Fun week with Fred

Just a little photo post outlining my visit with one of my oldest Internet friends, Fred!

Fred and I met in 1998 online, and have been friends ever since. Here's us when we first met:

. . . And here's us from Tuesday. :)

Fred has test-read pretty much everything I've written and given me feedback, and he has a great memory for the characters and their attributes, enabling him to quote or reflect on something I've written years later. His perspective has been quite useful in my editing, but furthermore, he's a great friend, and I enjoy spending time with him! He lives in Phoenix, though, and I'm all the way in Tampa, so his visits are rare.

We haven't done a whole lot of eventful things during his stay, but we have had quite a full week! He arrived on Tuesday (as pictured above), and on Wednesday, we went out to eat (with my friend Jeaux joining us), chowing down at Sonny's (one of Fred's favorite places).

On Thursday I cooked for us--we ate the tofu dish I featured in this blog post. He seemed to really enjoy it and complimented me a lot on my cooking!

On Friday we had my friend Victor over and ate Chinese food, then played board games all night.

Playing the X-Men game.

On Saturday, we found a cool brunch place and had pretty super breakfasts:

Tasty skillet!

Omelet with mushrooms!

And after brunch, we went out to check out the Museum of Science and Industry, where we checked out disaster exhibits, watched the show about butterflies in the IMAX theater, learned about constellations in the planetarium, talked to a guy about radio for a long time, and saw many exhibits about the human body.

Fred is building a house that's supposed to sustain hurricane-strength winds!

Leaving MOSI with our attendance stickers.

And on Sunday, my sister from California came into town and met up with us to go have brunch at the Thai Temple! (I had some tofu pad thai.)

You can kinda see the temple behind her. . . .

So now my houseguest Fred has gone on his merry way back to Phoenix, and my sister is here! She is at the beach while I'm posting this blog, but she'll be back tonight, and maybe I'll get to share some more fun pictures from her visit.