Last Saturday Kris from my old job came over. She’s really into gardening and gave me a few shade and wet ground loving plants (woo!) as well as a few nice flowers that I was able to get planted earlier this week. It’s nice to finally have a “real life” person to consult about gardening things. That evening we all went out to dinner up at Ortino’s and I introduced her to the lambic – she chose the peach and was suitably impressed. Woo another convert!
But the primary reason she was coming over was to spend the night so we could leave Sunday morning for the drive down to Baltimore for the joint PhillyChix/DC Chix meeting.
We left Sunday morning at 6:30, swung by Dunkin Donuts for some breakfast and hopped on the expressway. We took 422 to 202 to I-95 down into Baltimore, it was a simple drive and getting to the Aquarium in Baltimore was pretty easy (even if there was some construction at the exit). The drive down only took a little over 2 hours, so after parking we were there to meet Lauren, Katie and Raven shortly before 9AM.
The National Aquarium was great! I’d never been to Baltimore before, so it was all quite an experience – and I took pictures.
There were tons of fish, but I didn’t get pictures of many because they were dimly lit and moved too much for the little digital camera I brought with me.
Sea Anemones! I love these things.
There were plenty of turtles.
There was an impressive Australia exhibit, this photo catches some of it’s glory – as well as some giant bats hanging from the ceiling!
This frog was the best. They have a big frog exhibit this summer, frogs are great.
A photo of Baltimore Harbor from inside the aquarium.
I squealed like a little girl when I saw this, and then I felt silly. I had heard about the campaign to dress up the mailboxes, but I don’t go into cities much and didn’t expect to actually see one.
I love aquariums.
Katie’s pictures from the day are here and Lauren’s are here. Lauren’s include a group shot!
Uploaded by elwing on 5 Apr ’07, 6.49am PDT.
Kris, Lyz, Katie, Lauren (Raven not pictured)
We left the aquarium around noon and headed to the Capitol City Brewery. This is the second time we’ve had a meetup and the second time we’ve ended up at a brewery. It’s all my doing, and I’m the only one who really drinks beer. I need to stop hijacking meetings like this :P Actually everyone enjoys brewery food even if I was the only one drinking beer. I ended up with a Amber Waves Ale: An American original West Coast style or California ale. Ours is medium bodied with an intense floral hop character featuring variants grown in Oregon and Washington. This beer style is a recent development in the craft brewing industry. I was quite impressed with it, and brought a growler home to Michael. Oh and I had a crabcake sandwich, because that’s what you’re supposed to do in Maryland. The conversation was great too – we even talked about Linux a little ;) It’s just so relaxing to kick back with an awesome group of women from time to time, I look forward to our next meetup.
It was almost 2PM by the time we left the brewery and I decided it was time to head back so I could get home at a reasonable time and hopefully miss some of the traffic on 95. The ride back was a bit slower than the ride in, we did hit a bit of traffic, but we were back at the house before 5PM.
The other Linux event I attended this past week was the PLUG meeting in downtown Philly. I don’t generally get down to these, but I had a very good reason to this time – Michael was presenting! He did a talk on “Cross-Platform Digital Audio Streaming” and I really enjoyed it. Slides here and a photo here. Yay myn :) After the meeting we had a keysigning – which I hadn’t done in FAR too long. Then we dropped by the Best House with the rest of the PLUG group to chat for a few minutes before driving home. We managed to make it home by 10:30.
And Debian 4.0 released was released today! Woohoo! We only have two sarge machines here at home (work is another story, as my co-worker so helpfully reminded me in IRC this morning, hah!), and we’ll probably wait a couple months to bring those up to etch, but it’s still nice to see Etch finally go stable, it’s been almost 2 years since sarge did.
While I’m blabbering about Linux, I might as well mention that I was in the rare mood of wanting to “make my desktop pretty” yesterday and have quite a lovely pale purple setup right now. I also added hooks that will allow good access management to the dozens of servers at work, I love XFCE4.
Finally, Happy Easter everyone, I managed to get my Robin Eggs and Cadbury Creme Eggs yesterday, so I have been munching on them all morning – so bad! But so good… My chocolate intake has gone down since leaving my old job, so I figure it’s OK for me to indulge myself today. I also picked up some young gouda, port wine cheese and Deli-style rye Triscuits to enjoy while watching zombie movies this afternoon.
Oh, and there are flurries out today, a white Easter? My poor daffodils!
