Last weekend my mother was visiting. We ended up spending much of the visit just relaxing, went out to dinner a couple of times, I introduced her to Firefly and she ended up borrowing Tru Calling after she started watching it while I was working on Monday.
We did end up heading down to the city on Saturday though, to go to the Philadelphia Zoo! I’d been there twice before since moving to the Philly area, the first time with MJ and Bae and the second time back in 2008 for the Brew at the Zoo.
Kitties!
They finally had gotten rid of the last of the elephants, I miss them! The San Francisco Zoo also retired the last of their elephants a couple years ago due to similar problems – too small of a living environment and no budget to build a new one. But the new Big Cat Falls is a fun exhibit.
Giraffe!
Penguins!
After the zoo we headed up to City Ave to grab some dinner at Chipotle. She flew home on Tuesday afternoon, after which I broke out the moving boxes and started packing up more things.
In addition to packing I’ve had to do a reanalysis of my network in an effort to cut the number of systems I’m running down from 5 to… less. I ended up retiring my Sparc Ultra10 last night, it had been functioning as a firewall and backup server. My Xen server is now my firewall, and I no longer have a system hooked up to my TV, which is fine for the last three weeks I’m here in PA. So I’ll be bringing out my old laptop, my netbook and my xen server/firewall. My desktop? That’s being replaced by pieces for a system I’m having shipped to MJ’s, we worked this week to pick out the parts from newegg and order it with a cute white and pink flowers case! It will be a significant improvement from my current system, 2G of RAM really hasn’t been cutting it when I start playing with VirtualBox and a lot of high resolution photo editing. I still have a lot of things to do before the move, but I’ve gone ahead and got most of my service cancellations set up, been calling around to figure out other things I need to do. It’s going to be a busy three weeks.
Tomorrow I’m meeting up with my friend Mike to visit the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, which will cross off another museum on my “to visit before I leave Philly” list. Hooray!