Reunion Invitations

Last weekend the reunion invitation was e-mailed out along with a four page list of names with unconfirmed addresses from the Classes of '78 and '79. The invitation is posted here. The list of those with unconfirmed addresses (AKA the "Lost Sheep") is on this PDF file here. If you know where some of these people are, please let them know about the reunion. Also, please send the address information to Guy Houston and Claudia Gravelle at SRVHS7879@aol.com .

I was not involved in creating this list of the "missing," and I do not know how it was developed. I have talked with some people who are puzzled as to why they are listed as "lost sheep" when they had submitted address directory information in the past few years. The reunion "staff" is pretty much ad hoc. I try to help out and Claudia and Jay Briggs always are involved as well as others. If mistakes were made, they certainly were unintentional. The goal is always to get everyone in the know as soon as possible! I know that Claudia has already found a lot of people just since this weekend so the mailing has helped to do its job. In addition, the 333 Class of '78 & '79 members registered at Classmates.com were all notified of the reunion in a separate message last weekend.

This year's reunion is only $30 compared to $75 in 2004. It looks to be scaled back to the basics -- Getting together with old friends. The dinner and dancing were nice but most of us just wanted to talk with one another. And the SR football game the night before the reunion makes for another casual way to encounter old classmates without a lot of expense. Obviously, for me, it is a big expense because I fly out from the Washington DC area. Others will also come from afar for the reunion. Did you know we have classmates in Micronesia and Croatia?

More Reunion Details

Claudia Muller Gravelle has e-mailed the members of the Facebook 78/79 Reunion group with a request for e-mail addresses so she can send out a flyer with reunion details. Her e-mail added one heretofore unknown fact -- the October 24 activities will begin at 6 PM at the Radisson Hotel in Dublin with cocktails. Also listed were the already known plans for the SR homecoming game and post-game drinks at Elliots on Friday the 23rd.

It's nice to see this all coming together. Hopefully, those that need to make travel arrangements will be able to secure some of the low airfares that are currently being offered by Southwest and other carriers for Fall travel.

October 24, 2009

E-mail from Guy Houston has confirmed that the reunion will be on October 24, 2009. San Ramon High football will be playing their Homecoming game the night before, so a large group from the Classes of '78 and '79 will also attend that game. Guy says that invitations will be mailed out within the next week or so. Hopefully, the Class of '79 is included in that invite list -- Apparently a post card mailing went out in May from the Class of '78 but I did not hear of any '79 members receiving that postcard.

So I can finally book my travel for October's California events -- Scott Bisson's October 17th wedding and the October 23-24 Reunion. JetBlue happens to have some decent airfares right now, so I'm ready to buy! Woo hoo! Two weeks in California in October!

I'll continue to pass on any information that I receive, but make your plans to be there in October!

GeoCities to shut down October 26

The old free web hosting service, GeoCities, will shut down on October 26, 2009. While I had moved much of the website files from GeoCities, I still had most of the Wolf Print files there. They will be moved to a new location soon. Ideally, in the future I will re-scan the Wolf Prints at higher resolutions since computer speeds are so much faster than they were when these sites were created in 1999.

If you have a Yahoo GeoCities account where you may have stored some files in the past, you should make sure to download them to your computer soon. If you have a lot of files to download, I recommend the Firefox browser add-on called Down-Then-All. Here is a link to a step by step download tutorial . The "Down-Them-All" link is also at this tutorial site.

1979.SanRamonHigh.com

Well, after almost ten years of having the Class of '79 website at the "members.aol.com" address, I had to move it to another site last October. Since then, it has been at the "homepage.mac.com" site. Apple recently announced plans to close the Homepage service. Fortunately, Apple will NOT be deleting any files, but it will no longer be possible to make modifications through the Homepage service.

So, I recommend that everyone uses the address: http://1979.SanRamonHigh.com and that will get you to the correct page, wherever it may be hosted!

Facebook

I had been avoiding the Facebook phenomenon up until recently. I finally broke down and signed up in June just to see what all the fuss was about. I had mistakenly assumed it was very similar to MySpace.com. Well, it may be in some respects, but it sure does look a lot cleaner than any of the MySpace pages I had seen in the past.

Once someone asked me to be a "Friend," I finally learned at least some of what makes Facebook so great. First, this blog deals with the Class of '79 and Facebook does a wonderful job of grouping all of us class members together. There are about 100 of us on Facebook already. That's pretty good for our generation, I think. (I bet that the SRVHS Class of 2009 probably has more like 95% of its students on Facebook.)

Anyway, there is even a SR '78/'79 Reunion group on Facebook, where I learned that, at least as of Claudia M-G's March 2009 posting, the reunion is scheduled for October 24, 2009. But, if that's true, it needs to be better publicized than it has been! Post it at Classmates.com. Announce it in banner headlines at the Reunion Group Facebook page.

As for my facebook page -- you can find me by clicking John B. Ramsey's Facebook Page.

still wondering about reunion date...

So, with my last post, I passed on information from an alum who was told that the reunion would probably be the same weekend as San Ramon High's homecoming game. SRVHS's website doesn't give much information yet about the next school year, either in terms of Homecoming or a football schedule. But, I've ruled out the weekend of October 16-18 as SR will be facing De La Salle in Concord according to the De La Salle football schedule posted on that school's website. I've also learned that San Ramon will be home on October 23 and facing Livermore High School. This is according to the LHS website. So, maybe we'll have the 30 Year Reunion almost 10 years to the day of the 20 Year Reunion (10/23/99).

I hope an announcement is made soon, as a lot of us would like to begin to make travel arrangements. I am already planning to be in the Bay Area for Scott Bisson's wedding on October 17th, so I am hoping that the reunion will be within seven days of that date.