y o u j u s t d o n t g e t . u s

HAPPY BIRTHDAY RYAN! | Feliz Aniversário Ryan!

Ryan is 2 years old!

Happy Birthday RYAN!

And...congrats to the parents Liz and Keith.

Ryan esta completando 2 aninhos!

Parabéns RYAN!

E parabéns pra os pais Liz e Keith.

YouJustDontGetUs...After One Year

Hard to believe, but this little experiment in friends-and-family communication is one year old.

That's 351 posts, 953 linked-to items of interest, and 108 comments from you all.

As I described it on my blog:

During a holiday trip down California's central coast, my fiancee [now wife] and I wondered how we could easily and time-effectively set up a way to tell our friends and family (mine in California, hers in Brazil) what we were up to and what we found interesting.

The Big Sur lodge we stayed in didn't have phone, TV, mobile phone service, or (as it turned out) hot water before 4pm. It did have wifi in the bar, though.

We decided to set up a friends-and-family site using TypePad, Feedburner, FeedBlitz, and del.icio.us. After we threw our respective Flickr badges up there for good measure, we called it YouJustDontGetUs. Two black-tooth-grins later (and Leticia doesn't drink), we were all done.

Thanks for making it a great year. All the best from The Gomecile in 2008!

YJDGU In Review

Here's an interesting look at our little experiment in using social media to keep in touch with friends and family: Through the BlogPulse profile tool, you can get a summary of what we've linked to and who has linked to us.

Half of you subscribe via email, the other half through RSS. We don't really pay attention to pageviews or "hits" to the YJDGU site because, really, it's not terribly relevant.

We'll keep you up-to-date as to how this is going from a behind-the-scenes perspective but, for now, enjoy this site/newsletter. Be sure to tell other friends and relatives about YJDGU, because we'll be delivering travel and wedding updates more frequently as we get closer to the date.

It's Official | É oficial!

Yes, this is exactly what you think it is.

Well... Okay... The fact that we're both wearing rings here would lead some to believe that we skipped off to Vegas and got hitched at the Church of Elvis.

Reality is, though, that we're engaged. Seeing as how neither of us are much for tradition or convention, we thought it fit to both show it by wearing matching bands.

For those of you who want the scoop on a dramatic story in the vein of a John Hughes movie, it really went something like this:

Step One: Decide to get married.

Step Two: Select, shop for, and order rings.

Step Three: Wait four weeks.

Step Four: Put them on once Phil moved to Chicago.

Step Five: Celebrate by going out to dinner on Presidents' Day, buying furniture at Macy's Marshall Field's, and telling folks.

Step Six: Wear rings to the office the next day to see who would notice.

Step Seven: Wait about seven-and-a-half hours.

Step Eight: Sound of women screaming at approximately 4:17 p.m. Central Standard Time.

Step Nine: Bask in impending-nuptial-induced adulation from officemates.

Step Ten: Write blog post.

As to whether we've set a date, we're looking at November-ish and most likely in the San Francisco Bay Area. Watch this space for details.

We often think about the various circumstances that led to us meeting: Phil getting a job at Edelman. Leticia getting convinced by work-friends to go to the company summer party in August 2005. Leticia and Phil meeting at said summer party. The months of IM'ing and emailing that followed. Seeing each other again in November 2005 and, well, just knowing.

Important thing is that it happened. And, thus, here we are.

Our thanks and love go out to friends and family who have been so wonderfully supportive.

Stay tuned...

Pois é gente….a maioria de vocês já vem escutando sobre os planos de casamento fazem algum tempo. Neste último domingo, o Phil se mudou definitivamente para Chicago. Decidimos então oficializar o noivado colocando as alianças. Não da pra ver direito na foto, mas elas são lindas!!! :-)

Estamos os dois super felizes!

Us-Place v1.0 | Nossa Casa v.1.0

Yup... We got the keys. Signed the lease. Your guest room is in the lower left-hand side.

OBA...já temos a chave. Contrato assinado. O seu quarto de visitas e abaixo á esquerda.

Happy New Year | Feliz Ano Novo

From a New year, comes a new site.

By now, my dad is passing around a small business card with this site's URL and instructions on how to subscribe by email. Some of you at my cousin Paul's annual New Year's party in San Leandro are probably reading this message right now. Leticia and I are sorry we can't be there with you all, but it was wonderful seeing you during the Christmas holiday.

Why are Leticia and I publishing this site? Well... It goes something like this:

My blog is/was an experiment in trying to develop a site that was "perso/professional" in nature. During its (to-date) six years of publication, though, a funny thing happened.

I expected that the problem, if any, was going to be that my more PR- and business-minded readers
would reject the "perso" part of the "perso/professional" site. To tell you the truth, that never happened.

More often, though, friends and relatives would say something like "I don't understand half the things you're talking about on your blog!" This was usually followed by "And what is 'public relations' anyway?"

More than one relative, despite frequent cajoling, was scared to leave a comment. "Don't you do business here?"

So, here we are. My blog at philgomes.com will be steering a bit more professionally over the coming months. Nevertheless, you'll be able to see the most recent posts from that blog on the left-side margin of this page.

youjustdontget.us is a place where friends and relatives can follow what Leticia and I have been up to and, more frequently, see the links on the web that we find the most interesting.

Hey... It beats getting those silly forwarded emails, right?

Speaking of emails, we recommend that you sign up for updates-by-email. Go ahead and enter your address in the form on the left. After you receive the confirmation email and do what it says, you'll get once-a-day, full-text updates on this site. You can also sign up here.

So... To friends, relatives, and even trusted colleagues who are so inclined, this site is for you.

Welcome!