The IE team let loose Friday night at the Fenix to celebrate Lunar New Year. Felicity, our brilliant group assistant (and the woman who really runs the team), figured that having a traditional end-of-year holiday party was a bad idea -- too many conflicts, hard to get a baby sitter, too expensive to get a venue, etc. In light of our bad weather in December, this was particularly lucky.

Anyway, aside from the pool tables and normal club stuff at the Fenix, Felicity had the Rockaraoke band there. As I've blogged about before, Rockaroake is like normal karaoke, except you sing with a live band. It's tons of fun, especially when you know everyone who is singing. There were some surprisingly talented people on the team and some whose willingness to please their significant others outweighed their singing talent. Perhaps not surprisingly, it seemed that the Program Managers (stereotypically the most extroverted/attention seeking of the job functions) did much of the singing, although there were clearly representatives from the other disciplines including Katya and her friend Stephanie in the photo above. (In the interest of full disclosure, I sang Margaritaville solo and Summer Nights with Kellie - and yes, Kellie, I will continue to link to that horrible photo of you until you start blogging or otherwise create a presence on the web.)

The event was also special because team members could bring a guest. It was great to meet the spouses and significant-others and to really thank them for their sacrifices. We focus a lot on how hard a team works to ship something like IE; it's easy to overlook the burden our long nights and weekends places on our families and friends.

Good times.