We’ve been quite preoccupied with Simcoe’s medical problems this past week. Prior to that my month was quite busy with work, a bit of a fractured schedule that resulted in a couple afternoons off during the week and loss of a couple weekend days. This weekend I’m enjoying my first full weekend since Thanksgiving and am very much looking forward to a couple of long weekends coming up for the holidays.
On the subject of holidays we attended a holiday party earlier this month hosted on the USS Hornet Aircraft Carrier. It’s the aircraft carrier that picked up the Apollo 11 astronauts upon their return to Earth and it’s been converted into a museum that stays docked over in Alameda so they had a whole space exhibit. Several short tours were offered throughout the night, including a delightfully dorky ghost tour (several ghost-related shows have filmed there) and tours of the navigation and control areas of the ship. It was a really fun evening, we’ll have to go back some time during the day when they’re open and doing full tours.
More photos from the USS Hornet Museum here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157628263115001/
December 7th was the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the 7th anniversary of my father’s death. I kept busy during the day and caught Caltrain down to Mountain View for SVLUG that evening. I hadn’t been to an SVLUG meeting in over a year, but the “Linux-Based Personal Robotics” topic was too good to resist. It was given by Tully Foote, an engineer for ROS (Robot Operating System) at Willow Garage and in addition to lots of great information about the ROS open source project itself he brought along a little TurtleBot for some demos. I wish I could come up with a practical reason to get one.
Speaking of practical, I’ve been bitten by this Gmail bug. The worst of it is that I sent out the Ubuntu Weekly News to thousands of people with this newline issue (see the mess here). It’s nice that they’ve followed up to say a fix is in the works, but until then I’ve been able to work around it by just using Firefox rather than Chrome when I’m sending emails I copy from elsewhere. Ah, the joys of using a closed-source email option.
Last week we headed out to Oakland to see an acquaintance’s band, which is not a usual move for me (“clubs aren’t my scene”) but ended up being pretty fun. That Friday I headed out to Walnut Creek to meet up with the folks at the Diablo Valley Linux Users Group and finally see Grant Bowman who had recently returned from a 3 month stay with Dreamfish in Kenya.
Throughout the past several weeks I’ve been dedicated to my new workout routine, going to the gym at least twice a week and sticking to the routine established during my training session in November. I’ve also made a better effort at improved diet, which mostly means sticking to the set of foods I know are good for me and I should eat to stem impulse eating. It’s going well so far, I’m getting out of the mood funk I was in during November and feeling better in general.
My aunt Elaine from Phoenix is coming to visit for the Christmas weekend, from Thursday evening through Sunday evening. Our plans include a trip to the zoo, general San Francisco “tourist stuff” and a visit to the Jewish Contemporary Museum on Christmas (she doesn’t celebrate Christmas either and is fine with our celebration of Hanukkah). I realized while planning the visit that this will actually be my first Christmas with a blood-related relative in 12 years, the last one was when I was 18 before I moved from my childhood home in Maine to New York. I’m really looking forward to it.
Simcoe is doing well at home so far. We’re still working through the feeding logistics since their diets are almost opposites but so far we’re managing and already learned that she’ll happily eat the dry renal treatment food if I hand feed her. Tomorrow we’ll be giving her the first at home subcutaneous fluids, hopefully that will not be too difficult (for her or us!).