Time at home in San Francisco came to an end this week with a flight to Portland, OR on Friday for some open source gatherings around OSCON. This ended my nearly 2 months without getting on a plane, the longest stretch I’ve gone in over 2 years. My initial intention with this time was to spend a lot of time on my book, which I have, but not nearly as much as I’d hoped because the work and creativity required isn’t something you can just turn on and off. It was nice getting to spend so much time with my husband though, and the kitties. The stretch at home also led me to join a gym again (I’d canceled my last month to month membership when a stretch of travel had me gone for over a month). Upon my return next week I have my first of four sessions with a trainer at the gym scheduled.
While I haven’t exactly had a full social calendar of late, I have been able to go to a few events. Last Wednesday I hosted an Ubuntu Hour and Bay Area Debian Dinner in San Francisco.
The day after, SwiftStack hosted probably the only OpenStack 5th birthday party I’ll be able to attend this year (leaving before the OSCON one, will be in Peru for the HP one!). I got to see some familiar faces, meet some Swift developers and eat some OpenStack cake.
MJ had a friend in town last week too, which meant I had a lot of time to myself. In the spirit of not having to worry about my own meals during this time, I cooked up a pot of beef stew to enjoy through the week and learned quickly that I should have frozen at least half of it. Even a modest pot of stew is much more than I can eat it all myself over the course of a week. I did enjoy it though, some day I’ll learn about spices so I can make one that’s not so bland.
I’ve also been running again, after a bit of a hiatus following the trip to Vancouver. Fortunately I didn’t lose much ground stamina-wise and was mostly able to pick up where I left off. It has been warmer than normal in San Francisco these past couple weeks though, so I’ve been playing around with the times of my runs, with early evenings as soon as the fog/coolness rolls in currently the winning time slot during the week. Sunday morning runs have been great too.
This week I made it out to a San Francisco DevOps meetup where Tom Limoncelli was giving a talk inspired by some of the less intuitive points in his book The Practice of Cloud Systems Administration. In addition to seeing Tom, it was nice to meet up with some of my local DevOps friends who I haven’t managed to connect with lately and meet some new people.
I had a busy week at home before my trip to Portland this week, upon settling in to the hotel I’m staying at I met up with my friend and fellow Ubuntu Community Council Member Laura Czajkowski. We took the metro over the bridge to downtown Portland and on the way she showed off her Ubuntu phone, and the photo taking app for a selfie together!
Since it was Laura’s first time in Portland, our first stop downtown was to Voodoo Doughnuts! I got my jelly-filled voodoo guy doughnut.
From there we made our way to Powell’s Books where we spent the rest of the afternoon, as you do with Powell’s. I picked up 3 books and learned that Powell’s Technical Books/Powell’s 2 has been absorbed into the big store, which was a little sad for me, it was fun to go to the store that just had science, transportation and engineering books. Still, it was a fun visit and I always enjoy introducing someone new to the store.
Then we headed back across the river to meet up with people for the Community Leadership Summit informal gathering event at the Double Tree. We had a really enjoyable time, I got to see Michael Hall of the Ubuntu Community Council and David Planella of the Community Team at Canonical to catch up with each other and chat about Ubuntu things. Plus, I ran into people I know from the broader open source community. As an introvert, it was one of the more energizing social events I’ve been to in a long time.
Today the Community Leadership Summit that I’m in town for kicks off! Looking forward to some great discussions.