleTree sales office Monday but they haven't gotten back to me yet. Basically we do not want top be anywhere that requires catered food, we want to bring our own in, possibly potluck style.

I also have a few feelers out at some other places like the Brandermill Inn and Holiday Inn Express.

The only people who have gotten back to me is the Days Inn on Huguenot Road, their meeting room is about 20x30, rate is $125 plus tax for the entire day, and bringing in our own food is allowed. Set up classroom style it would hold 45 to 50 people with room for a presenter, other setups would hold less than that. It is alos right by the Chesterfield Towne Center mall is we wanted to try partnering up with them or one of their stores for a 'parade' of sorts.

Not a hotel, is a hotel. Damn guys I am getting dizzy here.

Has there been any talks with the other VA groups about this? It seems that there was a spur of the moment need to make a chat group last week and it's nice to see that there is somthing moving forward but this needs proper management to go smoothly. Was anyone from the other groups on the chat as well? Are we looking at 5, 50, 500, or 50,000 people to show up for this deal? I am sure that most of this was covered but since the two biggest factors to cement first are location and food I would think there needs to be a rough headcount and a date.

As it will be Richmond doing the planning, I felt the need to get our heads wrapped around what we will be doing. It was offered to the CRs from the other groups to join us for planning, but they declined and wanted to know what we decided.

We are preparing a survey (as stated above) to send to the other groups to gage the attendance and the willingness of the other groups to attend -- mainly: how many would be likely attending, what are they willing to pay, are they willing to bring food (potluck) and what would they like to see happen at the event.

What she said. We'll be running the entire event, but we'll receive feedback once we send out the surveys on our ideas. We still are working out some of the details.

Alrighty then. I hope this works out ok and if there is any thing that I can help with or any questions I can answer just let me know.